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Jewish World Review Oct. 10, 2008 / 11 Tishrei 5769 Lebanon on the brink — and why it matters By Caroline B. Glick
Following Lebanese President Michel Suleiman's visit to Washington last
month, this past week Assistant Deputy Secretary of State David Hale and
Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense Mary Beth Long visited Beirut. Hale
met with political leaders and Long presided over the first meeting of the
newly formed US-Lebanese joint military committee. The purpose of the
committee is to train and arm the Lebanese army. To this end, the US
announced it will be providing the Lebanese military with $63 million in new
equipment that includes ammunition, trucks, humvees, mobile communications
systems and Cobra attack helicopters.
In an interview with LBC television network, Hale stated that the US policy
of supporting the Lebanese military was likely to remain unchanged after the
US Presidential elections in November. In his words, "There will be
continuity in our policy to Lebanon… Republicans and Democrats both support
Lebanon and I am confident that there is a baseline of support for US policy
in Lebanon."
As for Israel, last Friday OC Northern Command Maj.-Gen. Gadi Eisenkot said
that Israel's strategy for defeating Hizbullah in the next war remains what
it was in the last war. Israel will seek to destroy Hizbullah by bombing it
from the air. According to Eisenkot, the difference between Israel's
campaign in 2006 and a future one is that next time the bombing will be more
comprehensive. Given Hizbullah's domination of the Lebanese government,
Israel no longer needs to be concerned about protecting a pro-Western
government in Beirut. Speaking to Yediot Ahronot Eisenkot asserted, "Today
there is no distinction [between Hizbullah and the Lebanese government] and
there is no dilemma. The operational significance of this is that the
Lebanese government is responsible for all the activities carried out within
its borders."
Eisenkot's statements echo remarks made by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in
August. During a visit to the Home Front Command Olmert said, "If Lebanon
becomes a Hizbullah state, then we won't have any restrictions in… regard
[to hitting government targets]."
One of the common features of both countries' policies towards Lebanon is
their utter neglect of the lessons of previous American and Israeli failures
in the country.
The 1983 US peacekeeping mission in Beirut is rightly considered one of the
gravest failures in US military history. The stated aim of the deployment of
US Marines was to help the Lebanese army assert control over the capital
city and then expand its control to the suburbs of Beirut and gradually over
the entire country.
The mission was to be accomplished by separating the IDF, the Christian,
Druse, Shiite and Sunni militias and the Syrian military forces from one
another. Political pressure from Washington did succeed in compelling Israel
to withdraw its forces from the city. But very quickly, the US Marines on
the ground realized that they were in a full-scale war and that there was no
way they could accomplish the aims of the mission with the tools they had at
their disposal as a peacekeeping force.
After IDF forces left Beirut, the Marines found themselves under attack from
the same Syrian forces and Druse, Shiite and Sunni militias that had been
fighting the IDF. The Christian militias, for their part, also treated the
Marines the same way they treated the IDF. They used Marine positions as
cover as they shelled the Druse, the Shiites and the Sunnis. The Lebanese
military - weak, incompetent, corrupt, and riven by the same sectarian
enmities that fuelled the war - was both unable and unwilling to take the
military steps necessary to assert control over the city even with Marine
assistance.
Once the futility of its strategy became clear, the Reagan administration
had two options. The Americans could pull out of Beirut and support an
Israeli expansion of the war to Syria and so remove the primary source of
the conflict. Or, they could redefine their objective to reflect reality and
order the Marines to attack Syrian positions and Syrian and Iranian-backed
militias and so set the conditions that in the fullness of time might allow
the Lebanese government to assert political and military control over the
country.
Yet rather than reconfigure its strategy and its strategic aims to accord
with conditions on the ground, Washington opted to ignore what was
happening. The Marines did not receive permission to take the fight to its
source, to support Israel, or even to protect themselves from the war they
found themselves in the middle of.
Thus the stage was set for the attack against the Marine barracks at the
Beirut airport. On October 23, 1983, an Iranian and Syrian-backed Hizbullah
cell attacked the unprotected Marine barracks with a massive car bomb. Two
hundred forty-one Marines were killed. Humiliated, the US pulled out of
Beirut with its tail between its legs. The message that it was possible to
defeat America reverberated throughout the region.
The lesson of the US experience in Lebanon was clear: You cannot assume that
favored actors are trustworthy or competent allies just because it is
politically expedient to believe they are. Reality is what it is, and if you
wish to change it, you first must acknowledge it.
Israel's 2006 war against Hizbullah in Lebanon is rightly considered the
gravest failure in Israeli military history. After Hizbullah assaulted
Israel on July 12, Israel announced its intention to destroy Hizbullah as a
fighting force. It further announced that to ensure that Hizbullah would not
threaten Israel again, Israel would demand that the Lebanese army deploy
along the border with Israel after the war to prevent Hizbullah from
reasserting its control over South Lebanon.
The IDF General Staff and the Olmert-Livni-Peretz government opted to
accomplish these aims by bombing Hizbullah bases, command and control
centers and missile arsenals from the air. Within the first three days of
the war, this strategy successfully flattened the group's stronghold in
Beirut's Dahiyeh neighborhood. It also destroyed Hizbullah's long-range
missile arsenal. But these successes failed to impact Hizbullah's ability to
wage war.
Hizbullah's commanders continued to operate. Its units continued to launch
missiles and rockets against Israeli territory. Iran and Syria continued to
supply the group with arms and personnel. As for the Lebanese military whose
forces were supposed to be part of the long-term solution, far from opposing
Hizbullah, its forces actively assisted Hizbullah in targeting Israeli
cities and military targets throughout the war.
Due to Hizbullah's resilience in the face of the air campaign, it quickly
became apparent that Israel's strategy needed to be replaced. To defeat
Hizbullah, Israel needed to adopt a maneuver strategy that tasked ground
forces with invading and conquering South Lebanon. To affect the long-term
demise of the Iranian-controlled and Syrian-assisted group, Israel also
needed to bomb Hizbullah-related targets in Syria. Such attacks would deter
Iran and Syria from employing Hizbullah as their foreign legion in Lebanon
in the future. Only after Iran and Syria had been deterred and Hizbullah had
been defeated on the ground could the Lebanese military begin to act as a
controlling authority in the south.
But when presented with this reality, Israel's political and military
leaders refused to countenance it. They clung to the notion that airpower
and Lebanese military deployment to the South could serve as the primary
components of a winning strategy. Tipping their hats to the public outcry
provoked by the strategy's self-evident failure, they embellished it by
adding a limited ground component to the operational plan.
But since the strategy remained one based on airpower, maneuver units were
provided with no clear operational objectives. With no relevant strategic
frame of reference to guide them, the General Staff commanders couldn't
determine how to use the ground forces. And so they were deployed
willy-nilly to battles that served no operational purpose.
The failure of the country's strategic leadership to base their strategy on
reality caused Israel to fail to achieve its stated objectives in the war.
And Israel's failure constituted a massive victory for Hizbullah and its
state sponsors. With the passive support of the Lebanese military, in May
Hizbullah staged a coup that won it effective control over the Lebanese
government. And with the passive support of the Lebanese military, Hizbullah
has rearmed and reasserted full control over South Lebanon.
For its part, unscathed by the 2006 war it effectively controlled with Iran,
Syria now feels confident enough to plan a reinvasion of Lebanon. Today
Syria has 10,000 troops positioned on Lebanon's northern border. Damascus is
openly preparing a pretext for invasion by waging a proxy war in Tripoli
through its Lebanese Salafist militias.
The lessons of Israel's failure in 2006 are clear. First, Hizbullah cannot
be defeated on the ground without invading and conquering South Lebanon.
Second, Hizbullah cannot be defeated without attacking its state sponsors.
Third, the Lebanese military will not fight Hizbullah in Israel's place.
In addition to their reliance on ignoring the lessons of their previous
failures, the current US and Israeli strategies for contending with Lebanon
also share an outsized estimation of the relevance of the Lebanese
government. Specifically, both policies wrongly view the Government of
Lebanon as a relevant force in the country. They diverge only on how they
relate to the government. The US believes that the Lebanese government is a
credible ally. Israel on the other hand sees the Hizbullah-dominated
government as its enemy.
There is ample evidence supporting both positions. But the basic reality
that both Washington and Jerusalem ignore is that whether it is a friend or
a foe, the Lebanese government today - as it was in 1983 and indeed since
the PLO fomented the Lebanese civil war in 1975 - is completely
inconsequential. Some elements of its military are pro-Western. Overall,
both during the 2006 war and during Hizbullah's coup in May, the Lebanese
military has facilitated Hizbullah's operations. Its former commander Michel
Suleiman owes his position as President of Lebanon to the support he enjoys
from Hizbullah and Syria. And regardless of its commanders' political views,
the fact of the matter is that the Lebanese army is incapable of
establishing and enforcing the authority of the central government over the
country. Moreover, since May, Lebanon's central government exists at the
pleasure and in the service of Hizbullah.
So both Israel and the US are now embracing policies that are founded on
false readings of the facts on the ground and on a refusal to countenance
the lessons of their past failures. As a consequence, both countries have
adopted policies that are doomed to fail. Moreover, their divergent
assessments of the Lebanese government place them on a collision course that
can threaten their alliance.
In light of all of this, Hizbullah, Syria and Iran have good reason to be
happy. When the next war erupts, rather than fighting them, their two
greatest foes may well spend their time and energy fighting each other.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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