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Subject:
Analysis: Nobody's victory, but in the end Israel could not defeat Hizbollah
joes
8/12/2006 11:02:57 PM
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A month of fighting, more than 1,000 dead, upwards of 800,000 Lebanese displaced and $2bn worth of damage - for what? Who wins in this bloody debacle, assuming it is coming to an end? Given the continued fighting, that is still a big assumption. Not Israel, certainly. Even while the authors of this military adventure continue to try to carve out some notion of victory to sell the Israeli public, increasingly fewer people are buying it.
The likes of deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres have tried to promote the notion that Israel has got everything it wants out of the war - and from Friday's disgracefully late UN resolution calling for an immediate cessation of violence (on which Israel is still being permitted by the US to drag its feet) - but the reality is that the prosecutors of this war have lost more than they have won.
Whatever Israel does now, it is seriously diminished. In military terms it has been confronted successfully for a second time by the guerillas of Hizbollah. Again and again, its heavily-armoured Merkava tanks have been rocketed to a standstill. All its technology and its large army have been shown lacking the deftness and determination of a vastly smaller force lacking armoured vehicles, bombers and aircraft. Most seriously, its vulnerability to missile attack has been amply demonstrated to any enemy, despite its possession of US anti-missile batteries. Israel has lost one of its most powerful weapons - the psychological sense of its military invulnerability.
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So who has won? Not Israel. Certainly not Lebanon or its fragile democracy, the development of both of which will have been pushed back half a decade and more. But what about Hizbollah? What can be said is that, on its own terms, it has not lost. Not yet. It has resisted Israel and thus far at least has survived, which was all it had to achieve. If it continues to survive until an international force is deployed - which seems likely - then the issue of its disarmament will have disappeared again into some vague future. In psychological terms, it can claim that its few fighters have inflicted disproportionate damage on the Israelis for a second time, and put the issue of the Shebaa farms on the negotiating table.
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