GLOBAL VIEW
Wall Street Journal

Israel Is Losing This War
Its leaders need to act fast.

BY BRET STEPHENS
Tuesday, August 1, 2006 12:01 a.m.

Israel is losing this war.
This is not to say that itwill lose the war, or that the war was unwinnable to start with. But if it keeps going as it is, Israel is headed for the greatest military humiliation in its history. During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Israelis were stunned by their early reversals against Egypt and Syria, yet they eked out a victory over these two powerfully armed, Soviet-backed adversaries in 20 days. The conflict with Hezbollah--a 15,000-man militia chiefly armed with World War II-era Katyusha rockets--is now in its 21st day. So far, Israel has nothing to show for its efforts: no enemy territory gained, no enemy leaders killed, no abatement in the missile barrage that has sent a million Israelis from their homes and workplaces.

Generally speaking, wars are lost either militarily or politically. Israel is losing both ways. Two weeks ago, Israeli officials boasted they had destroyed 50% of Hezbollah's military capabilities and needed just 10 to 14 days to finish the job. Two days ago, after a record 140 Katyushas landed on Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice he needed another 10 to 14 days. When the war began, Israeli officials spoke of "breaking" Hezbollah; next of evicting Hezbollah from the border area; then of "degrading" Hezbollah's capabilities; now of establishing an effective multinational force that can police the border. Israel's goals are becoming less ambitious while the time it needs to accomplish them is growing longer.

It is amazing how much can be squandered in the space of three weeks. On July 12, Israel sat behind an internationally recognized frontier, where it enjoyed a preponderance of military force. It had deterrence and legitimacy. Hezbollah's cross-border raid that day was widely condemned within Lebanon and among Arab leaders as heedless and provocative. Mr. Olmert's decision to respond with massive force enjoyed left-to-right political support. He also had a green light from the Bush administration, which has reasons of its own to want Hezbollah defanged and which assumed the Israelis were up to the job.

But it seems they are not up to the job. The war began with a string of intelligence failures: Israel had lowered its alert level on the northern border prior to the raid; it did not know that Hezbollah possessed Chinese-made antiship missiles, one of which nearly sank an Israeli missile boat off the coast of Beirut; it was caught off guard by the fierce resistance it encountered in the two Lebanese villages it has so far attempted to capture. Such failures are surprising and discouraging, given that Israel has been tracking and fighting Hezbollah for nearly a quarter-century.

Harder to understand is a military and political strategy that mistakenly assumes that Israel can take its time against Hezbollah. It cannot. Israel does not supply itself with precision-guided bombs; it does not provide its own cover at the U.N. Security Council; it does not have 130,000 troops at risk in Iraq of an uprising by Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. It should be immensely worrying to Israel's leaders that Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani is calling for an immediate cease-fire. Ayatollah Sistani--unlike, say, Kofi Annan--is the sort of man who can get George W. Bush's ear.
Israelis have compounded that mistake with an airpower-based strategy that, whatever its virtues in keeping Israeli troops out of harm's way, was never going to evict Hezbollah from southern Lebanon, just as airpower alone did not evict Saddam from Kuwait in 1991. The law of averages, however, guaranteed that over the course of 5,000 bombing sorties one bomb (or two or three or four) would go astray.

That may have been what happened over the weekend in Qana, where an Israeli air attack reportedly caused the deaths of at least 27 people, including 17 children. Yes, Hezbollah bears ultimate responsibility here for deliberately placing its military assets among civilians. Yet the death of those children should be counted as a crime if Israel's purposes in Lebanon are basically feckless. A line being bandied about in Israeli security circles is that the purpose of the bombing is to show Hezbollah that "the boss-man has gone berserk." What kind of goal is that? Nobody in this conflict ever doubted Israel's ability to set Lebanon back 20, 50 or 500 years (about where Hezbollah itself wants the country to be).

The goal, rather, is to ensure that Hezbollah will never again be in a position to spark a similar crisis, and to do so with maximum effect in the shortest possible time. Israeli Chief of Staff Dan Halutz warned two weeks ago that Hezbollah wants a long war: "They realize that prolonged attrition causes internal pressure from Israeli citizens and international pressure, and think those are our weak points." That's right, which makes his three-week bombing campaign puzzling.

More puzzling was the Israeli cabinet's decision last week against launching a full-scale ground invasion. Instead, they will content themselves with a narrow security strip in southern Lebanon, one that is too narrow to prevent rocket fire from reaching Israel but will give Hezbollah a fresh excuse to fight the new "occupation." The cabinet also went out of its way to reassure Syria--a country Mr. Olmert listed in his own Axis of Evil only the week before--that it had no intention of dragging it into the conflict. But Israel need not have bombed Damascus to derive the benefit of keeping Bashar Assad awake at night, to guess what his patronage of Hezbollah will get him.
Last night in Tel Aviv, Mr. Olmert delivered another blood, tears, toil and sweat speech; the Israeli cabinet later approved a stepped-up ground war, the scope of which remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Ms. Rice left Jerusalem for Washington with a different idea: "I take with me an emerging consensus on what is necessary for both an urgent cease-fire and a lasting settlement. I am convinced we can achieve both this week."

Timelines are colliding here; agendas may follow.

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Israel's Pyrrhus Syndrome

By PERCY KEMP
August 1, 2006

As the violence engulfing Lebanon pauses for an uneasy cease-fire, it's worth examining whether Israel's targeting of Hezbollah's military installations is also helping to weaken the Shiite organization's political power in the country.

Prior to the war, Hezbollah could count on roughly 40% of the Shiite vote. Amal, a pro-Syrian movement headed by parliament speaker Nabih Berri, and which Hezbollah superseded in the late 1980s when Iran became a player on the Lebanese scene, attracted another 40%. A vast array of second fiddles collected the rest. Geographically, Hezbollah was at the time in full control of the Eastern Bekaa region along the Syrian border; it outweighed Amal in the Shiite suburbs of South Beirut; and it shared influence with it in the south along the Israeli border.

Three days after the beginning of military operations in Lebanon, a senior Israeli officer said Israel had already succeeded in destroying as much as half of Hezbollah's military infrastructure. Whatever the truth behind such claims, the fact remains that, by then, Israel's massive bombardment of Shiite areas had pushed Amal and all the other Shiite organizations to rally behind Hezbollah. So even if Israel has succeeded in weakening Hezbollah militarily, politically its offensive can only serve to turn Hezbollah into the undisputed leader of Lebanon's Shiites.

At the broader national level, prior to the war Hezbollah had entered into an alliance with Gen. Michel Aoun, a popular figure within the Christian community. He fought the Syrians in the 1980s, then went into exile to France before returning home last year as Syrian troops were leaving Lebanon. This rather surprising alliance between Gen. Aoun, an anti-Syrian Christian leader, and Hezbollah, a pro-Syrian and pro-Iranian Shiite organization, was induced by the minority status of the two sides within the parliament and by the objective they both shared of cleansing the public service and ridding the country of corrupt politicians.

On the other hand, Hezbollah was at loggerheads with the "Forces of March 14." The loose anti-Syrian and pro-American coalition of Sunnis, Druze and Christians is led by Saad Hariri, the leader of the parliamentary majority, whose father (the late Prime Minister Rafik Hariri) was purportedly assassinated by the Syrians in 2005, and by Walid Jumblatt, the Druze leader whose father was also said to have fallen prey to the Syrians 29 years ago. At the time, Messrs. Hariri and Jumblatt were growing increasingly frustrated with Hezbollah's refusal to disarm in line with U.N. Security Council Resolution 1559. When Israel launched its offensive, they entertained the hope that a swift blow to Hezbollah would quickly force it to lay down its arms. Yet as the scope of military operations widened and Israel started targeting the country's infrastructure, even shelling Christian areas and attacking Lebanese army barracks, Hezbollah's stock rose: Gen. Aoun publicly backed the Shiite organization; Maronite Patriarch Monsignor Sfeir stated that U.N. Resolution 1559 could not be implemented by force; and Hezbollah's main rivals, Messrs. Hariri and Jumblatt, found themselves in a tight spot and forced to backpedal, demanding, in light of the massive destruction caused by the Israeli bombardments, an immediate cease-fire despite the fact that Hezbollah's military power was still relatively unscathed. By widening the scope of its operations in Lebanon, Israel may well have succeeded in weakening Hezbollah militarily. But ironically it also allowed Hezbollah to enhance its political standing in the country.

This notwithstanding, Israel has now added a ground offensive to its air, sea and artillery assaults. If matters will now be decided by the fortunes of war, two basic scenarios can be contemplated.

Should Israel succeed in routing Hezbollah and pushing it back north of the Litani River, while wiping out its arsenal of missiles and rockets, then the remains of Hezbollah's military organization would probably quickly be redirected to protect itself and its Shiite allies from their internal Lebanese enemies, and in particular from Messrs. Hariri and Jumblatt. Lebanon would then be in real danger of a civil war pitting Shiites against Sunnis and Druze. The country would enter a period of violence and instability, and Israel's northern border would not be safer for that.

If, on the other hand, Israel fails to seriously dent Hezbollah's command structure and military capabilities, the Shiite organization would come out as the victor and Messrs. Hariri and Jumblatt would lose out. Again, Israel's northern border would not be any safer.

Both scenarios are rather gloomy from Israel's perspective. So much so that one wonders whether, by pursuing a purely military strategy in Lebanon, Israel might not be suffering from a Pyrrhus syndrome. It may well be that like the Grecian king of Epirus, Israel's generals and strategists are too busy winning their battles to win the war, failing to make political capital out of any of their military victories.

Take U.N. Resolution 1559, for instance. Israel has so far insisted on implementing its purely military clauses, i.e. disarming Hezbollah and deploying the Lebanese army (or an acceptable international expeditionary force) along the border in the south. Yet there is far more to Resolution 1559. It also contains a political clause calling for the election of a new president. As the deadlock continues and no internal Lebanese consensus is reached over the implementation of the military clauses of U.N. Resolution 1559, addressing its political clause could prove to be a deadlock-breaking formula.

Back in 1958, when the country was a battleground for pro-Western Lebanese militias fighting anti-Western Lebanese and Syrian militias backed by Egyptian president Nasser, and when U.S. Marines landed on the beaches of Lebanon, parliament convened and elected a president acceptable to all Lebanese factions. He was army Chief Gen. Fouad Shihab, and his mandate ushered in a long period of stability and prosperity for the country, and of security for its neighbors.

The time may now be ripe for parliament to elect a new Fuad Shihab as president. One name that springs to mind is that of army Chief Gen. Michel Sulayman. Gen. Sulayman indeed commands the respect of the army which will be called upon to deploy swiftly in the South; he has a good standing with Hezbollah and Hezbollah's foes, Messrs. Hariri and Jumblatt. And he is in a position to reassure Lebanon's beleaguered Christians that their identity is no longer at risk. Such a president is likely not only to prevent the looming civil strife, but also to convince Lebanon's fractious leaders and chieftains, including Hezbollah, to eventually delegate their powers to him so as to build a proper state.

The past 30 years of internal strife in Lebanon, and of continued insecurity along Israel's northern border, show that Israel has a vested interest in the stability of Lebanon. All the more reason why Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ought to stop his military offensive in Lebanon, as it can only result in further chaos. Failing this, the battered yet never despairing Lebanese people might be entitled to say to him what the Spartans said to Pyrrhus when he invaded them: "If you are a god, we have nothing to fear from you, because we are not guilty. If you are a man, there will come another, who will be stronger than you!"

Mr. Kemp is a Beirut-based novelist and political risk consultant. His latest novel is "The Boone System" (Saqi, 2003).