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Gunning for the future
Way down upon the Litani river, an old routine once held sway. Israeli and Hezbollah fighters would skirmish, each taking a prisoner or two, writes Pramit Pal Chaudhuri.
Way down upon the Litani river, an old routine once held sway. Israeli and Hezbollah fighters would skirmish, each taking a prisoner or two. Hezbollah would rocket a northern kibbutz. An Israeli jet would fire a missile in return. The question is why this ho-hum exchange metamorphosed into a monster war. The answer is context. And in West Asia, context is changing faster than you can say ‘Katyusha’.
The backdrop is the US decision, after 9/11, to demolish the ancien Arab regime. The tottering autocracies of the old regime had their uses during the Cold War. Now they were the spawning ground for al-Qaeda. Some bits would be changed slowly, some would be changed by force. Professor Noah Feldman has called the policy “democratisation by destabilisation”. The Bush administration accepts it’s going to be more bloody and chaotic than it had expected. But the policy lives on.
The policy is a quandary for Israel. The ancien regime was good for its security. The autocracies were toothless, they had ceased to even dream of driving the Jews into the sea. However, any new democracy that replaced them would probably be Islamicist and inspired to have a go at Israel.
But Israel came to more or less accept that the US policy was in its long-term interests. A key reason is demography. Israel cannot absorb the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories without becoming a Jewish-minority State. The rise and rise of Hamas indicated Palestinian nationalism was becoming increasingly religious. Which is why a hawk-like Ariel Sharon adopted a policy of hitkansut, unilateral withdrawal or, literally, ‘contraction’.
Israel gambled that Hamas, at a time when Arab democracy is the geopolitical buzz, would be tamed in time by the pressures of holding elected office. It would be a messy business, but in the long run there would hopefully arise a Palestinian State that was Islamicist but accepting of Israel’s existence. The battling going on in Gaza the past few weeks was about bringing this experiment to fruition. Diplomatic circles say, in a hard-nosed Levantine way, Hamas and Israel were heading in the right direction — until Hezbollah entered the scene.
The third house-wrecker is Iran. Thanks to fat oil revenues, the fall of Sunni Iraq, an Arab polity lacking in leaders, and the success of Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran has a stature in West Asia it has not seen since the heyday of Khomeiniism. It has positioned itself as Israel’s No. 1 enemy and thus the Muslim street’s Hero No. 1. All that’s missing in Iran’s power equation is a nuke or two.
Israeli officials have repeatedly told New Delhi, among others, to inform Iran that “we have no fight with Iran”. That has little impact on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad who has called for Israel’s annihilation and denied Adolf Hitler killed 6 million Jews. Combined with Iran’s determination to get the Bomb, Israelis see Iran as an existential threat. “The fear is of being perceived as weak and vulnerable. Then when Iran acquires nuclear weapons, Hezbollah can shell Israel with impunity,” says military expert Michael Oren.
Into all this, blithely strides Hezbollah. The Shia militia has its own reasons to keep West Asia’s fires burning, though on a more parochial level. One of its foreign supporters, Syria, has been on the backfoot ever since it was implicated in the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. It has been under pressure from the Beirut government to end its warlord state. That it’s been all quiet on the northern front the past several months hasn’t helped: Hezbollah’s legitimacy is partially derived from being the only Arab group to stand down Israel.
While capturing two Israeli soldiers was par for the course, where Hezbollah clearly went over the top was its decision to fire missiles at Haifa, Israel’s third largest city. A full-scale Israeli military response then became inevitable. Israeli intelligence reports that Hezbollah was planning to ship the captured soldiers to Iran and that 100 Iranian military advisors were in south Lebanon only added to the perception that this was less about Baalbek than about Tehran.
Hezbollah’s own surprise at the fury of Israel’s response indicates it didn’t seem to understand it was waving everything that would look like a red flag from Jerusalem: disrupting the withdrawal strategy, boosting Iran’s Mad Max ruler and directly attacking the Israel heartland. Even Luxembourg might have said boo after all that.
Like Saddam Hussein — who pretended to have WMDs even after 9/11 raised possession from a misdemeanour to a shoot-on-sight crime — Sheikh Hassan Nasrullah seems to have been blind to the new context. He failed to differentiate between Hezbollah’s goals and those of Iran. Qom seminaries need Geopolitics 101 added to their curricula. “Hezbollah miscalculated. They misread the changing international and regional situation,” says Lebanese political scientist Farid Khazen.
The fallout of the war depends in large part on the results of the fighting over the next ten days. The two forces are more evenly matched than it may seem. Israel has armour, airplanes and an ability to carry out fast ground attacks. Hezbollah is dispersed into independent, well-armed guerrilla units who will try to engage the Israelis man-to-man. Their goal will be to simply inflict enough casualties so that any Israeli victory will be pyrrhic. Hezbollah will refurbish its image as the only one capable of bloodying the Jewish nose. And Iran will bask in this reflected glory.
If the war goes well for Israel, it could complete the virtuous cycle of democracy and violence that it’s trying to get rolling in Gaza and possibly even lead to the establishment of a genuinely sovereign Lebanon government. All this could help reboot the withdrawal policy — presently haemorrhaging support among Israelis. Iran would be a big loser. It has already lost a Hezbollah missile arsenal partly designed as a deterrent against any future Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear installations. “We lived in fear of those rockets. Now we know better,” said one Israeli official.
But the gains of even a draw would be considerable for Tehran. It will be able to make the claim that Shia militancy is the only force that can stand up to the West, eclipsing even al-Qaeda. Syria would likely move closer to Iran as would Hamas. Worst of all for Israel would be that aura of military invincibility, frayed by its earlier withdrawal from Lebanon, could be dissipated. That could mean 50 years of being an Iron Wall, of forcing its Arab neighbours to grudgingly accept its existence through sheer might, could go to waste. If a new wave of democratic Islamicist regimes come to power over the next few decades, Israel will have to teach them the same military lessons their secular Arab predecessor took so long to learn.
Either way, the present Israeli battle with Hezbollah and, vicariously, Iran, is about how the new Arab world order is going to look. Like the war in Iraq and the integration of Muslims in Europe, this is just the latest chapter in the crumbling of an old regime and the struggle to decide who will create the one to follow.