The Lebanese crisis
Trying in vain to find a way out
Aug 3rd 2006 | BEIRUT, JERUSALEM AND NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition
The United Nations is desperately looking for a peace plan but no one seems to know how it would work
NEARLY three weeks into Israel's campaign against the Islamist militias of Hizbullah in Lebanon, hopes for a diplomatic breakthrough leading to an early ceasefire were badly dented when Israel's air force dropped bombs on a building in the small town of Qana, 12km (eight miles) north of the border. Israel said militants who had just fired a Katyusha rocket had taken refuge in the building. But, as had been the case ten years ago when Israel had shelled a UN compound in Qana in reply—it said—to Hizbullah fire, dozens of civilians were sheltering there too. The death toll of at least 28, including 16 children, was not only the worst so far in this war; it knocked diplomatic efforts to find a solution askew.
A few days before, Hizbullah's two representatives in Lebanon's government had unexpectedly consented to a seven-point peace plan proposed by the prime minister, Fouad Siniora. It would have brought the official Lebanese army into south Lebanon, where Hizbullah has long held sway, and beefed up the UN's existing monitoring force, known as UNIFIL. Under the plan, Hizbullah would also free the two Israeli soldiers it kidnapped on July 12th, triggering Israel's attack, in return for three Lebanese prisoners (one an Israeli citizen) in Israel. The UN would also reconsider the status of the Shebaa Farms, a sliver of disputed land it had previously deemed to belong to Syria (and is occupied by Israel as part of the Golan Heights) but which Hizbullah and the Lebanese government claim as Lebanese.
The plan fell short of the full disarmament of Hizbullah that Israel demanded, and that the UN called for two years ago in its resolution 1559. But it was a big step forward. Israel had dropped hints, albeit later denied, that it could be flexible about Shebaa. Condoleezza Rice, the American secretary of state, was due to come to Lebanon from Israel to wrap up the details. But after the Qana slaughter, Mr Siniora told her not to bother until the UN had imposed an Israeli ceasefire.
That has meant a frenetic week at the UN in New York. The challenge is to come up with a package that will keep Hizbullah out of south Lebanon after Israel withdraws, and do it fast enough to stop the war before any more massacres occur. The UN was hoping to pass a ceasefire resolution, which America had refused to promote before the horror in Qana, this week. But a second resolution on a peacekeeping force will take longer.
All the big players agree on the need for such a force. The consensus is that it will not be an expanded UNIFIL, which Israel distrusts as ineffectual, nor something under the auspices of NATO, which many Arabs, especially Hizbullah, distrust as another American proxy. Estimates of its likely size vary wildly, from 8,000 to more than 20,000 troops. No country has yet promised any. America and Britain will provide backing but not men, as they are overstretched in Iraq.
Behind the scenes, France is emerging as the lead nation in the scheme (see article). Turkey, which has longstanding relations with Israel, may be a leading contributor too, putting a Muslim face on the peacekeeping force.
So a new UN force in Lebanon may risk looking like a Frankenstein's monster, with French leadership, a mandate from the UN, Muslim legitimacy from Turkey, logistical support from NATO, and money and diplomatic backing from the United States and Britain. In any event, a plan has yet to be agreed that would either disarm Hizbullah or fold its militia into Lebanon's official army. No country sounds keen to tell its troops to fire on Hizbullah if it disobeys. A UN official says that this question must be settled before an international force can be agreed upon.
It is not clear, in any case, that a ceasefire would happen just because the UN asks for one. Israel, which briefly stopped its air attacks a day after the Qana tragedy at Ms Rice's insistence, started bombing again within 12 hours and returned to a full-scale offensive two days later. Its politicians are still determined to strike a decisive—and visible—blow against Hizbullah before time runs out.
The war's initial euphoria in Israel—at last, a fight that nobody could accuse Israel itself of starting, launched from a territory that it was not occupying, by an enemy that unashamedly wants to destroy it—is turning into doubt and recrimination. On July 30th the generals were saying they needed about two more weeks to reach their goal of “significantly weakening” Hizbullah, the same timetable they had given two weeks before. Rockets still rain on northern Israel—231 of them on August 2nd, the biggest daily total ever. Last week, the first battles between Israeli troops and Hizbullah forces in the militants' border strongholds brought unexpectedly high Israeli casualties. Meanwhile, Hizbullah's public-relations engine, its al-Manar television station, still emits propaganda and speeches by the movement's charismatic leader, Hassan Nasrallah, despite having its headquarters bombed to rubble.
Inevitably, there are murmurs that Dan Halutz, Israel's first airman to hold the job of chief of staff, was too keen to show that Hizbullah could be dealt a crushing blow from the air alone, and that the army was too late in bringing in ground troops. But the preference for air power may well owe more to the politicians. Israel was wary of repeating its mistake of 1982, when what was meant to be a lightning offensive against Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) bases in south Lebanon turned into an 18-year-long quagmire for Israel's army.
In fact, argues Moshe Yaalon, a former chief of staff, Israel has made progress. The air strikes, he says, have taken out a lot of Hizbullah's longer-range rockets; good intelligence had pinpointed the houses and even the rooms that Hizbullah had set them up in. The small and portable Katyushas that remain do little damage and do not travel far; in the past few days the hits on the larger and more distant Israeli towns, like Haifa, have dropped, though there was another flurry on August 2nd.
The Katyushas, however, cannot be destroyed from the air; they are too easy to hide. This week, trying to outrun the UN, the government decided to step up the ground offensive. Thousands of infantry and tank troops have been sent to the front, where they are concentrating on destroying Hizbullah posts near the border and in nearby towns and villages. They may be joined by more reserve troops. The goal is first to create a Hizbullah-free zone six to eight kilometres deep, and ultimately to beat Hizbullah's forces back as far as the Litani river, some 30km north of the western half of the Israeli-Lebanese border. Emptying the entire area of civilians may, by some analyses, be part of Israel's strategy.
It will be a tough task. After years concentrating on “low-intensity conflict” against Palestinians, this is more like the big wars Israel fought decades ago—but harder, because Hizbullah enjoys some advantages of both conventional and guerrilla armies. Unlike most guerrilla forces, it has had six years to train, prepare, dig bunkers and stockpile supplies, with unfettered access to weapons from Syria and Iran across porous borders. Israeli soldiers coming back from the front have reported encountering tougher and better-trained fighters than they are used to.
Unlike a conventional army, Hizbullah has been able to hide its men and its weapons among civilians—making Israel much more reliant on intelligence in pinpointing targets, and forcing it to constrain attacks to try—in vain, as it often turns out—to limit civilian casualties. Moreover, Hizbullah operates in small, autonomous and largely self-sufficient cells.
Even with most of Hizbullah gone, a few remaining cells can do disproportionate damage—not physically, but in the public perception. So Israel needs physically to push Hizbullah and its Katyushas back most of the way up to the Litani, and through air strikes destroy most of its long-range rockets, which can hit Israel from deep inside Lebanon.
Which is why this week Israel's government has been playing up the successes. It claims to have taken out most of the long-range rockets already. A commando raid on August 1st at a hospital in Baalbek, deep inside Lebanon, which Israel says netted five Hizbullah prisoners, may not have caught a big fish for a prisoner swap but did show that Israel can strike anywhere it wants to; reports from Lebanon say 17 people, many of them civilians, were killed.
Indeed, while Lebanon's civilians continue to suffer grievously, with some 800 of them thought to have been killed, the physical damage to Israel has been light. Hizbullah rockets have so far killed 18 civilians, while 35-plus Israeli troops have died during the ground offensive.
But Israelis' sensitivity to attack, and their media's intense focus on each and every soldier killed, has strong political and psychological effects. Drowning out the grumblings about poor military planning are charges that Israel should never have left south Lebanon, which freed Hizbullah to build itself up in the first place.
Hitting back too hard?
More plausibly, some think this war could have been pre-empted. Giora Eiland, until recently Israel's national security adviser, recalls that when Syria pulled its forces out of Lebanon in 2005, fulfilling their part of UN Resolution 1559 and so removing one of Hizbullah's props, he advised seizing the moment with a deal similar to the one being discussed now. Israel would free its Lebanese prisoners and hand Lebanon the Shebaa Farms, thus robbing Hizbullah of its two main reasons for attack, in return for Hizbullah's disarmament.
Many doubt this will work now. First, the death toll in Lebanon has turned world, and especially Arab, opinion so strongly against Israel that it is much harder now to force Hizbullah to disarm. Second, however far Israel has pushed Hizbullah back by the time the war ends is where it will probably stay; no multinational or Lebanese force is likely to do more than maintain the status quo. Third, Israel's army must stay in place until the other force arrives, making itself vulnerable to attacks (and more kidnaps) and earning ever more Arab enmity. Fourth, once Israel is gone, Hizbullah cells may well creep back into their old territory unless the monitoring forces are unusually vigilant—and willing to fight them. Fifth, these forces will have to patrol the border too, to keep weapons out, and even the best-kept borders are notoriously porous.
Finally, asks Efraim Halevy, a former head of Mossad, Israel's foreign intelligence agency, what if Hizbullah attacks the multinational force, as it did with car-bombs in 1983, killing 301 American and French troops? The gruesome cycle of repeated history would simply turn again.
Best of all, from Israel's point of view, would be to remove Hizbullah's external support. Udi Sagi, a former general who once headed negotiations with Syria, this week publicly argued that now is the time to restart negotiations with Syria over the Golan Heights, which Israel occupied in 1967. Given the limitations of the Lebanese army and any foreign force, peace with Syria, which is thought to supply some of Hizbullah's weapons and to provide a conduit from Iran, may be the only reliable way to stop Hizbullah rearming. But for now, peace talks are not on offer.
