Arms and influence

Lebanese nostalgia

Matt over at Fruits and Votes writes:

Various news reports have noted that last week’s accord regarding the Lebanese political standoff included electoral reform. One report I heard (via Mosaic; it might have been from Dubai TV, but I do not recall) referred to reinstating the electoral system from the 1960s, but with some new “special provisions” (or words to that effect) for the division of Beirut and other large districts.

To avoid the problems of the old Lebanese constitution, the trick will be creating an electoral system that fairly represents the sectarian distribution (Shi'a, Druze, Maronite Christians, etc.) without either (1) creating a formula that won't represent demographic realities several years from now, (2) excite arguments over what the word "fair" means in electoral terms, or (3) put a fig-leaf of respectability over the dominance of a particular faction, such as Hezbollah. (On that last point, click here for Matt's excellent analysis of how the electoral system was responsible for Hamas' victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections.)

A finely-tuned electoral system won't, by itself, end Lebanon's current conflict. However, it's hard to imagine a resolution without it. Here's where the United States should be playing the role of impartial referee or judge, but can't, given its current standing in the Middle East.

More than an oxymoron

The phrase "Lebanese army" must be more than an oxymoron for Lebanon to pull out of its political nose-dive. Lebanese troops need to be able to exercise the sovereign power of the Lebanese government to police its own borders. Anything else means that there is no Lebanese state, and we continue on the dark road to the Lebanon of the 1980s.

Of course, the Lebanese army might do a poor job. The Washington Post article about the ongoing operation against Palestinian government starts with a troubling phrase:

Lebanese troops pounded a Palestinian refugee camp with artillery and tank fire for a second day Monday, raising huge columns of smoke as they battled a militant group suspected of ties to al-Qaida in the worst violence since the end of the 1975-90 civil war.

Here's another paragraph that makes one concerned about political backlash:

Hundreds of Lebanese troops, backed by tanks and armored carriers, surrounded the refugee camp Monday. M-48 battle tanks unleashed their cannon fire on the camp, home to 30,000 Palestinian refugees. The militants fired mortars toward the troops at daybreak.

Cross your fingers, and hope that the Lebanese army is fighting these battles in the right way--and that its getting the support and advice it needs.

In a Beirut minute

IN THE NEWS
Rick Shenkman puts the Lebanon problem in the simplest terms. [Thanks to Your Right Hand Thief for the link.] Every day in Iraq adds to the negative example: today, snipers killed 20 Shi'ite pilgrims, another outrage that the world's most powerful military was unable to prevent.

Still, Shenkman's comments are worth a little embellishment. While the rest of Lebanon--including people who were once hell-bent on killing each other, like Michel Aoun and Walid Jumblatt--have kept political competition confined to peaceful battlefields, Hezbollah has reserved the right to unilateral military action. Lebanon's meager police and military forces are outmatched in any conflict with Hezbollah, who unlike its rivals, sees more pros than cons in a resumption of Lebanon's horrible civil war.

To succeed, Hezbollah's rivals will need help. The Israeli campaign against Hezbollah did not help. The Bush Administration's green light to the Olmert government did not help. At some point, Hezbollah will have to be disarmed. Otherwise, Lebanon will be held hostage to Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, or his successor, in perpetuity. Lebanese security forces need personnel, training, equipment, and the sure knowledge that, when they confront Hezbollah, they will have a good chance of winning. (That last bit may require assurances from regional and outside powers that, when the chips are down, the Lebanese government has friends who will rush to help.)

The last few weeks of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah have moved Lebanon farther away from this goal. The current worries over the size and effectiveness of the UN peacekeeping force, and the risk that the cease-fire might collapse before the peacekeepers arrive, show how little help Lebanon is really getting.

Can't stop

IN THE NEWS
Chirol at ComingAnarchy.com kinda gets the situation in Lebanon, and kinda doesn't. Here's a quote:

Israel understands that their only option is complete victory. Anything less than the destruction of Hizballah as a terrorist group (i.e. their armed wing) will only strengthen them and weaken Israel.

Except, the way this war is being fought, Israel won't destroy Hezbollah. Not only was this war poorly planned and executed, but it's also clear that Israel is running out of time.

However, the biggest problem with Olmert's strategy--at least, the maximalist version of it, which Chirol seems to advocate--is that Israel has never believed that it could annihilate its enemies. That's a wise assumption underlying Israeli grand strategy: no matter what the level of threat, Israel's response has never depended on the complete destruction of its enemies. In spite of constant PLO attacks and repeated attempts by hostile Arab governments to crush Israel militarily, no Israeli cabinet ever made the obliteration of its enemies the definition of victory. However, Israel has clearly won most of its wars.

Chirol hits closer to the truth with this statement:

The only other option is to create a large enough buffer zone inside Lebanon to protect Israel in the future which, however, would only continue the tit for tat fighting further north.

However, Chirol undermines his own analysis by making it sound as though this "minimalist" version of the Olmert strategy is equivalent to automatic defeat:

Indeed, what American Left, U.N. and Europeans fail to understand in their knee jerk reaction is that a cease fire would be an automatic victory for Hizballah. As a 4GW movement, they need only to stay in the game to win.

That generalization about guerilla organizations is true--to a point. Insurgents make mistakes. Had Israel responded more deftly to the kidnapping of its soldiers and the rocket attacks on its civilians, Hezbollah might have faced even greater animosity from the majority of Lebanese, sick of being dragged into war by armed factions like Hezbollah. Had Israel not muddled the moral dimension of the conflict with its meat cleaver methods, Iran and Syria might be having a harder time supporting Hezbollah. Instead, the disproprtionate focus of Lebanese civilians, Israeli voters, and foreign diplomats is on Israel's methods, Israel's mistakes, Israel's real agenda in the current conflict.

Guerrillas and terrorists often lose. They can't win if they don't "stay in the game," but short-term survival does not immunize them from their own long-term mistakes. Unfortunately, the governments that revolutionaries are trying to defeat often obligingly make their own, bigger mistakes--as Israel has in the current war.

Unashamed, part I

IN THE NEWS
Lately, I've been worried that many Americans has reached a tacit conclusion about their own government that's completely incorrect and unjustified. The same willingness to give the benefit of the doubt, in spite of clear warning signs that severe doubt is justified, is in operation now, just as it was in 2003. The thinking, such as it is today, runs something like this:

• Surely, the Bush Administration must acknowledge that it made horrendous mistakes in Iraq.
• Of course, anyone who recognizes mistakes of this magnitude would avoid repeating them.
• Obviously, US foreign policy in Iraq, as well as other parts of the Middle East, must now be constrained be guided less by wishful thinking (a polite term for what Thomas Ricks calls "adventurism"), and more by cautious pragmatism.

Unfortunately, this line of thinking starts with an unjustified premise—the President and his senior advisors believe the axioms and corollaries of their foreign policy in the first term to be wrong—and builds an unsustainable edifice of hope on this weak foundation. If the American electorate needs proof that the Bush Administration is unrepentant and recalcitrant, we need only look at the last couple of weeks of news coming from Lebanon.

First, it's important to understand the Bush foreign policy from the perspective of the most influential members of the Administration—Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Perle, et al.--who crafted it. This recent article in Salon does a good job of explaining their mindset, so I won't repeat their summary of the neoconservative Weltanschauung here. Suffice it to say that, in their minds, the problem wasn't the strategy itself, but inadequate opportunities to take it as far as they believed it should go—not only to Baghdad, but also to Damascus and Tehran.

Once again, we're left with less information than we should have about our own government. While that's partially the result of the Bush Administration's psychotic obsession with secrecy, it's also the fault of the press for not following up on important stories. Since Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice began her global "let's keep Israel fighting" tour, journalists have focused on the question, Why has the United States been blocking efforts to negotiate a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah? However, that question is only the shadow cast by a much larger concern: Why are US officials urging Israel to expand the war to Syria?

Without understanding the mindset of influential people inside the Administration, such as Eliot Abrams, or currently outside of it, such as Richard Perle, the idea of asking Israel to attack Syria seems crazy. However, if you take the perspective of Abrams and Perle and assume that it's shared by people in the White House, the President included, the notion of attacking Syria makes perfect sense. (Of course, by "sense," I mean, "whatever seems to logically connect facts and interpretations." Unfortunately, we're talking about people whose interpretations of Middle Eastern politics have proven to be completely wrong, and who casually ignore any inconvenient facts.)

The conditions for sustaining the same strategy that got the United States mired in Iraq still exist. George W. Bush started his presidency with practically no knowledge of foreign affairs, and there's not much sign that he's learned the challenges, pitfalls, and subtleties of international relations during five years on the job. The traditional source of foreign policy advice, the National Security Council, remains a weak institution, more interested in conformity than candor. The Republican-dominated Congress provides no counterweight to Bush's foreign policy, and the Democrats seem incapable of mobilizing any effective opposition. The State Department and the CIA continue to be treated as pariahs, even though US foreign policy can't function without them. Bush's closest advisors, such as Condoleeza Rice, do not seem to be able to convince Bush that his policies in general are leading in a bad direction. The men and women with whom Bush has the closest personal connections, as well as the "wise old men" of his father's foreign policy team, are equally incapable of convincing Bush that some of his less effective subordinates, such as Donald Rumsfeld, need to be restrained or removed.

If people like Perle and Abrams were to get their wish, a broadening of Israel's war to Syria, the results would be an unmitigated disaster. Israel would be completely on its own, attacking a country that is not playing a direct part in the current clash with Hezbollah. Obviously, Syria has been Hezbollah's patron for decades, but that's a thin pretext for war with Syria.

The most that US troops in neighboring Iraq could do is watch. Already overstretched, the US military is re-deploying to concentrate on central Iraq, Baghdad in particular. However, even if the troop strength existed to assist the Israelis, the political basis for such assistance does not exist. The US public is likely to be outraged at the expansion of its own ongoing war in Iraq, which an increasing majority of Americans do not support. Diplomatically, the United States has had good reason to avoid fighting alongside the Israelis. US and Israeli troops fighting in tandem would end any hope of the United States playing the role as honest broker in Middle Eastern affairs, except if the survival of Israel were immediately at stake. Needless to say, two kidnapped soldiers and harassing rocket attacks do not amount to the imminent destruction of Israel.

However, nothing I said in the last paragraph means that the Bush Administration wouldn't commit a grievous mistake, if given the opportunity. Fortunately, that opportunity does not seem to exist, in large part because the Israelis are not interested. When Israel pre-emptively attacked Syria in 1967, Syria was part of the Arab coalition mobilizing for an attack on Israel. Attacking Syria now is far less justified, and more likely to shatter any support the Olmert government has for the current war effort. Instead, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) have focused on damaging Hezbollah as much as possible before continued attacks become politically unsustainable. The IDF is also trying to "prepare the battlefield" for the next conflict with Hezbollah, by de-populating southern Lebanon. Unless the Olmert government has a sudden change of heart, that's as likely as IDF operations are likely to go.

The fact that the Israelis have resisted American pressure to attack Syria should not be cause for relief, however. The fact of the pressure itself means that the guiding principles of the Bush Administration's Middle East policy have not changed. The bloody stand-off in Iraq has not prompted soul-searching. Instead, the top officials who have the greatest influence over the President are searching for new "opportunities."

You're all terrorists now

IN THE NEWS
The real goal is probably to depopulate southern Lebanon, but still...

Eighties nostalgia

IN THE NEWS
Israeli attacks into Lebanon have not only resumed, but intensified. Since the US government has demonstrated no interest in constraining the Israelis, the accidental killing of over 50 civilians, including 37 children, in the twice-tragic town of Qana, caused only a pause in the Israeli campaign. If the external power with the most leverage over Israel were at odds with the Olmert government's strategy, the Qana tragedy might have been the end of Israeli operations in Lebanon.

Escalating the attacks won't change the outcome of this war. Israel may destroy more missile launchers, kill more Hezbollah fighters, and change the physical conditions in southern Lebanon to make it less hospitable for Hezbollah. The war will not, however, destroy Hezbollah as an organization, or drive a wedge between Hezbollah and the Lebanese who support or tolerate its actions. Israel's strategy will also not cut off Hezbollah's sources of foreign support, from Syria and Iran.

That conclusion, of course, is based on the assumption that Israel will withdraw from Lebanon. It's possible, though unlikely, that the Olmert government might reach the same conclusion about the war, and decide a more permanent presence in southern Lebanon will be necessary to keep Hezbollah at bay. This "presence" could be less an occupation, and more a regular series of incursions. Either way, Israel would be switching from the defensive posture it had against Hezbollah to something else.

Whatever form this new strategy takes, it will not be as simple as a switch from the strategic defensive to the strategic offensive. If you send out regular patrols from a firebase, you're not attacking; you're simply doing a better job of defending a fixed position. Israel's options with Lebanon are much the same, writ large: either keep the point of engagement with Hezbollah where it was before this war, on the border or just inside Israel, or move it to some distance inside Lebanon.

Hezbollah, of course, would be forced to respond. The opportunities for kidnapping and bombarding Israeli civilians would diminish. The new operational target would be the Israeli military. Hezbollah's goals would be the same: eliminate or weaken its political rivals in Lebanon; manufacture the animosities and fears that drive more people to support a radical, militant Islamic party like Hezbollah; cement the assistance it receives from outside Israel. Rocket attacks on Israeli towns are one way to achieve these goals; returning Lebanon to the conditions of the 1980s is another.

In fact, the situation that Israel has created is arguably better for Hezbollah. Before the Israeli attacks, Hezbollah had lost political ground in Lebanon. The Hariri assassination led to the withdrawal of its Syrian patron. Not only did Hezbollah suffer politically for its close ties with Syria, but political parties that led or joined the "Cedar Revolution" gained in popularity and clout.

Today, with Israeli bombs dropping on Lebanon, questions of popularity or clout appear meaningless. The men and women who led the peaceful and successful campaign to kick out Syria are powerless to defend Lebanon against Israel. Syrian and Iranian aid to Hezbollah now seems necessary, not problematic. Rather than devising ways to disarm Hezbollah, rival politicians are hiding in basements or fleeing from the war zone.

The Middle East has changed since the Eighties, but Eighties nostalgia seems to be in. There isn't an Iran-Iraq War, but there is a major insurgency in Iraq, with Iran as an indirect participant. The Sunni-Shi'ite fault line doesn't run along the Iran-Iraq border, but it does fall somewhere between Samarra and Basra. Saudi Arabia and the emirates may be supporting Israel as a proxy for fighting Shi'ites, but their interests are no more aligned with the United States than they were twenty years ago. American forces may not be based in Saudi Arabia, but 140,000 of them are in Iraq for an indefinite period.
The US Navy may not be skirmishing with Libyan MIGs and Iranian patrol boats, but Americans are fighting a much nastier enemy, the different insurgent factions in Iraq, and suffering far higher casualties. Lebanon may not have devolved to the multi-sided civil war of the 1980s, with Israel thrown into the mix, but Lebanon has gone a few steps down that dark road. Syria may not be governed by Hafez al-Assad, who may not have ever been able to live peacefully with his neighbors, but the current president, his son, Bashr al-Assad, is undoubtedly seeing few incentives to pursue an accommodating foreign policy, particularly since the US government has declared its intention to depose him. Israel may not be fighting the first intifada, but it has been living with a second, far nastier Palestinian uprising for longer than the first intifada lasted.

As frustrating as the Middle East was before 2001, it is far more vexing today. George W. Bush's hastily-sketched blueprint for remodeling the Middle East was worse than irrelevant. It actively contributed to creating this "Forward Into The Past" situation in the Middle East. The occupation of Iraq, the freedom of action granted Israel, the rejection of diplomacy with Syria and Iraq, and no visible changes in the US relationship with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates are all deliberate US foreign policy choices that have led, since 2001, to where the Middle East is today. In some ways, the situation is better than it was in the 1980s. For example, Lebanon has not fallen as far as it did in the early Eighties. In other ways, the Middle East today is far worse than it was in the 1980s.

Israel's failed strategy

IN THE NEWS
ZenPundit has an excellent post about Israel's war in Lebanon. His conclusion?

The only meaningful strategic goal here for Israel was the total demilitarization of Hezbollah, an objective that coincided with the national interests of not just the U.S. but that of France, and therefore, in a languidly trailing and desultory way, the EU. The key to that objective was Syria, not Lebanon, and making the hapless and ineffectual Lebanese government instead of the "strong", generally unpopular and very "targetable" Syrian regime the focus of Israeli wrath - followed by real negotiations of things Damascus is interested in talking about - was a mistake.

He also touches on an important question. It takes a bit of digging to figure out the answer to this one, so I've been delaying saying anything about this topic until now.

It's pretty clear that Israel's reliance on air strikes is counterproductive. However, it is not a unique failure in this campaign. During the second intifada, the ongoing struggle with Hamas, and even the stand-offs with Arafat in his compound, the Israeli Defense Forces have been increasing their reliance on airpower. For anyone who remembers the Entebbe Raid or has studied Israel's regular cross-border raids into neighboring countries, it looks as though Israel has swapped a scalpel for a meat cleaver as its military instrument of choice.

As ZenPundit argues, the installation of an Air Force officer as the IDF's chief of staff provides a partial explanation for this shift in operational methods. However, it's not the whole story. It's beyond my capabilities to provide a full explanation here today, but it's important to recognize the strategy for what it is--and how different it is from, say, the hard road Israel once traveled in tracking down and eliminating the Black September terrorists responsible for the Munich massacre. That operation may have fallen short of success, but it's preferable to bombing Lebanon into rubble.

It's also important to remember, back in the early days of the Global War On Really Bad People Everywhere And Nowhere, how the White House and top officials in the Department of Defense looked to Israel for lessons on how to handle counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. Given the IDF's increasing reliance on airpower, I worry that they drew the wrong lessons.

From the bayou to Beirut

IN THE NEWS
The Bush Administration has watched as two cities, New Orleans and Beirut, have been destroyed. I spent the last post talking about a moral challenge, proportionality in warfare. I'll spend this post talking about a different moral question: Which are worse, sins of commission, or sins of omission?

Sins of commission can flatten cities. One cost of the German invasion of the Soviet Union was the devastation of Stalingrad, not to mention other Soviet population centers, and millions of Soviet citizens. The German bombardment of Passchendaele created an icon of World War I, the gradual conversion of a typical Western European town into an unrecognizable collection of craters and rubble.

Sins of omission can be just as destructive. I'll spare the reader yet another recounting of the events leading to the flooding of New Orleans. Suffice it to say that, in the most generous interpretation, a city died because of warning signs ignored, preventive measures not taken, and reactions that occurred far too slowly and incompletely. A year later, New Orleans is still suffering from the indifference of the rest of the country. The next hurricane season easily could undo the partial recovery of a city that was a unique cultural treasure, not only for the United States, but the world.

Beirut, too, has fallen prey to sins of omission. In this case, the Bush Administration's foreign policy made a bad situation worse. The primary responsibility for Lebanon's tragedy lies with Hezbollah and Israel. As I've argued earlier, Israel must defend itself, but in the case of Hezbollah, its chosen methods are neither effective nor justified. Hezbollah is about as monstrously self-absorbed a political organization as you can find in the Middle East, happy to profit from a return to the chaos of the 1980s. As culpable as the two parties are (and it's probably worth throwing a couple of other regional powers, such as Iran, into the line-up of suspects), the United States deserves some blame for how this crime occurred, and how much damage it has inflicted.

This article in Slate pins the blame on the unintended ways in which the Bush Administration's Middle East strategy has helped Iran. I don't disagree with the premise, but I don't think it provides the full explanation of what happened to Lebanon. A more complete picture would include the following elements:

• Although the Bush Administration applauds Lebanon's eviction of Syrian security and intelligence forces, there is practically no American assistance to the Lebanese government.
• Hezbollah, seeing itself as a state-within-a-state, operates without any effective opposition from the Lebanese government. The support it receives from Iran emboldens Hezbollah further.
• Since Ariel Sharon left Likud, the Israel government has focused on creating defensible borders over maintaining its control over the Occupied Territories as a bargaining chip with the Palestinians.
• Returning the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians sparks debate in Israel over how safe Israel will be, once it contracts its borders.
• Hamas' kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, followed by Hezbollah's kidnapping of two more, seems to be the realization of the risks many Israelis feared the new strategy would create.
• The kidnappings, combined with other Hezbollah attacks, poses two challenges to Ehud Olmert. At a national level, he needs to respond somehow, to prove that the strategy he inherited from Ariel Sharon was correct. At a personal level, he has to show that, even without the military background most of his predecessors as Israeli prime minister had, he can handle this sort of crisis.
• Israel assaults both Gaza and Lebanon. In both cases, the Israeli objective is clearly more than just the return of the hostages. The Israeli government either wants to hurt Hamas and Hezbollah enough to deter these groups, or cripple them to the point where they present far less of a threat. In other words, Israeli strategy is trying to change its enemies intentions, capabilities, or, preferably, both.
• In Lebanon, Israel's strategy brings widespread death and destruction. Israel is may be trying to do more than just kill Hezbollah fighters. Israel may also be trying to make people in Lebanon think twice about supporting Hezbollah. The Olmert government may also be trying to drive people out of southern Lebanon, making it harder for Hezbollah to operate in secret along Israel's northern border.

Where does the United States fit into this picture? Here's a quick summary of where the United States could have done more to prevent this crisis, and imposed some constraints on it once it started:

• The United States has mired itself in an expensive, open-ended war in Iraq, reducing American leverage elsewhere.
• The Bush Administration's unilateralist approach to Iraq has made potential allies wary of supporting American initiatives elsewhere in the Middle East.
• However, in the case of Israel, the Bush Administration has chosen not to apply its leverage at all. Instead, the Bush foreign policy has, since the second intifada, given Israel more latitude than any previous Administration has granted.
• The Bush Administration also chose to discard what few sources of leverage it might have had with Iran,
• Hezbollah's chief patron. Iran, is enjoying new confidence, having benefited from the rout of the Taliban, the fall of the Iraqi Ba'athist regime, and the United States' vulnerability in Iraq.
• Iran is accruing new sources of power and influence. Aside from advancing its nuclear capabilities, Iran is also enjoying economic overtures from India and Russia, two countries that the Bush Administration has tried to build "special relationships."
• Once the Israeli assault into Lebanon started, the Bush Administration has done nothing to rein in Israel. In fact, the United States was forced to admit that it was providing Israel with new stocks of munitions while Israeli bombs were falling on Lebanon.
• During last week's multinational efforts to get Israel and Hezbollah to agree to a cease-fire, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice appeared to be interfering with these efforts, preferring to give the Israeli government more time to complete its campaign.

The Israelis suspended bombing after killing 37 Lebanese schoolchildren in Qana—certainly not the intended outcome of airpower in "urban warfare," but certainly a predictable one. In other words, three dozen dead children succeeded in slowing down the Israeli assault, where American diplomacy had failed—or did not even try.

It's disturbing to see the world's only superpower react to the devastation of New Orleans and Lebanon with a shrug. Not only does the Bush Administration's detachment not help the Lebanese now, but it also bodes poorly for the future. Sins of commission inspire people to rebuild; sins of omission cast doubts on whether rebuilding is worth the effort.

After World War I, Belgium committed to rebuilding Passchendaele and the neighboring city of Ypres. King Albert I made invested his own name and clout into the King Albert Fund, designed to attract Ypres residents back to the city. In the process, the King made the reconstruction of Ypres a national priority. Armed with pre-war blueprints, builders re-created as many of the original buildings as possible.  Today, many of the medieval buildings in Ypres may not be constructed with the original stones, but Ypres—the buildings and the people—survived the massive artillery bombardments of World War I.

Today, there is nothing like the King Albert Fund for New Orleans. While the reconstruction project may seem daunting, it's by no means impossible. In 1919, Ypres had a population of 40,000, out of Belgium's total population of 7.5 million. In 2005, New Orleans had a population of 500,000, out of the US population of 299 million. In other words, Belgium was able to rebuild a city where 0.5% of its population lived before it was devastated. The United States is certainly capable of rebuilding a city where 0.2% of its population lived, even faced with the unique challenges of the levee system.

If there is no determined effort to rebuild New Orleans, there's even less chance that the US government will be roused to help rebuild Beirut and other Lebanese urban centers. In other words, having been guilty of a sin of omission concerning Israel and its neighbors, there's little chance that the current Administration will feel the need to re-think its approach. After responding to the immediacy of current events, the Administration is more likely to shrug, yet again, and move on. 

Truly, the line of the day

IN THE NEWS
Via Poliblogger, truly the line of the day.