September 25, 2006

Surprising Success for Condi and GWB Against Hezbollah - via the U.N.!

In a post on August 17th, I examined why Condi and the GWB administration supported an end to the Israel-Hezbollah war via U.N. resolution 1701, which relied on U.N. security forces.

U.N. Resolution 1701 on the Israel-Hezbollah war was passed less than a week ago, and already no one can tell why the U.S. supported it, or what good we thought it was supposed to do. The resolution leaves it up to Lebanon to enforce its provisions against Hezbollah, and as of today:

• Lebanon has already balked at doing so.
• Most pundits believe that Hezbollah will not be disarmed.

I started with Condi's stated goal of preventing a return to what the status quo was before the war:

"We do seek an end to the current violence, we seek it urgently. We also seek to address the root causes of that violence," she said. "A cease-fire would be a false promise if it simply returns us to the status quo."

My conclusion, which seemed surprising to me at the time, was that Condi actually believed it was possible to accomplish something useful via the U.N., given the active support and participation of the Lebanese government:

...GWB and Condi seem to think Lebanon really is going to disarm Hezbollah. Where they're getting this from, I have no idea, but it's evident they haven't given up on it yet.

Second, GWB and Condi have decided to trade the possibility of an imminent outright destruction of Hezbollah by Israel, for specific advances in the official stance of the U.N. vis-a-vis Hezbollah. They actually believe that the threat of U.N. resolutions and sanctions will make it difficult for Iran and Syria to provide arms to Hezbollah. They're essentially hoping for long-term peer pressure, over a period of years, to take the place of an immediate victory on the ground, which they felt presented too great a danger of initiating a larger war.

Today we find that Condi and GWB may have been right. The U.N. forces are not taking over the area by themselves - they are deployed along with an equally large force of Lebanese soldiers. The U.N. + the Lebanese government is not as ineffective and counterproductive as the U.N. alone usually is:

The Lebanese guerrillas admit they can't return to the south but defiantly reject calls to disarm.

...the deployment of up to 15,000 foreign troops and another 15,000 Lebanese soldiers into south Lebanon, as well as tightened restrictions at Lebanon's sea and land entry points, suggests that Hizbullah will be unable to revive its well-entrenched military presence along the border with Israel, casting into doubt a future role for its vaunted military wing.

"The war was a definitive turning point in which Hizbullah has shown its military capability, but it was a capability it could only show once," says Rami Khouri, a Jordanian political commentator and director of the Issam Fares Institute of Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut.

Hizbullah officials admit that there can be no going back to the situation along the border before the war. While insisting that the group will not disarm, Hizbullah's military commanders are currently reassessing the group's future.

It's significant that this is exactly what GWB said was going to happen, in an August 21st press conference (noted at the time in this previous post on this site):

One thing is for certain -- is that when this force goes into help Lebanon, Hezbollah won't have that safe haven, or that kind of freedom to run in Lebanon's southern border.

How about that? GWB said it was "for certain," and he called it correctly. Very impressive, considering very few people believed the U.N. had any ability to do anything useful. In the same press conference, GWB continued:

In other words, there's an opportunity to create a cushion, a security cushion. Hopefully, over time, Hezbollah will disarm. You can't have a democracy with an armed political party willing to bomb its neighbor without the consent of its government, or deciding, well, let's create enough chaos and discord by lobbing rockets.

And so the reality is, in order for Lebanon to succeed -- and we want Lebanon's democracy to succeed -- the process is going to -- the Lebanese government is eventually going to have to deal with Hezbollah.

So Hezbollah has been driven out of its fortified bunkers and is trying to find a way to continue to exist. The best current strategy Hezbollah has, may be fatally flawed:

One possibility, analysts say, is to link Hizbullah's military wing more closely to the Lebanese Army, now deployed in strength in south Lebanon.

"If Israel violates the cease-fire and Hizbullah helps the Lebanese Army's legitimate response to that violation, I think it would be very hard for UNIFIL to intervene," says Amal Saad-Ghorayeb, a Lebanese expert on Hizbullah.

One example, apparently under serious consideration by Hizbullah, is how to retaliate against Israel's violations of Lebanese airspace. UNIFIL has recorded more than three dozen violations by Israeli aircraft since the cease-fire came into effect. "We have reported them to the UN Security Council. What more can we do? Shoot them down?" says UNIFIL spokesman Alex Ivanko.

But Hizbullah might attempt to do just that. "We were unable to make good use of our anti-aircraft capabilities during the war. This is something we are looking into for the future," says Abu Mehdi. "The resistance is planning a new strategy."

This strategy depends on the assumption that the Lebanese government will want to respond to supposed Israeli violations of the cease-fire, with military action. This is highly unlikely, since Israel's military actions in the region are targeted, not against the Lebanese government, but against Hezbollah.

Israel is not the common enemy of Lebanon and Hezbollah.

But Hezbollah is the common enemy of Lebanon and Israel.

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Categories: Counter-Terrorism, The Mid East, The U.N.

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