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After Lebanon| by Tom Porteous | Released: 13 Aug 2006 |
After the adoption of Security Council Resolution 1701 last week in New York, the lonely Arab state on the Council, Qatar, expressed the predictable Arab view that the resolution was biased in favour of Israel. In some respects it is, and this reflects the reality of Israel’s military and political superiority in the region.
The more significant point, however, is that the very existence of this resolution signals the continuing shift in the political balance of power in the region against Israel and the United States.
The United States’ and Israel’s overreach in Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq, together with the reaction of their nationalist and Islamist opponents in the region, have delivered consequential defeats to U.S.-Israeli ambitions to reshape the region in line with their strategic interests.
The immediate and stated war aims of Israel -- and by proxy of the United States -- in Lebanon were to secure the return of the two Israeli soldiers kidnapped by Hizbullah and to defeat Hizbullah both militarily and politically. Their wider strategic aims were to ratchet up the pressure on their two main state opponents in the region: Iran and Syria.
Over the past month it has become clear that Israel -- with diplomatic cover and material support from the United States -- has been unable to achieve its primary aims through a military campaign. In spite of massive bombardment of Lebanon’s infrastructure Hizbullah, though militarily dented, has maintained its capability to retaliate.
Israel is learning, like the United States and Britain in Iraq, that in the face of a politically determined and cunning enemy which deploys the tactics of asymmetric warfare, its powerful military machine can inflict massive “shock and awe” on its enemy but cannot secure -- in fact may actually hamper -- the attainment of desired political and strategic outcomes.
Israel’s offensive against Lebanon has helped to increase the political influence of Hizbullah throughout the Arab and Muslim world -- no small achievement given that Hizbullah is a Shi’ite movement regarded with suspicion by many Sunni Muslims. It has also eased, for now, the internal and international pressures on Iran and Syria. For example Iran is using Lebanon as cover for a further clamp down on dissidents including most recently a threat to arrest the Nobel peace prize winner Shirin Ibadi if she does not close down her human rights organisation.
Another consequence of Israeli military action in Lebanon has been to further undermine the position of U.S. and British occupying forces in Iraq where Hizbullah’s allies include the U.S.-backed government.
Both Hizbullah and Israel have committed war crimes in the past month. But the death and destruction wreaked by Israel have been overwhelmingly disproportionate. Its civilian-military kill ration has been higher than Hizbullah’s. And, whatever the causes and “triggers” of the war, it was the Israelis, not Hizbullah, who in this conflict started the killing of civilians. All this has severely undermined Israel’s international reputation.
As the negative strategic and political consequences of the Israeli offensive became clear, U.S. and Israeli politicians and diplomats, not normally noted for their love and admiration of the United Nations, rushed to New York to salvage the situation through international diplomacy. And the UN resolution that has resulted from this diplomacy, though predictably biased in Israel’s favour, falls far short of satisfying Israel’s war aims.
The Israeli ambassador to Washington, Daniel Ayalon, said in an interview on CNN on 11 August that the resolution calls for the unconditional surrender of the two kidnapped soldiers. It does not. The issue is only mentioned in the resolution’s preamble. On the disarmament of Hizbullah, resolution 1701 gets little closer to that objective than resolution 1559, which also calls for Hizbullah’s disarmament and which Israel repeatedly said its military was designed to implement.
The main feature of the resolution is that it will see the deployment to southern Lebanon of Lebanese government forces supported by a beefed up UN force. But it is hard to see how such a combination will prevent Hizbullah from once more building up its strategic and political position in its southern Lebanese heartland.
In short Israel has gained little from its offensive against Lebanon but has lost much: It has empowered its enemies and badly dented its military credibility and its international image. Israel’s main allies, the United States and Britain, by siding so squarely with Israel, have also further undermined their political and strategic standing in the region at a time when they can ill afford it.
The facts on the ground now call out loudly for a comprehensive international effort to address the problems of the region in a serious and even-handed way, including a concerted push for a resolution of the Palestinian question and an engagement with legitimate popular nationalist and Islamist forces.
Will this happen? It doesn’t look like it. The next item on the international agenda for the region is neuralgic: how to put more pressure on the Islamist regime in Iran to give up its nuclear ambitions.
Meanwhile, the revelation last week in the UK of a massive alleged al-Qa’eda terrorist plot furthers the exceedingly dangerous and simplistic theory of President Bush. He reiterated in his 12 August radio address that all Islamist movements are essentially one, and the West and Israel are fighting a powerful, monolithic, and inherently evil Islamist enemy that must be defeated at all costs and by all means.
Tom Porteous is a syndicated columnist and author, formerly with the BBC and the British Foreign Office.
Copyright © 2006 Tom Porteous / Agence Global
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Released: 13 August 2006
Word Count: 892
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