This article is a reminder of powerful the neocon/Cold-War-relic notion of seeing terrorism as primarily a problems of state sponsors of terrorism still is in the minds of many American policymakers: Syria seen as linchpin in Lebanon: Damascus' sway over Hezbollah called key to conflict's outcome San Francisco Chronicle 07/23/06.
But as Hezbollah has grown in strength, say some experts, it is starting to move out of Syria's shadow.
Syria "is the doorman, and it gives Hezbollah diplomatic cover in the region," said Joshua Landis, a Syria expert at the University of Oklahoma. "(But it) can't order Hezbollah to stop, any more than America can order Israel to stop."
Some have suggested that Syria should be attacked militarily to force it to restrain Hezbollah, or to punish it for failing to do so.
"The answer lies in delivering an unequivocal blow to Syrian ground forces deployed near the Lebanese border," wrote Michael Oren, a senior fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, in the New Republic online. "Presented with a choice between saving Hezbollah and staying alive, Syria's dictator will probably choose the latter."
But the consequences of such a strike could be dire, warned Marina Ottaway, an expert on democracy and the rule of law at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
"Syria is a very fragile country. It has all the potential of being another Lebanon," with a patchwork of rival political, religious and ethnic groups ready to collapse into a pandemonium of sectarian violence that could last for years, Ottaway said.
The consequences of that could spill over into or merge with the current chaos in Iraq, said Bokhari - a potential nightmare for the United States.
That article is also interesting, because the Iraq hawks who want the US to expand the Iraq War into directly attacking Iran are stressing the alleged Iranian control of Hizbollah. Iran is mentioned in this article only as "Syria's increasingly close ally".
Why Israeli bombing might not be enough to wipe out Hezbollah: It also might lead to backlash among Lebanese by David Biale San Francisco Chronicle 07/23/06. In contrast to the previous article cited, Biale takes it for granted that Lebanese Hizbollah is the cat's-paw of Iran:
Hezbollah's unprovoked attack on Israel is the product of Iran's messianic drive to create a Shiite empire stretching from Tehran through Iraq to the Mediterranean. So the stakes of this war between Israel and Hezbollah are much higher than in either the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or even Israel's 1982-2000 invasion of southern Lebanon, and the context for evaluating the Israeli army's tactics is also very different.
But the article takes what seems to me to be a fairly realistic view of the risks in the current situation:
There are, however, major risks to Israel in pursuing these goals. First, it is questionable whether a bombing campaign can destroy Hezbollah. While the bombing is causing terrible civilian suffering, irregular forces such as Hezbollah can survive relatively intact. On the other hand, a ground invasion is unlikely to be any more effective than Israel's failed 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon was.
Second, because bombing does cause extensive civilian casualties as well as destroying civilian infrastructure, such as the electricity grid, it necessarily causes a backlash. Most Lebanese appear to be angry at Hezbollah for dragging them into this confrontation, but because Israel must use such powerful munitions, this anger is quickly turned onto the Jewish state. The same is true for international opinion, initially sympathetic to Israel but then increasingly hostile as the bombing campaign continues. Israel knows that, as in past wars, it has to realize its military goals quickly before international intervention puts a stop to hostilities.
Third, although military deterrence works against states (Syria has kept quiet on the Golan Heights since the 1970s, despite its hatred of Israel), it rarely does against irregular entities. Despite all of Israel's draconian measures against the Palestinians, Hamas was deterred for only a little over a year to keep an informal cease-fire. Similarly, Hezbollah, which kept relatively quiet for six years, nevertheless undertook its unprovoked attack despite the full knowledge that Israel would respond tenfold. If, as many think, Iran gave the green light for the attack, then deterrence becomes even less convincing because Iran itself suffers no direct consequences from Israel's response.
Finally, there is little hope that either a reinvigorated Lebanese government or an international force will succeed in suppressing Hezbollah. The international force, led by the United States, that intervened after Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was driven out in short order by the first generation of suicide bombers. And America's record in Iraq suggests that even the most powerful army in the world is relatively impotent in the face of a fanatical insurgency.
He also notes that "America's adventure in Iraq now looks like part of the problem." Gee, imagine that. We took out Saddam's secular, Sunni-dominated, anti-Iran government in Iraq and installed a Shi'a-dominated, Islamist, pro-Iran government. And that has greatly strengthed Iran's relative power position in the Middle East. Who would have thought?
Condi-Condi says its all "birth pangs".
Amotz Asa-El of the hawkish Jerusalem Post in the oddly-titled Modernism vs. fundamentalism: Backing for Israel reveals true nature of clash in Lebanon San Francisco Chronicle 07/23/06 justifies Israel's general war on Lebanon by blaming the Lebanese government for not controlling Hizbollah. And what's a good hawkish argument these days without some kind of dumb, phony Second World War analogy? He even tosses is a bad American Civil War analogy:
For Islamism, the Lebanese conflict is today what the Spanish Civil War was for fascism in the 1930s: a testing ground for the free world's willingness to fight for its beliefs and interests. The industrialized powers, all of which except Japan now have their own Islamist headaches, clearly saw it this way in their summit last week in St. Petersburg.
It follows that the folly whereby a sovereign government outsources its diplomatic and military policies to others must end. Therefore, once the fighting subsides, southern Lebanon must be brought under Beirut's rule, the way the American South was reintegrated after the Civil War - politically, economically and spiritually. Governmental escapism of the sort displayed since 2000 by Beirut in south Lebanon cannot be tolerated anymore, as it creates vacuums that ultimately destabilize the international system.
Alan Dershowitz makes a propaganda argument to justify Israel's targeting civilians in 'Civilian Casualty'? It Depends: Those who supports terrorists are not entirely innocent Los Angeles Times 07/22/06:
Turning specifically to the current fighting between Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas, the line between Israeli soldiers and civilians is relatively clear. Hezbollah missiles and Hamas rockets target and hit Israeli restaurants, apartment buildings and schools. They are loaded with anti-personnel ball-bearings designed specifically to maximize civilian casualties.
Hezbollah and Hamas militants, on the other hand, are difficult to distinguish from those "civilians" who recruit, finance, harbor and facilitate their terrorism. Nor can women and children always be counted as civilians, as some organizations do. Terrorists increasingly use women and teenagers to play important roles in their attacks.
The Israeli army has given well-publicized notice to civilians to leave those areas of southern Lebanon that have been turned into war zones. Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit. Some - those who cannot leave on their own - should be counted among the innocent victims.
If the media were to adopt this "continuum," it would be informative to learn how many of the "civilian casualties" fall closer to the line of complicity and how many fall closer to the line of innocence.
Every civilian death is a tragedy, but some are more tragic than others.
This kind of reasoning is the same kind that Al Qaida applies to democracies, in which the people vote for their governments, so they share the guilt for the actions of their leaders. Dershowitz' argument essentially would toss out the laws and customs of war developed over centuries that aim at limiting the death and destruction of wars and to minimize the harm to noncombatants. It's a truly obscene argument.
Anatol Lieven of the New America Foundation looks at Bush's Middle East Democracy Flop: The U.S. has alienated potential allies and undermined its own stated goals Los Angeles Times 07/23/06:
In truth, reliance on democratization was always not so much a strategy as an excuse for the lack of one. It provided a flimsy cover for the Bush administration's inability or unwillingness to address the key challenges and opportunities of the region. These failures included walking away from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and refusing to consider deals with Iran and Syria when, in the wake of 9/11, these regimes were extremely eager for compromise. As investigative reporter Seymour Hersh and Mideast scholar Flynt Leverett, among others, have argued, Bush forfeited the chance to recruit these two states as allies in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Sunni extremist world, which the Syrian and Iranian regimes have their own good reasons to hate.
Instead, the administration, backed by most of the Democratic leadership, has supported the Israeli government in its plan for a unilateral solution that would confine the Palestinians to Bantustans. It has treated Iran and Syria with unremitting hostility, trying to undermine the Syrian economy and impose sanctions on Iran, demanding concessions while openly proclaiming its desire to overthrow both states. (my emphasis)
Lieven also seems ready to embrace the instant conventional wisdom that Hizbollah is the servant of Syria and Iran. Actually, I guess the conventional wisdom is to claim that Hizbollah is the servant of whichever country the speaker wants the United States to attack, although Lieven himself doesn't sound like he wants to see the current war expanded. At best, this particular state-sponsorship argument is a gross oversimplication:
Not surprisingly, when the flare-up of fighting between Israel and the Palestinians provided an opportunity, Tehran and Damascus unleashed Hezbollah. This is an extremely risky and irresponsible strategy for Syria and Iran, but no serious student of the Middle East can claim that it is an unexpected one, given the situation in which the United States has placed them.
Lieven also addresses the real lessons of Israel's experience over the years. How our Republican warmongers can see Israel as a successful example of reliance on military force has been a mystery to me for a long time:
The neoconservatives who shaped Bush's "strategy" toward the Middle East always embodied a quite Orwellian contradiction. On the one hand, they professed to believe that early democracy is possible for the Middle East and that it would solve the region's problems, including the Israeli-Arab dispute. On the other hand, many made no secret of their belief that, as neocon scholar Michael Ledeen has written (quoting Machiavelli), "it is better to be feared than loved." Raphael Patai, whose book "The Arab Mind" influenced neoconservative thinking, argues that Arabs chiefly respond to the language of force.
But as the experience of Israel shows, rejecting compromise and relying mainly on force leads only to endless conflict. Now that the U.S. dream of combining democratization of the region with submission to Washington's policies is dead, the U.S. too is faced with a stark choice: seek genuine compromise with key regional actors, or be prepared to fight repeated wars.
No comments:
Post a Comment