The Israeli Trap
By Donald Devine

The Yom Kipper War attack against Israel by modern Egyptian and Syrian armies in 1973 was defeated by it in 20 days. The current Israeli incursion into Lebanon to punish a few thousand member Hezbollah militia with mostly aging arms for kidnapping two of its soldiers has lasted 27 days--with little to show for its effort.

Osama bin Laden planned it that way. Israel has fallen into the same trap as the United States in Iraq. As Lawrence Wright puts it in his new book, The Looming Tower, bin Laden’s explicit “strategy was to continually attack until the U.S. forces invaded; then the mujahadeen would swarm upon them and bleed them until the entire American empire fell from its wounds.” The Israeli cabinet is meeting today to revise strategy in the face of the unexpectedly strong Hezbollah guerilla resistance.

The United States and Israel are a long way from falling but it is always bad strategy to trip into an enemy ambush. Hindsight is 20/20 but it was all too predictable. In these days of universal availability of information over the Internet, the poor prognosticator cannot escape his own words. After supporting the Afghanistan operation in late 2001 because Afghan ground troops were to be used to defeat al-Qaeda and Taliban forces with only limited reliance upon American special forces and air power, your editor warned transforming the whole Middle East would be very different ("Unfriendly Turf for Democracy," Washington Times, November 20, 2002):

“The conservatives who set a ‘pluralistic, Western-oriented Iraq’ and a democratic Mideast as the goal are asking for a neocolonialism that will make the failures in Somalia, Lebanon and Haiti nation-building look like cakewalks. Since Iraq was drawn on the maps of a faraway colonial office in 1921, it has generated dozens of coups, eight Kurdish revolts, nine Shi'ite uprisings and three pogroms, all before Saddam imposed his terrible order on the local factions. He then allied his secular Arab revivalist Ba'athists with the minority Muslim Sunnis and Christian Chaldeans, who feared a united fundamentalism more than Saddam. Revolts since then have killed 100,000 Iraqi Kurds and 30,000 Shi'ites. Playing well with others is not a high priority in old Mesopotamia. While of pluralism there is aplenty, it is not the benign type required for a democracy.”

The column warned before the decision had been made to occupy and democratize Iraq that other powers would become involved too.

“Regional power Iran, with its ruling fundamentalists and Syria with its dictatorship are in many ways worse neighbors than Saddam and poorer candidates for Western freedom. But the neocolonialists want to reform Saudi Arabia into an outpost of democracy too. Come on.”

“Many think an American presence would at least assist ally Israel. A war with Iraq diverts attention from Jerusalem, shifts Arab anger eastward and inserts the American colossus as a stabilizing force into the region during the occupation that would follow a hopefully easy U.S. military victory. The lifting of the burden at the beginning would seem like salvation; but it is difficult also to see how Israel's military self-assurance could last the years required for regional regime change once its citizens (and the terrorists) realized the Americans were the real protectors in the region. Could even its universal military service be sustained, much less its fighting élan? Freedom in the West took centuries. But could a U.S. occupation to build a democracy persevere even 20 years?”

Middle East expert Daniel Pipes—we explored Israel, the West Bank and Golan together in the middle 1980s—mentions in his article in this issue of Conservative Battleline Online the importance of will to Israel’s military success. “By 1993, this record of success imbued Israelis with a sense of overconfidence. They concluded they had won, ignoring the inconvenient fact that Palestinians and other enemies had not yet given up their goal of eliminating Israel. Two emotions long held in check, fatigue and hubris, came flooding out. Deciding that (1) they had enough of war and (2) they could end the war on their own terms, Israelis experimented with such exotica as ‘the peace process’ and ‘disengagement’ . . . In this mish-mash of appeasement and retreat, Israel’s enemies rapidly lost their fears, coming to see Israel as a paper tiger. Or, in the pungent phrasing in 2000 of Hezbollah ‘s leader, Hasan Nasrallah, “Israel, which has both nuclear power and the strongest air force in the region, is weaker than a spider's web.”

Even pro-Israel Wall Street Journal editor Bret Stephens now fears “Israel is losing this war” and that “another blood, tears, toil and sweat speech” by the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is not a real strategy. Time is running out. What are the options? While the usual neocon sources are demanding an extension of the conflict to Hezbollah suppliers Syria and Iran, Olmert has informed the former he will not act against it. If military force against them is ruled out even by the Israelis--backed by Secretary Condoleezza Rice—this is not a serious option.

The “international community,” including Rice, is set on a U.N. Security Council resolution to first limit “offensive” military actions, then set a cease fire and an occupation of the region south of Lebanon’s Litani River by an international force. However, Lebanon’s foreign minister Tarek Mitri responded that Europeans—much less Americans—cannot be part of this force and that Syria and Iran would need to be consulted (as they are already by French and Spanish diplomats). This type of force is obviously insufficient. A 2,000 member U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon already exists and was unable to prevent the present fighting.

The only real alternatives are more Israeli concessions and a more balanced American role as in 1973 or, as Pipes suggests, a serious Israeli hunkering down—together with a lower U.S. profile and dispersion of forces. In either case, it is imperative that American troops not be included in an international force, which President George W. Bush has now wisely ruled out. As Iraq and the earlier U.S. Lebanon mission prove, once U.S. troops turn from soldiers to policemen, they become targets. Washington Post foreign expert David Ignatius, optimistic as usual, hopes that Hezbollah’s apparent success (and even survival is success) will give the man “likely to emerge as the strongest political force in Beirut,” Nasrallah, the confidence to deal with Israel as Anwar Sadat’s partial success in 1973 allowed him to come to terms with Israel.

But Nasrallah is a tough case. As Beirut-based writer Annia Ciezadlo recounts it, early in the morning of September 13, 1997, one 45-year-old woman, two Hezbollah fighters, and six Lebanese soldiers were killed by an Israel air attack in southern Lebanon. One of these was Nasrallah’s 18 year old son, Hadi. The father gave a speech that evening but did not even mention his son until the crowd demanded it. His response was to thank God for choosing a martyr from his family so he could face the other families who had lost children in the struggle. “We are now fighting together and falling as martyrs together," he concluded to wild applause. But the real danger is that he accepts the international force because he knows he can outwait it. One should be careful what one wishes for.

It is clear that radical Islam will remain a security threat. But military occupation has obviously reached its limits in both Iraq and Lebanon. Iraqi president Jalal al-Talibani just made it public that Iraqi forces will take charge of security from U.S. ones in all provinces by the end of 2006, only a year later than U.S. officials told me they were planning back in 2003 when I visited Iraq.

When freed of the burden of occupation, the American military can more effectively maneuver to combat the subtleties of irregular warfare. It has been a tough lesson in foreign affairs reality but the U.S. is set to emerge from a set of miscalculations in the Mideast that with a little luck can make it a more effective participant in the war on terror by setting more limited and achievable goals.

Dr. Devine is the editor of Conservative Battleline Online.