The Great Equalizer

Forget the Colt-45 "Peacemaker" -- the great equalizer is the RPG-29.

One of the factors in Hezbollah's victory on points against the Israeli Defence Force last year was the humble rocket propelled grenade. The RPG is not your grandfather's bazooka: the (former) Soviet-made RPG-29 Vampir was specifically designed to defeat reactive armour. It uses two shaped charges, the first to trigger the reactive armour and the second to blow a hole through the tank. Costing around $500 for the launcher and $250 per missile, the RPG-29 was impressively effective at destroying the Israeli Merkava tank, reportedly the most heavily armoured tank in the world. That makes the RPG-29 one of the most impressive giant killers out there.

This suggests that the overwhelming advantage of First World armies with their heavy tanks costing millions of dollars could be severely undermined. This will make the cost of invasion far higher, both in soldiers' lives and dollars, and allow infantry to go toe-to-toe with heavy armour. If true, that's probably the biggest shift in military technology since the invention of the pike formation which allowed infantry to defeat armoured knights.

More on those cluster bombs

Cluster bombs make an effective weapon against massed ground troops. But they also make an even better weapons against civilians, a terror-weapon. By happy accident, cluser bombs have a habit of not going off immediately, which makes them one of the weapons of choice for the ethnic-cleanser and high-tech terrorist. Bomb an area, and not only do you kill people immediately, but you keep killing and crippling them for years or even decades afterwards, as unexploded bombs are found, often by children who think the small bombs are playthings.

Which makes the use of cluster bombs on civilian areas a war-crime. Deliberately endangering non-combatants is not an act of war, it is a crime. Civilized countries do not deliberately drop cluster bombs where children are sure to find them.

In the south of Lebanon, an incredible ninety percent of the cluster bombs dropped on civilian areas were dropped in the last 72 hours of the war, when Israel knew that a diplomatic resolution was imminent. The south of Lebanon, mostly villages and farm land with large civilian populations, are littered with unexploded cluster bombs. This immoral crime is part of Israel's attempt at ethnic cleansing, like the bulldozing and bombing of civilian houses and factories, cynically defended by the oft-repeated lie that Hezbollah military units were hidden in civilian areas.

Prime Minister of Israel?

The Ha'aretz columnist Bradley Burston has a radical idea -- he wants Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah to run for Prime Minister -- of Israel.

Now it's official. Israel is a country without a prime minister.

This had been no more than an educated suspicion until Monday night, when Ehud Olmert effectively made the announcement. Not in so many words, of course. Instead, in a long-awaited television address to the nation, Olmert took Israel's last remaining expectations of him and kicking them in the teeth, by ducking a full-out probe into his handling of the war.

If nature abhors a vacuum, imagine how it feels at this point about Israel's senior leadership.

The titular head of state, our model for probity, is looking down the barrel of rape charges. The army chief of staff, our model for dedication and sacrifice, took a break for a bit of financial planning just as the nation's leaders were deciding whether the military was ready, plans, supplies, training and all, to go to war.

The justice minister might have helped Olmert this week, had he not resigned over suspicions that he forced a French kiss on an unwilling young woman soldier.

And then there is Olmert himself, the man who acted as prime minister from January 4, when Ariel Sharon suffered a devastating stroke, until July 12, when Olmert suffered a debilitating, evidently permanent lapse of responsibility.

After nearly six decades of existence, Israel has found itself a practical experiment in Anarcho-Zionism. Unlike its neighbor the Palestinian Authority, which is a government lacking an independent state (and a number of officials jailed by Israel), Israel has become an independent state lacking a government.

[...]

Maybe that's our answer. If assassinating or abducting the Hezbollah leader is still on the agenda, as Israeli officials maintain, why not put Nasrallah to useful purpose?

Look at the issues. Consider his record. Here is a man who is both strong and wise on security issues. He saw to it that his troops were well-prepared, well-trained, well-supplied, and and well-protected.

Nasrallah would be a new sort of Israeli leader. One who gets things done.

Here is a man who addresses social welfare needs head-on. He doesn't wait to help home-owners rebuild residences destroyed by aerial attacks. He hands out literal lump-sums, immediately, in cash.

Here is a man who delivers medical care to the needy, affordable housing to the homeless, food and even clothing to society's disadvantaged.

Here is a man who cares deeply about, and puts major emphasis on, education and youth (even if the message is one of incitement, hatred, and anti-Semitism).

Moreover, as he proved this week in admitting to having miscalculated the Israeli response in Lebanon, Nasrallah, as opposed to, say, Olmert, is a leader who, when he's made an error in judgment, can openly admit to it.

For more than 20 years, Israeli prime ministers have come to office pledging to be leaders for all the people, only to exacerbate existing divides and create new ones.

Why not tap the one leader who has managed to unite the Israeli people as has no prime minister in memory?

Thanks to billmon.

Of course, it is fascinating to see how the Israeli left and right have joined ranks in their opposition to Hezbollah following Hezbollah's retalitory rocket attacks against Israel. Remember, in almost six years of niggly you-shoved-me-first low level fighting over the Israeli-Lebanese border, only six Israeli civilians died from border violence. As I said before, that's six too many, but it was hardly a real threat.

But once Israel launched the July attacks to stop it, Hezbollah retalitated in force, killing perhaps a few dozen Israelis (mostly Arab-Israelis) in just a few weeks. In the face of enemy aggression, both the Lebanese and Israelis put their political differences aside and closed ranks against the attacker -- regardless of whether the attacker was the aggressor or not. This oh-so-very-human habit just goes to show the futility of trying to win hearts and minds via warfare.

The Arab street

In the aftermath of the Israeli war on Lebanon, Arab bloggers and writers have been very busy discussing "Who Won?" Marc Lynch at Abu Aardvark writes about the many, varied responses coming out of "the Arab street".

For reasons I've already discussed, it is quite clear to me that Hezbollah, bloody but unbowed, won the ground war. Clearly Lebanon the nation-state was the big loser: the United Nations is estimating that Lebanon's economy has been put back twenty years.

The most interesting thing from Lynch's blog isn't the various opinions on who won, but the fact that there is a great deal of diversity in Arab opinion. People are often tempted to lump diverse "others" into a single basket, like Bush's imaginary "Axis of Evil": with enemies and rivals Iraq and Iran, isolationist North Korea, and non-state terrorist organisation al Qaeda (enemy to both the secular Iraqi government and the wrong-sort-of-religion theocratic Iranian government) being treated as essentially identical. But in real life, people or nations don't come in two flavours of Us and Them.

There is, however, one sense in which the so-called Arab street is unified: their increasing anger and fury at the US, Israel, and their accomplices in the friendly Arab regimes.

Marc Lynch has a follow-up here. Both are worth reading.

Western, particularly American, political actions over the last few decades has been pushing the Muslim world to become more radicalized, more violent and angry. We (by which I mean the elites in government that rule in our names) have, whether by design, or stupidity, or accident, been pushing millions of Muslims into the welcoming arms of Islamic anti-Western Fundamentalists. I do not welcome the day that Hezbollah controls Lebanon's politics, but Israel's foolish, arrogant, wicked adventurism has made that day more likely. The people that we trust with keeping us safe from our enemies have been, through their short-sighted greed and hunger for power, been boosting the strength and power of those Medieval, vicious god-botherers who want to control how we dress, what we eat, how we wear our hair, and how we think.

Cluster bombs

Juan Cole discusses the thousands of unexploded cluster bombs in Lebanon which have already killed and maimed civilians, especially children:

The bombs frequently do not detonate, so now south Lebanon is littered with deadly fist-size bomblets that will inevitably kill and disfigure children and other civilians.

The US State Department will investigate whether Israeli deployment of these weapons in civilian areas violated secret agreements under which Washington supplied them to Israel.

Nothing will come of the investigation, given the clout of the Israel lobby in Washington, but someday the relative of an innocent maimed Lebanese may decide to take revenge on the country that supplied the cluster bombs. And the American public will ask in astonishment why anyone should hate us.

Because they "hate our freedoms", surely?

Hezbollah to Syria: pull your head in

Juan Cole is reporting on Hezbollah's snub to Syria:

[...] Hizbullah declined to adopt the position of Syrian President Bashar al-Asad in accusing the reformist politicians of standing against Hizbullah and the resistance in Lebanon. (Bashar has a feud with the 14 March group, but Hizbullah joined it in a national unity government.) Husayn al-Hajj Hasan, a Hizbullah member of parliament said, "we reject the idea of considering the 14 March group to be agents of Israel and America."

In an emotional speech in Beirut Thursday morning, shown on LBC, Saad Hariri said that the 33-day long Israeli campaign against Lebanon had inflicted profound damage on the country. He went on to say that it was painful to find a sibling Arab leader adding insult to injury by instigating division and infighting among Lebanese. Hariri was referring to Tuesday's speech by Bashar al-Asad of Syria in which he accused Hariri and other members of his coalition of being agents of foreign powers and urged Hizbullah to stand up to them. Hariri said that Lebanon had seen nothing from Syria but hatred, hypocrisy and lies. He accused Syria of trading for its own advantage on the blood of Arab children at Qana, in Gaza and in Baghdad. He said he sympathized with the suffering masses of Syria who labored under a tyrannical regime that denied them the possibility of free elections. He reminded Damascus that steadfastness in the face of Israeli attacks was a famed Lebanese product, stemming from Lebanese national unity. (Asad had said that the 14 March group was a product of Israel.)

This is a good sign for Lebanon, and further evidence that Hezbollah is becoming a responsible, serious player in the region, not merely a tool of Syria and/or Iran, and is trying hard to avoid a disasterous return to the civil war. Looks like Syria is rapidly becoming irrelevent.

Timeline of lead up to the invasion

Remember the two "kidnapped" Israeli soldiers? Israel swore they would never negotiate for their release. Now that they've backed down and have agreed to negotiate for a prisoner exchange, it is worth revisiting the question of the "kidnapping".

Of course these two soldiers weren't kidnapped from their beds or snatched off the street. They were taken prisoner during a clash between Hezbollah fighters and IDF soldiers back in July. Israel insisted that Hezbollah had crossed the border into Israel -- but not at first. It took a few days before the "Hezbollah started it first" story hit the media. Originally, Israel stated that the soldiers had been captured in Lebanon.

Forbes quoted Israeli officials:

The militant group Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers during clashes Wednesday across the border in southern Lebanon, prompting a swift reaction from Israel, which sent ground forces into its neighbor to look for them.

The forces were trying to keep the soldiers' captors from moving them deeper into Lebanon, Israeli government officials said on condition of anonymity.

See also here.

And here which points out that the Israelis had not been able to recover the tank destroyed in the raid (at least as of the time of writing).

It's worth remembering the timeline of events:

• June (date unknown, but on or before the 13th):
  Israel apparently shells a Gaza beach, injuring at least one family of Palestinians.


• June 13: Israel launches another airstrike against Gaza, killing eleven.


• June 24: Israel raids Gaza, kidnapping/capturing two Palestinian civilians, one of whom is a doctor.


• June 27: Hamas apparently used a tunnel to raid Israel, capturing an Israeli soldier:
  
  

  "KIBBUTZ KEREM SHALOM - Israel (CBS/AP) June 25 -- The brazen pre-dawn attack was the first ground assault by Palestinian militants since Israel pulled out of Gaza last summer, and the first abduction of an Israeli soldier by Palestinians since 1994..."

  
  If you've been reading media reports here, one would be forgiven for thinking that Israelis soldiers were being kidnapped on a daily basis.


• June 27: The plot thickens. The Shin Bet claims that the IDF was given detailed warnings of where and when the tunnel raid was going to take place.
  
  Probe: IDF knew militants planned abduction via tunnel
  Link (apparently no longer on line) here.


• July 12th: Two Israeli soldiers were captured by Hezbollah. Immediately afterwards, Israel begins launching air strikes against not just the Hezbollah-controlled south, but Beirut and the Christian north, including Lebanese army bases in the north.


• Also on July 12: IDF Chief Lt. General Dan Halutz threatens to "turn the clock back on Lebanon 20 years", as reported in the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz.
  Sorry no direct link, but it is referenced here.

After the Israeli invasion had started, SF Gate reveals that the attack on Lebanon has been planned for at least one year and possibly as many as three. Israel's claims of self-defence do not hold water.

Trish Schuh of Counterpunch has also discussed this shifting border crossing. Now that Israeli lawyers are suing the Lebanese government (talk about blaming the victim), the question of who cross the border first will take in greater importance. She quotes a report on the ABC News in Australia, quoting the IDF:

The sources say the Israeli soldiers had been seized at around 9am local time across the border from Aita al Shaab, some 15 kilometers from the Mediterranean coast. The Israeli army confirmed that two Israeli soldiers had been captured on the Lebanese frontier. Israeli ground forces crossed into Lebanon to hunt for the missing soldiers, Israeli Army Radio said.

and the Voice of America, reporting from Jerusalem on July 12:

Speaking to reporters outside the Israeli Foreign Ministry, spokesman Mark Regev says Hezbollah is responsible for the violence. "It appears we have an escalation in the North," he said. "It is very clear that the escalation started on the Lebanese side of the border, and Israel will respond appropriately."

"The escalation started on the Lebanese side of the border". What were Israeli troops doing on the Lebanese side of the border? Picking daisies? Sounds like "He started it by hitting me back" to me.

Although it is getting further away from the immediate cause of the war, it is worth remembering the Israeli provocations towards Hamas and Hezbollah (assassinations, both bungled and successful, bombings, shelling of civilians, etc.). In Down the Memory Hole we have some hard figures which show which group of people is at greater risk of death and injury and who it really is that needs defending:

...between September 2005 and June 2006, 144 Palestinians in Gaza were killed by Israeli forces, according to a list compiled by the Israeli human rights group B'tselem; 29 of those killed were children. During the same period, no Israelis were killed as a result of violence from Gaza.

The broader implications of Israel's failure

Israel's failure to defeat Hezbollah has consequences which extend beyond the borders of Israel and Lebanon. The Agonist discusses some of the reasons for that failure, and points out that the broader implication is potentially very broad indeed: a sea-change in who counts as a major player. It isn't just nation states any longer:

It should also make people start thinking more seriously about so called non state actors like Hezbollah and the Tamil Tigers and the Islamic Courts Union and their similarities and differences from States. Such organization - with the support of a population and fulfilling most of the roles of the government, yet not internationally recognized, are likely to increase in number and efficacy over time - and as we have just seen, even now, they are a force to be reckoned with.

Welcome the new Middle East. It's not your father's Middle East anymore.

Of course, this change has been building for many decades, at least since the Taliban and other non-state groups forced the Soviets out of Afghanistan. The Tamil Tigers have been making their voices heard (sometimes at the point of a gun) for many decades too. But this is the first time that a first-world army has had its eye blackened by a non-state in open combat.

Facts on the ground

Billmon of The Whiskey Bar has looked at the American claims that Israel won a great victory over terrorism in this war:

Strictly from a humanitarian point of view, it's both grotesque and repulsive to have to listen to Ehud Olmert, Sheikh Nasrallah and the Boy King all proclaiming victory in their nasty little war -- even as the bodies are still literally being pulled out of the rubble.
[...]
In other words, Bush managed to make both himself and America look like petty, pathetic losers -- which is certainly true, but hardly needs to be flaunted before the world. Typically, the moron ignored -- or never understood -- the concept of plausible deniability, which is one of the key benefits that proxy wars offer to their superpower patrons. If your guy wins, you take the credit and make sure everybody notices how well your weapons systems performed. If he loses, well, it had nothing to do with you. This at least leaves you with as much diplomatic manuevering room as is possible under the circumstances.

[...] So it looks like all of Bush's canned speechifying is going to be trumped by Hussein Kalash's plain statement of fact.

"We're still here."

Some facts speak for themselves.

Well worth reading.

Taking credit for the cornucopia of foolishness

Now that the ceasefire in Lebanon is (mostly) holding, all the major players are claiming victory. Historian Juan Cole wonders why anyone would want to claim victory in this sordid little Keystone Cops war:

Since the United Nations resolution calling for a halt to hostilities, Prime Minister Olmert, President Bush, Secretary-General Nasrallah, President al-Asad and President Ahmadinejad have all been procliaming [sic] the war a personal victory.

I don't know why they would want to claim it.

It was such a stupid war. It was thick-as-two-blocks-of-wood strategy on all sides. It was moronic for the Israelis to plan it out last year. It was idiotic for Hizbullah to cross over into Israel, kill soldiers, and take two captive. [Ed: there are considerable doubts on this description of events.] It was brain dead for the Israeli officer corps and politicians to think they could get anything positive out of bombing Lebanon back to the stone age and making a million people homeless. It was dim-witted for Hasan Nasrallah to threaten Israelis with releasing poison gases from Haifa chemical plants on them. It was obtuse for the Israelis to confront a dug-in guerrilla movement with green conventional troops marching in straight lines. It was dull of Hizbullah to fire thousands of katyushas into open fields where they mainly damaged wild grass. The few times when the rockets managed to kill someone, it was often an Arab Israeli civilian. Stupid.

Israeli's armed forces chief, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, unwisely sold off $27,000 in stock when he heard that Hizbullah had captured 2 Israeli soldiers. That wasn't unwise economically, since when Israel went to war, its stock market fell 12% It is further proof that the war was planned well in advance, and that Halutz knew that the capture would trigger it. But what could he have saved or made from this transaction? A few thousand dollars? It was stupid for him to risk the public perception of impropriety for such a small sum. Unprofessional.

[...]
But this war was a keystone cops war. It was horribly destructive for Lebanon, but not to any purpose for anyone, including the Israelis. The Americans and Israelis seem to have thought that the small farmers and small shopkeepers of south Lebanon were a sinister wraith army of the ghost of Ayatollah Khomeini. In fact, they were . . . small farmers and shopkeepers. One of the reasons they are rushing back down south is to see to their small farms, even if the small farmhouse isn't there any more.

But there you have it. Everyone wants credit for this cornucopia of foolishness.

Bush came out and said that Hizbullah had been defeated, and tried to link Hizbullah to the Sunni Arab guerrillas who make his life hell in Iraq. But, George, Hizbullah is Shiite. It was your Shiite allies in Iraq who supported it.

One event that stood out in my mind from early in the ground invasion was a complaint from an Israeli soldier that the Hezbollah fighters were deliberately wearing military uniforms to confuse them, because that made them look like soldiers. Hey Brainiac, that's what they are: soldiers.

I don't know what the Israeli brass thought, but the rank-and-file seem to have swallowed whole the myth of Hezbollah being untrained terrorists with machine guns. Maybe Israel really did expect to find Hezbollah fighters hiding in civilian clothes in markets and apartment buildings (and maybe the Pope is an atheist...) and was taken completely by surprise to discover Hezbollah troops were well-trained, disciplined light infantry, dug into heavily fortified, well-supplied positions far from the residential areas the Israeli airforce was blowing up.

It has been said, if you fight the weak, you become weak. Israeli soldiers have spent the last decade or two shooting rock-throwing Palestinian children, protecting bulldozers, and blowing up Hamas leaders with guided missiles. Whatever edge they once had has been dulled by their arrogant confidence that the IDF is the toughest, meanest military force in the Middle East and possibly the world. With total air superiority, heavy armour and a numerical superiority, they couldn't beat light infantry and failed to make a single one of their strategic aims. The best they can say after this is that, having picked a fight with the 40lb weakling next door, "we didn't get our butts kicked!"

Morally, ethically, Cole might be right that Hezbollah has nothing to be proud of here. (His assertion that they crossed into Israel and captured two soldiers is doubtful -- more details to follow soon.) Both sides have committed war crimes: Hezbollah by firing unguided rockets into farmland where they could -- and did -- hit civilians, and Israel by its application of collective punishment to the entire Lebanese people, its deliberate destruction of houses, factories, bridges, airports and other civilian infrastructure, and its killing of hundreds of civilians -- at best careless endangerment, at worst deliberate murder. Either way, a war crime.

But, militarily, there was a clear and obvious winner here, and it wasn't Israel. Victory isn't decided by casualties alone, and certainly not by civilian casualites. In the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel, the suffering of ordinary Lebanese doesn't matter to either side.

It is bad enough that Olmert is a militaristic vicious thug who invaded a foreign state on the slimmest of pretenses, but he is an incompetent thug who couldn't even pull the job off. Not only has he failed to curb militant Fundamentalist forces in Lebanon, but he has embolded them, weakening the secular Lebanese government, perhaps fatally, undercutting their authority, handing moral authority and the support of virtually all of Lebanon (Christian, Druze, Shiite and Sunni) to Hezbollah.

Olmert may or may not be able to spin this for the domestic market as a great victory. The frightened people of Israel might even prefer Olmert's strutting tough-guy policy of "my way or a fist in the face" towards Hamas and Hezbullah over the alternatives of negotiation, diplomacy and compromise. But there is no doubt that his adventurism has weakened Israel's position in the Middle East and made them less safe and more insecure.

Who won the war?

Now that the fighting has (mostly) stopped in Lebanon, and the ceasefire seems to be holding, we should ask, who won the war?

Well, Israel claim to have invaded Lebanon to force Hezbollah to disarm. Hezbollah aren't disarmed, and managed to fire 250 rockets into Israel in the last day before the ceasefire.

Israel said their aim was to destroy Hezbollah as an effective force. Hezbollah has not fired a single rocket into Israel since the ceasefire, giving unmistakable evidence that they remain under effective command and are not just a bunch of untrained terrorists. They're soldiers who can follow orders. [Update, 18-08-06 11:15am: it seems that the ceasefire hasn't been kept quite so well as I thought. Both sides have claimed provocation and retaliation, including a handful of rockets fired ineffectually into Israel. But still, it is clear that Hezbollah is under effective command.]

Israel said that they were going to occupy southern Lebanon until Hezbollah was no longer a threat. Israel are withdrawing from Lebanon, and Hezbollah are still there, still armed, and still able to fight.

Israeli hardliners hoped to push the Lebanese people out of southern Lebanon, leaving the area depopulated and giving Israel a large buffer zone. Under the mythology of far-right Israel, the Lebanese and Palestinians are not attached to any particular piece of land. (Half a century of conflict over land hasn't taught Israeli wingnuts any different.) As soon as the ceasefire started, Lebonese farmers and shopkeepers began returning to their farms and what little was left of their homes.

Israel said they went to war to rescue the two captured soldiers, and would never negotiate for their return. The soldiers are still prisoners, and Israel have now said they will negotiate.

I have previously suggested that this war between Hezbollah and Israel is like Rocky: no matter what the judges say, the fact that the heavyweight champ Apollo Creed didn't cream the unknown in the first round made Rocky the winner. No matter how badly Rocky was beaten by the champ, he was still standing, bruised but unbowed. But in fact it is worse than that: despite a total lack of air support and heavy armour, Hezbollah was able to inflict significant loses on Israel while suffering surprisingly few loses themselves.

When a first-world army with air support and heavy armour takes on second-world ground troops, you should expect a ratio of 1:10 losses. In this war, the ratio was 1:4 according to Israel and 2:1 according to Hezbollah (as of the time of writing). Of the two, I consider the Israeli figure (barely) more reliable -- I'm assuming the true figure was one Israeli casulty taken for every two inflicted.

As Pat Lang writes:

A basic lesson of history is that one must win on the battlefield to dictate the peace. A proof of winning on the battlefield has always been possession of that battlefield when the shooting stops. Those who remain on the field are just about always believed to have been victorious. Those who leave the field are believed to be the defeated.

It is Israel, not Hezbollah, who is slinking off this battlefield.

How to win friends for your enemy

Over at The Whiskey Bar, Billmon reminds us that unprovoked attacks against civilians can easily backfire:

The stakes are high for Hizbullah, but it seems it can count on an unprecedented swell of public support that cuts across sectarian lines. According to a poll released by the Beirut Center for Research and Information, 87 percent of Lebanese support Hizbullah's fight with Israel, a rise of 29 percent on a similar poll conducted in February.

More striking, however, is the level of support for Hizbullah's resistance from non-Shiite communities. Eighty percent of Christians polled supported Hizbullah along with 80 percent of Druze and 89 percent of Sunnis.

Lebanese no longer blame Hizbullah for sparking the war by kidnapping the Israeli soldiers, but Israel and the US instead.
[...]
Ghassan Farran, a doctor and head of a local cultural organization, gazes in disbelief at the pile of smoking ruins which was once his home. Minutes earlier, an Israeli jet dropped two guided missiles into the six-story apartment block in the centre of Tyre.

"Look what America gives us, bombs and missiles," says this educated, middle-class professional. "I was never a political person and never with Hizbullah but now after this I am with Hizbullah."

Unless Israel is prepared to take the gloves off and start a full-blown land invasion and genocide in Lebanon -- which I don't believe they have quite reached that state yet, more out of concern for Israeli casualties than for any other reason -- they can't beat Hezbollah by dropping bombs on people's houses, and will only make them stronger.

Like Apollo Creed versus Rocky Balboa, if Israel can't knock Hezbollah out in the first round, the champ loses -- no matter what the final decision on points is. The Israeli right-wing government has handled this badly, underestimating Hezbollah's discipline and fighting ability, underestimating revulsion to war crimes and the slaughter of children, overestimating their ability to commit ethnic cleansing from the air and kill or displace the people of southern Lebanon. Simply by standing up to Israeli tanks and fighters and fighting them to a draw, Israel has lost and Hezbollah has won.

I was going to say "an honourable draw", but with both sides committing war crimes, there is no honour in this war. Still, there is no moral equivalence between the two sides, and not all crimes are equal. Hezbollah's crimes are of carelessness, firing inaccurate missiles into civilian areas where, on occassion, they have killed a civilian: a crime of ommission, failing to take sufficient care. Israel's war crimes are deliberate, crimes of commission: deliberately bombing civilians, guided missiles fired at ambulances, bombing U.N. reports, attacking rescue workers, and so forth.

We should take Israel's claims of self-defence with more than just a grain of salt: since Israel withdraw from their illegal occupation of southern Lebanon in 2000, until 12th July of this year, six Israeli civilians died in border violence. Six. Obviously that's six too many, but sane governments don't risk the welfare of their entire nation over one death per year, and moral, ethical people don't slaughter at least 400, mostly innocent civilians including children, and make 800,000+ homeless, over six.

Those two Israeli soldiers

The supposed justification for the brutal invasion of Lebanon by Israel is the "kidnapping" of two Israeli soldiers a month or so ago.

The use of the word "kidnapped" to describe armed soldiers captured on duty in a hostile area (if not an outright war zone) is pure propoganda. They were't stolen from their homes while they slept, or kidnapped from a movie theatre, they were taken prisoner while armed and on a mission. They have been taken prisoner, and are captives. Taking soldiers captive is not a crime.

However, sending troops over the border into a foreign sovereign state might very well be. Reports at the time of the "abduction", such as this one from Forbes, are clear that the soldiers were part of an IDF force which were in Lebanon, not Israel. The soldiers were captured in the Lebanese town of Aitaa al-Chaab, and eight other Israeli soldiers killed.

See also here.

Hezbollah has in the past made it clear that they will arrest any Israeli soldiers found in Lebanon illegally, and is willing to negotiate their release in exchange for some of the many thousands of prisoners being held by Israel.

Since we know now that Israel has been planning the war for three years, with detailed war plans for at least a year, it seems extremely likely that the commando raid on Aitaa al-Chaab was deliberate provocation, and that the Israeli refusal to negotiate the release of the captured IDF soldiers isn't some principled stand but the deliberate sacrifice of two pawns as a casus belli for war.

Coffin counters

As of July 28, 2006, the Israeli attack on Lebanon has lead to the deaths of 425 Lebanese, 51 Israelis, and 4 UN peacekeepers.

A graphical counter can be found here. It really drives home the discrepancy in the amount of violence applied by each side and the disproportionate response applied. With the destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure, its bridges and factories and power stations, at the hands of Israel in the 1980s and again in 2006, I'm sure many Lebanese are thinking "Invade us once, shame on you; invade us twice, shame on us. Never again!"

A similar counter for the occupation of Iraq can be found here. Deaths in Iraq to date are approximately 2550 Americans, 44,650 Iraqis. Since 2002, Iraq has suffered the equivalent of almost fifteen September-Elevens, or about one every three months. And that doesn't take into account the fact that Iraq has a much smaller population, so the death toll is far more significant in proportion, nor does it consider those who have been indirectly killed by the destruction of infrastructure, the lack of food and water and medical supplies.

I think it is fair to say that the average Iraqi probably holds at least ten times as much good will towards the USA as the average American holds towards al Qaeda.

Israel vs Hezbollah is not such a cake walk

Reports coming out of Lebanon indicate that Israel isn't finding things going all their own way. Israel might be the third most powerful military in the world, but unless they are prepared to use nuclear weapons to crush a flea, and deal with the fall-out that leads to (both political and radioactive) they have to fight on the ground, and Israeli troops put their pants on one leg at a time like everybody else.

Juan Cole writes:

The Israelis are finding that the Hizbullah guerrillas have excellent intelligence on Israeli weaponry, and that they are capable of fighting orderly tactical battles from buildings with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. In other words, they are not facing the militia of tobacco share croppers. They are facing a highly professional military force, perhaps the most professional in the region aside from Israel's own.

Kidnapping Palestinian dentists and blowing up civilians in their homes is easy. Fighting dedicated soldiers with well-planned defences who are defending their homes and are willing to use asymmetrical tactics is a whole 'nuther ball game.

---

In further news from Cole, he reports that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice didn't have much impact in her surprise visit to Beirut:

Rice proffered "support" to Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, but not a ceasefire, which is what he really needs to keep his government from collapsing--and he testily told her so. She said she regretted the humanitarian situation (caused by America's ally with billions in American-supplied armaments), but the US is offering only $30 million in aid (billions of dollars of damage have been done to Lebanon by Israel, most of it unrelated to Hizbullah). She delivered her ultimatum to Nabih Berri, speaker of the Lebanese parliament and a leading secular Shiite politician who has an alliance of convenience with Hizbullah. Berri angrily rejected her terms and riposted that no negotiations would happen without there first being a ceasefire. He was relaying to her Hizbullah's position.

Rice's visit showed how low American stock has fallen in the Middle East, since she came virtually empty-handed, merely as a go-fer on behalf of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, with little positive to offer. Berri thunderously rejected her ultimatums, or rather those of her political bosses. She came with nice words but Israeli bombs hit Beirut before and after her visit, according to my sources. Her professions of sympathy rang hollow, since her government was encouraging the bombing raids and blocking any UN or European move toward a cease-fire. She played no more exalted a role than Mafia enforcer, lifting her suit coat at the corner to display the loaded pistol as she discussed just how much the owner of the Lebanese restaurant would be paying per month for "protection" from certain of her "friends," or else, you know, something bad could happen to this nice restaurant of yours.

And, she was undermined by Washington's warmest ally in the Muslim Middle East, the government of American Iraq, who delivered a message the opposite of her own. He argued for an immediate ceasefire and warned that Israel's destruction of the infrastructure of a whole country will grow extremism. Al-Maliki is referring to the "boiling" Mahdi Army in Iraq and other such phenomena, which have him in their sights, and maybe American targets as well.

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Cole also discusses why he accuses both Israel and Hezbollah of war crimes:

Some readers have asked why I characterize Hizbullah's rocket launches as war crimes. It is because the Geneva Convention requires that in war you have to aim at enemy combatants. You can't deliberately target civilians, and you can't endanger civilians unnecessarily. The Hizbullah rockets have poor targeting, and so just firing them endangers civilians. The rockets themselves have apparently killed almost no Israeli troops, and almost all their victims have been innocent civilians, like that poor man who was just driving along in or near Haifa. That is, the Hizbullah rockets have been fired indiscriminately (the only way they can be fired) and mainly hit civilian targets, which a prudent person could foresee. Bingo. War crime.
[...]
There is actually an argument to be made that both Hizbullah and Israel have taken the civilian population of their enemy hostage. Since hostage-taking is forbidden, both are war criminals.

While both sides are clearly "bad guys", one look at the numbers of dead and homeless on each side shows who the biggest bad guys are. To those who argue that "Israel are the good guys", you can't act like thugs and monsters and still cloak youself with the mantle of goodness. Evil is what evil does, and the good-will Israel accumulated after the Holocaust and decades of hostility from their Arab neighbours is virtually gone now. As far as the international community, with the exception perhaps of the USA is concerned, Israel is the neighbourhood bully who knowingly uses their childhood abuse to excuse all manner of vicious behaviour.

Yes, Israel was born in bloodshed. Yes, the Jews have suffered. So have many other people. It doesn't excuse Israel's behaviour. It isn't Israeli's ports closed, or airports and factories that have been bombed and destroyed. It isn't Israeli Red Cross ambulances being shot at by guided missiles. There haven't been over four hundred Israeli civilians killed, and 800,000 made homeless. It isn't Hezbollah who is threatening Israel with the old Roman -- and Nazi -- tactic of tenfold retribution.

Criminalising civilians

Juan Cole quotes at length a discussion of the criminalisation of civilians in Iraq and Lebanon:

In the days before the US-commanded forces unleashed the second siege of Falluja in November 2004, a quarter million women, children and old men fled the city, but males between the ages of 15 and 45 were denied passage. They were essentially criminalized and forced to remain in a zone upon which hell was about to descend. These poor souls were condemned to a legal category that philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls hominus sacres, those without rights who can be killed without it being called the murder of a human, homicide.
[...]
Look at this logic: since Israel has asked civilians to leave, any that disobeyed have forfeited their status as civilians. Because the United States and its British followers have blocked the resolution to stop the killing, Israel will continue until Hezbollah “is no longer present.” But remember Hezbollah has been redefined to include all those “still in south Lebanon.” This crude logic renders all the people of southern Lebanon hominus sacres.

A serious war crime may be imminent. The responsibility to protect civilians does not end when an invading army asks them to clear out. An Nahar also reported that hundreds of people were trapped in southern villages. Moreover, there is evidence that some who tried to flee north in cars have been targeted.

Note: the correct Latin term for someone who can be killed with impunity by anyone is "homo sacer" (singular) and "homines sacri" (plural).

Life's little ironies

In one of life's little ironies, the Israelis used to take credit for "creating" Hezbollah and Hamas, as "safe" religious alternatives to Palestinian nationalism. As Tom Hayden writes:

In 1982, Israel said the same thing about eliminating PLO sanctuaries in Lebanon. It was after that 1982 Israeli invasion that Hezbollah was born. I remember Israeli national security experts even taking credit for fostering Hamas and Islamic fundamentalism as safe, reclusive alternatives to Palestinian secular nationalism. I remember watching Israeli soldiers blow up Palestinian houses and carry out collective punishment because, they told me matter-of-factly, punishment is the only language that Arabs understand. Israelis are inflicting collective punishment on Lebanese civilians for the same reason today.

From Tom Hayden's discussion here:
Part One
Part Two

No untermenschen here

Juan Cole discusses degrees of human-ness:

Israeli officials have already showed us how Arabs can be reclassified away from a full "human" category that they clearly, in the view of the Kadima government, do not deserve.

For instance, Israeli ambassador to the United Nations Dan Gillerman angrily denounced Kofi Annan for neglecting this key fact. The Guardian reports, 'Mr Gillerman said "something very important was missing" from Mr Annan's speech: any mention of terrorism. Hizbullah were "ruthless indiscriminate animals", he told reporters.'
[...]
Israeli Deputy Consul General for San Francisco, Omer Caspi, said of the Lebanese and Palestinian publics concerning Hamas and Hizbullah members, "We say to them please remove this cancer off your body and soul before it is too late."

Caspi did not specify whether members of Hamas are leukemia and those of Hizbullah melanoma, or the reverse.

I admire Cole's good taste in failing to mention der Untermensch. I, on the other hand, have no such restraint. With a good quarter of my recent family tree dying in the Hitler's concentration camps, I know what it is like to have a powerful enemy intent on treating you as a disease. I'd just like to reach out the hand of friendship to the Untermenschen of Lebanon and wish them peace and prosperity, and remind Israel that you reap what you sow.

Israel bombs Christian television

The excuse given by Israel for their latest invasion of Lebanon is that they are targeting Hezbollah terrorists in the south of the country. In fact, Israel has called on the Lebanese government to help root out Hezbollah -- conveniently forgetting that, whether Israel likes it or not, Hezbollah is a legitimate (if unruly and sometimes criminal) part of the Lebanese government.

So why is Israel indiscriminately targeting civilians in Southern Lebanon?

Many people won't care. Southern Lebanon is mostly Shiite. Under the theory that "the only good Muslim is a dead Muslim", many wingnuts just won't care that one third of Lebanese casualties have been children.

But Israel is targeting Christian Lebanese as well. They've already bombed various Christian neighborhoods, at least one church and St. Therese's hospital, and now, as Juan Cole is reporting, they've bombed Christian television stations in the north of Lebanon, killing at least one civilian.

As Juan Cole explains:

Israel on Saturday attacked and partially crippled the media outlets of the Christian and Sunni factions in the Cedar Revolution that Bush and his supporters trumpeted as the foundation of the "new Middle East."
[...]
Israeli political and military elites are clearly upset that they have not been able to monopolize images and reporting of their vicious total war on Lebanese society, Christian, Sunni, Druze and Shiite. Attacking Lebanese television is an attempt to ensure that the war is seen only through the lens of Israeli media, which are censored by the Israeli military. I.e., full spectrum dominance of news and images.

Lebanese Broadcasting Company, a Christian-owned concern, is not a legitimate Israeli target in its struggle against Hizbullah's rockets in the far south of Lebanon.

There is no doubt that Hezbullah has, and continues to, engage in indiscriminate rocket attacks against the north of Israel. These acts are also war crimes, but they have been utterly ineffective, and rarely cause casulties. Israel's attack on Lebanon has killed at least 350 people, mostly civilians, in just a few days, crippled Lebanon's economy, destroyed its infrastructure, and left half a million people homeless. Compared to Hezbullah's petty pot-shots over the border, with most of their rockets hitting nothing but bare dirt, Israel has deliberately destroyed airports, power stations, housing estates and blown up trucks as a warning: drive a truck and you die. (Perhaps they think that only terrorists drive trucks.) This collective punishment of all of Lebanon for the crimes of a few is a war crime, and will only lead to the Lebanese people becoming more radical and less trusting of Israel's good intentions.