Charles Krauthammer has an enlightening editorial up at the Washington Post. He explains the Middle East through the eyes of a neo-conservative. It’s not too different from my take on what is unfolding from yesterday.
It goes like this: Hizbollah is a Shi’ite militia in a diverse country of Christians, Druze, and Sunni Muslims. They are resented by a plurality (or near plurality) of their countrymen. They are hated by the neighboring Arab regimes (except the Alawite ruled Syria). The UN has already asked Hizbollah to disarm. The G8 blamed them for starting this latest round of violence. The Arab League has condemned Hizbollah. Bottom line? Pretty much everyone hates Hizbollah and want them to get their ass kicked (except Syria and Iran). But who can do the ass-kicking? And under what pretext?
Krauthammer explains:
Fine. Everyone agrees it must be done. But who to do it? No one. The Lebanese are too weak. The Europeans don’t invade anyone. After its bitter experience of 20 years ago, the United States has a Lebanon allergy. And Israel could not act out of the blue because it would immediately have been branded the aggressor and forced to retreat.
Hence the golden, unprecedented opportunity. Hezbollah makes a fatal mistake. It crosses the U.N.-delineated international frontier to attack Israel, kill soldiers and take hostages. This aggression is so naked that even Russia joins in the Group of Eight summit communique blaming Hezbollah for the violence and calling for the restoration of Lebanese sovereignty in the south.
But only one country has the capacity to do the job. That is Israel, now recognized by the world as forced into this fight by Hezbollah’s aggression.
So, from a neoconservative’s point-of-view, Israel was just waiting for a sufficient provocation to justify an invasion of Lebanon. It’s a job everyone wants done, but no one wants to take credit for.
I think there is a lot of truth in what Krauthammer is saying. I think he has correctly described the kind of cynical, inhumane, and strategically inept thinking of the major players. Take the Saudis. This is a win-win for them. Israel takes care of a problem and takes all the blame for it. How do Sunni Muslims justify standing by quietly while fellow Muslims are killed in droves? Well? They are Shi’a Muslims. They take their orders from hated Iran.
You can see the problem with this thinking by examining Krauthammer’s war plan.
The road to a solution is therefore clear: Israel liberates south Lebanon and gives it back to the Lebanese.
It starts by preparing the ground with air power, just as the Persian Gulf War began with a 40-day air campaign. But if all that happens is the air campaign, the result will be failure. Hezbollah will remain in place, Israel will remain under the gun, Lebanon will remain divided and unfree. And this war will start again at a time of Hezbollah and Iran’s choosing.
Just as in Kuwait in 1991, what must follow the air campaign is a land invasion to clear the ground and expel the occupier. Israel must retake south Lebanon and expel Hezbollah. It would then declare the obvious: that it has no claim to Lebanese territory and is prepared to withdraw and hand south Lebanon over to the Lebanese army (augmented perhaps by an international force), thus finally bringing about what the world has demanded — implementation of Resolution 1559 and restoration of south Lebanon to Lebanese sovereignty.
Only two questions remain: Israel’s will and America’s wisdom. Does Prime Minister Ehud Olmert have the courage to do what is so obviously necessary? And will Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s upcoming peace trip to the Middle East force a premature cease-fire that spares her the humiliation of coming home empty-handed but prevents precisely the kind of decisive military outcome that would secure the interests of Israel, Lebanon, the moderate Arabs and the West?
But it simply isn’t possible to expel Hizbollah. How would we expel the Democrats from New Jersey or the Greens from Vermont? And that job would be a lot easier because we have registration rolls to work with. Hizbollah is a political party and a militia. Their power base is in southern Lebanon. You can’t expel them, you have to kill them. And they are not wearing uniforms or advertising their membership.
This plan is a massive ethnic cleansing campaign. Anything less will be a failure. In reality, it is a prescription for a new Israeli occupation. Short of an occupation, the people will just come back and start firing rockets again. So, Israeli will bomb indiscriminately, forcing the population to flee. Then they will occupy southern Lebanon. Then they will try to get the Lebanese military to take over the job.
There is no reason to believe that the Lebanese army has either the stomach or the capability to engage in an ethnic cleansing campaign on their own soil, using an army that has a large Shi’a component. Krauthammer senses this, so he suggests that the UN might be willing to send a force to help. I really doubt that Israel will ask the UN for help. I’ve seen no indication that they want the UN on their border. But they might see such a step as their only way out of Lebanon. Who knows?
So, this is the hairbrained plan that is unfolding before our eyes. Israel is bombing blindly, driving people from their homes, and thinks it can eradicate a political party from their border by destroying the infrastructure of an entire nation. No one really cares that they are doing this, even if they think it is pointless, because everyone hates Hizbollah. The Lebanese cry out for help so that their nation will not lose everything it has gained since the end of the civil war. No one is listening.
