War destroys myth of Israeli invincibility

War destroys myth of Israeli invincibility
BY JOHN O'SULLIVAN
Copyright by The Chicago Sun Times
August 15, 2006


As the guns fell silent, the tanks went back over the border and refugees began to return to their homes in Lebanon Monday, the U.N.-brokered cease-fire looked as if it was a success. What is more (and more surprising), the terms of the cease-fire are reasonably fair -- i.e., not unfavorable to Israel.

Barry Rubin, the biographer of Yasser Arafat and a skeptical observer of U.N. behavior in the Middle East, gave a detailed examination of the cease-fire terms in his column: Let me list some of the terms he sees as either favorable to Israel or at least better than expected:

•The recent war and resulting deaths are blamed on Hezbollah for attacking Israel.

•The Israeli army is to leave southern Lebanon not immediately, as the Arab League proposed, but only when the Lebanese army arrives to take its place.

•The Lebanese army is to be the sole military force in Lebanon (with the exception of U.N. troops) and other militias such as Hezbollah are to be disbanded.

•The U.N. force that will police the cease-fire and south Lebanon is not to be the toothless existing UNIFIL force, as Lebanon wanted, but a 15,000-strong new military force.

Now, these terms are not very different from those that U.S. Ambassador John Bolton and the French cobbled together two weeks ago at the U.N. and to which Hezbollah, Lebanon and the Arab League bitterly objected. Taking note of their protest, France then reopened negotiations, apparently switched sides, risking attacks for duplicity, and hammered out these new terms which are -- well, much the same as the old ones.

Something else is odd about them. If they are what they seem, this is the first occasion when the losing side in a war dictated the terms of the peace. OK, maybe not the first occasion, but certainly the first time that such a perverse result benefitted Israel.

Israel engaged in this war not only in self-defense but also for strategic purposes: to destroy Hezbollah and to strengthen Lebanon as a functioning democratic state -- and thus not a bellicose enemy. It achieved them in reverse: Israel weakened Lebanon as a functioning democratic state and strengthened Hezbollah.

To be sure, many Hezbollah terrorists were killed and their weapons captured. But because they fought the Israeli Defense Forces bravely and continued to rain down missiles on northern Israel right up to the cease-fire, they are heroes to Arab youths whom they will recruit in their thousands. As for weapons, their principal supplier, Iran, has a bottomless purse to finance other people's jihads.

Because Hezbollah is now stronger, Lebanon is weaker. All the other parties in the Lebanese parliament will hardly be prepared to stand up to the one party that has a successful militia at its beck and call.

This structure, an electoral "party" allied to a terrorist militia, was pioneered in its modern form by Sinn Fein-IRA in Northern Ireland. It means, of course, democracy cannot really function. If such a hybrid party loses the election, its militia can bring out the guns and nullify the election.

Another result of the war -- perhaps the most important -- is that the myth of Israeli invincibility has been destroyed. Israel has always been weaker than it looks because it is a small population, living within frontiers that are militarily hard to defend, surrounded by far more numerous enemies. People forgot about these strategic weaknesses and thought of "Fortress Israel" as invincible because it has a powerful well-equipped army that had won its previous wars handsomely. But this war has undermined that belief.

The Israeli army of a generation ago would have carried out some daringly unexpected maneuver such as leaping over southern Lebanon to attack and destroy Hezbollah's reserve of fighters in their Beka'a Valley camps. But the modern Israeli army relied too heavily on air power, carried out a mechanized frontal assault against guerrilla forces, took longer to advance than anyone expected, and had still not achieved its objectives when the referee stopped the game.

Maybe its terrorist-to-soldier kill ratio was massive. But it still lost because it failed to win. Israel will learn from these mistakes. But the entire Arab-cum-Islamic world is now less frightened of Israel than a month ago.

All this suggests that the current cease-fire is merely the preliminary to another war. Hezbollah and its allies will feel that they have the Zionist enemy on the run. But such a war will very likely have a different course and outcome. Israel will be developing strategy and tactics designed to avoid its recent mistakes and to defeat this new sort of enemy.

In order to avoid such a war, several things would have to happen in the next year or so. The Lebanese army would have to be transformed into an effective fighting force with a loyalty to Lebanon rather than several different ethnic-cum-confessional loyalties. A U.N. force, not only numbering at least 15,000 troops but also being able to call on air and naval power and intelligence resources, would have to be established in southern Lebanon. Hezbollah would have either to disarm voluntarily or, more likely, to be forcibly disarmed by either the Lebanese army or the new U.N. force.

All or any of these steps would require a U.N. organization and an "international community" that takes its resolutions and its resolution seriously. Nothing we have seen since 1944 suggests that either exists.