THE WAR HEZBOLLAH COULDN'T LOSE- AND MIGHT

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Last update - 19:21 11/08/2006


ANALYSIS: The war Hezbollah couldn't lose - and might

By Bradley Burston

On paper, Hezbollah couldn't lose.

It went into the war as the best equipped guerrilla force in history, with sophisticated laser-guided anti-tank missile weaponry, with bunkers built with reinforced concrete walls four meters (12 feet) thick, with more than 13,000 rockets, a launcher for every eight of them, command and control networks built with Iranian advice and Iranian advisors, and a string of forifications, some of them originally built by Israel, up to the very edge of Israel's northern border

Hezbollah, above all, went into the war with Israel asleep on that border, woefully unprepared for a war it saw as inevitable but somehow not imminent. Israel went into the war still believing that it had withdrawn from all Lebanese territory six years before - just because the world said so - and that that would make a difference.



Israel went into the war exhausted and also over-confident from six years of war in the territories. Israel went into the war with an army torn to pieces for months by the psychological warfare of the pullout from Gaza and a part of the West Bank.

Israel entered the war with a prime minister better suited to the Ministry of Trade, a defense minister better suited to the Ministry of Welfare, an army chief of staff unversed in ground warfare, and a sophisticated anti-missile system completely useless when it came to Katyushas.

Israel went into the war with a government prepared to fight the last war down to the last mistake. It began the war shielding IDF soldiers at the expense of Lebanese civilians and its own citizens, holding back an army whose only real strength is charging full-out forward, bombing and shelling residential blocks and roads, receiving rockets in return without having adequately prepared shelters and air raid sirens at home.

It went into the war with Military Intelligence, the Shin Bet and the Mossad focused for years at different "resolutions," that is, locked on to foiling Palestinian terrorist attacks within Israeli cities, trying to halt makeshift Qassam rocket attacks from Gaza, and monitoring the long-range missile threat from Iran.

It went into the war with the IDF believing that it was facing a force of some 2,000-3,000 Hezbollah men under arms in the area of south Lebanon up to the Litani river. In fact, there was a well-trained cadre organized into two brigades, with a total of at least 8,000.

It went into the war lacking enough flak jackets for its reservists, enough proper helmets, enough food, even enough water.

But that was only the beginning of the miscalculation.

There were the unstated terms of victory. If Nasrallah managed to stay alive, Hezbollah won.

If Hezbollah managed to fire rockets into Israel while under attack - regardless of the moral issues of specifically and explicitly targeting civilian populations [which, if Israel did so, the Arab world and its gleeful Galloways immediately trumpeted as a war crime on par with the atrocities of the Nazis] - the Islamic militia was hailed for its resilience, its resourcefulness, its coolness under the fire of one of the world's best equipped and best prepared armed forces.

If Israel, fearing the domestic political backlash of heavy IDF casualties in a ground war, ordered air power and artillery to pound civilian infrastructure and residential areas suspected of serving as Hezbollah launch sites and hideouts, and if this caused shocking numbers of civilian casualties, then Lebanese of all stripes, and the Muslim world in general - even those who cannot stomach them at other times - lined up in support of Hezbollah as the moral victor and sole savior of the beleaguered, defenseless Lebanon.

Sure enough, the Olmert government went into the war the way the Barak government had gone into the intifada. It was Ehud Barak's helter-skelter overnight withdrawal from south Lebanon in May, 2000, that put Hassan Nasrallah in the path to becoming the Gamal Abdel Nasser in robes of his age.

In fact, you can date this war from May 26, 2000, when Nasrallah took the podium at a victory rally in Bint Jbail, celebrating, and taking a deep bow for, the IDF retreat.

"My dear brothers," Nasrallah announced to the Arab world, in a statement which would become one of the ideological underpinnings of the intifada which would erupt four months later, "Israel, though it has nuclear weapons, is a weak as a spider's web."

The assumption was clear. In ending its 18 year occupation of the south Lebanon security zone, Israel had folded and run as a result of the deaths of an average of 25 soldiers a year. The society was decadent, corruptly secular, uncommitted to struggle, vulnerable to a victory - and ultimate eradication - at the hands of radical Islam.

The sense of destiny and triumph has been strengthened over the years by the jihadist media savvy pioneered by Hezbollah field videographers, post-production technicians, and the broadcasters of its well-financed, well-run private television station.

So galvanizing has Hezbollah's military effort been, that Al Qaida's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri - who once condemned Shi'ites as worse than the Jews - recorded a video late last month in which he exhorted all Muslims to back the fight against Israel.

So how could Hezbollah lose?

They still might. And not only because its gunners have yet to make good on Nasrallah's probably ill-advised (and reminiscent of Israeli blunders) vow to send missiles crashing into Tel Aviv.

The answer lies in the nature of the cease-fire now under debate at the United Nations and across the Arab world. The answer lies, no less, in the one phenomenon that Israelis planners could not have foreseen, and which they are still at a loss to explain:

The world's silence.

For all the name-calling and hand-wringing - much of it perfectly valid, others drearily, predictably one-sided - Israel has been for a solid month operating under no real international pressure.

The reason this time may have little to do with Israel, and everything to do with Iran.

The world is scared of Hezbollah. Because the whole world is scared of Iran. Especially large swaths of the Arab world.

If, for the first time, Hezbollah is forced by international pressure to pull back its fighters in favor of the Lebanese army and a multi-national force, even at the cost of a large prisoner exchange.

"In the past we used to oppose or not agree on deployment of the army at the borders," the Hezbollah leader said this week, spending a large part of a televised speech deflecting what he called criticism of his policies, apparently from fellow Lebanese. Now, he said, "we agree on deployment of the army."

When this war is over and Israel's troops are gone from Lebanon, and when the rage at Israel begins to subside, it will be Nasrallah's turn - like Nasser's four decades ago - to answer to fellow Arabs for his actions.

In the service of Iran, a rebuilt Lebanon is again a ruin. In the service of Iran, flying bombs launched from Lebanon have killed a significant number of Arabs in Israel, many of them children.

When that happens, it won't be good enough for Nasrallah to point to his statements this week when he said, 3,000 Hezbollah missiles into the war:

"I have a special message to the Arabs of Haifa, to your martyrs and to your wounded. I call on you to leave this city. I hope you do this."

"Please leave so we don't shed your blood, which is our blood."