A US/Israeli debacle in the Middle East

Although it initially tried to portray its war against Lebanon as a limited response to the abduction of two of its soldiers, Israel's subsequent expansion of its war aim to that of 'crushing' Hezbollah revealed a bigger gameplan: the realisation of the US vision of a 'new Middle East'. The fierce resistance put up by Hezbollah to the Israeli offensive has however put paid to this latest attempt to restructure the Middle East to conform to Israel's strategic needs and ensure US domination. 

T Rajamoorthy

'PILOT as policeman, bomb as baton - this thought was developed early by R.P. Hearne in Airships in Peace and War (1910). Punitive expeditions are costly and time-consuming. But punishment from the air can be carried out immediately and at a much lower cost.

'In savage lands the moral effect of such an instrument of war is impossible to conceive, writes Hearne. The appearance of the airship would strike terror into the tribes. And in addition, one could avoid the awful waste of life occasioned to white troops by expeditionary work.'1

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'What are the rules for this kind of cricket? asked the newly appointed chief for India's Northwest Province, Sir John Maffrey. The air force headquarters for India answered that international law did not apply against savage tribes who do not conform to codes of civilised warfare.'2

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According to the Old Testament, when the ancient Israelites attacked Canaan, God held back the sun to enable them to finish the job. It would appear that the US, which often plays the role of God in modern times, has been performing the same service for Israel in the Jewish state's latest war in the Middle East.
While Israel was continuing its merciless aerial onslaught against Lebanon, the US held back all efforts by the international community at the UN to realise a ceasefire.
The pretence that the US was interested in a 'durable ceasefire' was merely a fig-leaf to cover its naked attempt to give Israel more time 'to finish the job'.
The 'job' in this instance was to lay the groundwork for the US vision of a 'new Middle East'. The slaughter of innocents and their anguished cries were, it was to be inferred from the words of US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, merely the 'birth pangs of a new Middle East'.
Although Israel initially sought to justify its invasion of Lebanon as an attempt to secure the release of two Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah after a raid across the border, it has now become clear that this was a mere pretext. The war it launched was a premeditated one. It had been planned for months and the Bush administration had been 'closely involved' in its planning.3 
While some commentators (e.g., Seymour Hersh, Gareth Porter) have focused on the importance of the war for the US as a prelude to its own potential future war on Iran, it is important not to overlook the fact that a successful Israeli offensive against Hezbollah was expected to bring more immediate benefits to the US in its quest to consolidate its domination of the region.
If for Israel the war against Hezbollah was in the first instance a continuation of its colonial war to subjugate the Palestinians, the political restructuring of the region in its wake was expected not only to meet Israel's strategic needs as the regional policeman, but also to remove another impediment to the consolidation of the US informal empire in the Middle East.
Significantly, the push by the US to consolidate its power and influence in the region took place at a time when Egyptians were commemorating the 50th anniversary of the nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Gamal Nasser - an event which marked the challenge to Western domination by the ideology of Arab nationalism which he embodied. The response to this nationalisation by Britain (a shareholder in the private company running the canal) and France, an invasion of Egypt - after using Israel as their cat's-paw to engender a crisis - sealed the fate of these old imperial powers in this region. The mantle of Western imperial power was now to be assumed by the US, which had not been privy to the Suez (mis)adventure.
In 1958 - 'a revolutionary year'4 - the fault lines in the region were clearly exposed when the monarchies of Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia and Lebanon under the pro-Western regime of President Camille Chamoun openly allied themselves with the US. An attempt by President Nasser to consolidate the influence of Arab nationalism through a union of Egypt and Syria to form the United Arab Republic in February was promptly met with a Western counter-move in the form of a union of Iraq and Jordan to form the Arab Union. However, when in May anti-government riots and insurrection broke out in Lebanon and in July the Iraqi monarchy was overthrown, the whole edifice of Western dominance appeared to crumble. In a desperate move to hold the line, the US had to dispatch Marines to Lebanon and the British troops to Jordan to shore up their client regimes.
If the year 1958 was the apogee of Arab nationalism, 1967, when the Arabs suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of Israel, marked the beginning of its decline. The death of Nasser three years later and the advent of a pro-Western regime in Egypt were important markers in the waning of this ideology. The resulting void in the Middle East was increasingly filled by the forces of radical Islam, best epitomised by the emergence of an Islamic regime in Tehran in 1979 and of the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah a few years later.
The process of the decline of Arab nationalism was further accelerated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, to which many of these regimes were allied. In the absence of a countervailing power, many Arab nationalist regimes sought to come to terms with the US. The need for such accommodation became more pressing when the second Bush administration embraced the vision set out by the neo-conservatives in their 'Project for the New American Century'. It was clear that in the New World Order it envisions, there was to be no tolerance of any resistance to US power and influence.

Israel's strategic concerns

But while the US has been prepared to accept such overtures from some Middle Eastern regimes, it has opted for regime change in others. To a large degree, this choice between these alternatives has been dictated by Israel's strategic concerns. The fact that the group of neo-cons behind the 'Project for the New American Century' viewed Israel as the lynchpin in the remaking of the Middle East explains the basis for such decisions.
The differing responses by the US to overtures from Libya on the one hand and those from Syria on the other illustrate the centrality of these strategic concerns. While both Syria and Libya have been accused of 'terrorism', Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi's overtures to the US have been fully reciprocated while Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's overtures have been spurned. This decision cannot be explained merely by the fact that Libya has been prepared to cooperate with the US in the 'war against terror'. Syria has also offered and has, in fact, provided such cooperation. If Libya has been accepted back in the fold, it is because unlike Syria, it is not perceived as being a regional player with the potential to challenge Israel.
The fact is that Syria has exercised a strong influence on the politics of Lebanon and, until quite recently, had a strong military presence in that state. Israel however regards Lebanon as of vital strategic interest to it and has long entertained hopes of turning Lebanon into a friendly client state which will provide it with the necessary 'security'. As far back as 1948, then Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion expressed the view that 'the weak link in the Arab coalition is Lebanon. The Muslim rule is artificial and easy to undermine. A Christian state must be established, whose southern border will be the Litani [River]. We will sign a treaty with it'.5 
Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon was precisely designed to achieve this purpose. However, the whole military adventure ended in disaster and Israel was forced to beat an ignominious retreat some 18 years later. The project to play off the Christian Maronites against the Muslims in Lebanon failed and resulted in a greater sense of national unity between the two communities.
Interestingly enough, it was this invasion that gave birth to Hezbollah, which successfully spearheaded the resistance to the Israeli occupation. The perceived influence of Syria over Hezbollah, a movement labelled as 'terrorist' by the US and Israel, has been used by Israel's supporters to reinforce the case that Syria is a threat to Israel's security. It is for this reason, rather than concerns about US security as such, that Bush opted for regime change in Syria.
It must be pointed out that this policy of uncompromising hostility to Syria is peculiar to the current Bush administration. Previous US administrations, including that of the senior Bush and that of Ronald Reagan, accepted the regional importance of Syria, particularly with regard to Lebanon. Key US officials from previous administrations, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Adviser to President Carter, have recently criticised this major policy change and called for a reversion to the time-honoured US practice of bringing in Syria to resolve such crises. These officials have been concerned with putting US interests first, rather than allowing the Israel lobby which currently holds sway in the corridors of power in Washington to dictate US foreign policy.
In their recent analysis of 'The Israel Lobby', John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt have explained how Israel and its lobby pushed regime change in Syria onto the US foreign policy agenda:
'Once Baghdad fell in mid-April 2003, [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon and his lieutenants began urging Washington to target Damascus... Prominent members of the [Israel] Lobby made the same arguments. [US Deputy Defence Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz declared that there has got to be regime change in Syria...'
These moves were accompanied by a shrill media campaign to prepare public opinion for the necessary action against Syria. In the US Congress, the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act drafted 'by some of Israel's best friends' was signed into law in December 2003. The Act threatened sanctions against Syria if it did not withdraw its troops from Lebanon and stop supporting 'terrorism' (i.e., Hezbollah).
From the White House, it was only a short step to the UN. In September 2004, the US, with France as a co-sponsor, managed to push through the UN Security Council a resolution which called on Syria to withdraw its troops from Lebanon and stop intervening in the Lebanese political process. It also demanded all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias to disarm and disband - a move clearly directed against Hezbollah.
The assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in February 2005 provided the catalyst to push through the implementation of Resolution 1559 with regard to the presence of Syrian troops in Lebanon. The 'Cedar Revolution', modelled on the 'Orange Revolution' in Ukraine and fully backed by the US and the West, brought together most of the anti-Syrian political parties and groups under one umbrella to echo the call for the Syrian troops to leave. Syria duly complied with Resolution 1559 and pulled her troops out in April 2005.
The US and the West then began to cultivate close relations with the new 'free and independent and sovereign Lebanon'. As if to signal the crucial importance of Lebanon, in April this year, President Bush invited Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, who had come to power with full US backing after Syria's withdrawal, to the White House. At a press conference at the South Lawn Bush made a public pledge of support for the new administration. A visibly moved Siniora, after effusively thanking his host, was stirred to respond with the following declaration of faith: 'I am really convinced that President Bush and the United States will stand beside Lebanon to have Lebanon stay as a free, democratic, united and sovereign state'. Three months later, with Israeli warplanes raining down US-made bombs and Israeli tanks rolling into south Lebanon (all with US support), it would become clear to this poor soul how much the US cared about Lebanon or its sovereignty.
With Syria out of Lebanon, the heat was now on Hezbollah to comply with Resolution 1559 by disbanding its militia. With Syria and Iran under diplomatic isolation and facing the potential threat of sanctions (Iran for her failure to comply with International Atomic Energy Agency resolutions to stop its uranium enrichment programme, Syria for the regime's alleged involvement in the Hariri assassination), the disbanding of Hezbollah's militia would remove an important challenge to US dominance in the region. So far as Israel was concerned, only Hezbollah stood in the way of a restructuring of Lebanon to conform to its strategic needs.
But for those concerned with Lebanon's existence as an independent state, the disbandment of Hezbollah's militia would leave the country vulnerable to pressures from Israel. With a weak national army and with no countervailing power to offset the influence of the strongest military power in the Middle East, Lebanon would be reduced to an Israeli satellite.
Nevertheless, despite the difficulties, just before the current crisis, Hezbollah was engaged in discussions with the Lebanese government on the integration of its forces within a national framework.
However, the Israelis (and the US) obviously decided to use the pretext offered by Hezbollah's abduction of the two Israeli soldiers to 'destroy' Hezbollah once and for all and thereby further reduce the regional influence of its backers, Syria and Iran. Hence, after initially claiming that its objective was to secure the release of the abducted soldiers, Israel subsequently proclaimed that the goal of the war was to implement UN Resolution 1559.
It is now clear, though, that Israel miscalculated the capacity of Hezbollah to resist. Despite the enormous firepower it unleashed, it was not able to crush the resistance. On the contrary, Hezbollah displayed incredible resilience and an astonishing capacity to strike back.
A feature of the war was the extent to which Israel relied on air power. The reason for this preference was simply that it would be less costly for itself in terms of casualties. In making this choice, Israel was reinforced by its own bitter experience in the 1982 invasion of Lebanon when its ground troops took unacceptably large losses.
An equally striking thing about this air war was the fact that it was mainly directed against civilians and civilian infrastructure.
It has been suggested that Israel resorted to such attacks in frustration after its failure to successfully target the elusive Hezbollah guerillas. This is not correct as it is clear that Israel resorted to the bombing of civilians from the very inception of the war so that by the third day the number of Lebanese civilian casualties had reached the figure of 100. 
It is not difficult to discern the aim of such attacks: to instil fear and terror among the Lebanese people at large and to impress upon them the military might and capacity of Israel to wreak havoc. Apart from its 'deterrent effect', such bombing was also calculated to sow disaffection against the Shiite Hezbollah, especially among the Christian and Sunni population.
The bestiality and barbarity of such air campaigns can only be sustained if there is an underlying racist conviction that the victims are somehow or other less deserving of human compassion than those who are inflicting it on them. Israeli premier Ehud Olmert's comment that 'the lives and well-being of Sderot's [a town in southern Israel] residents are more important than those of Gaza residents' and Major General Aharon Ze'evi's statement that 'Better Palestinian mothers should cry and not Jewish mothers' encapsulate this underlying racism in Israeli society that helped to justify and sustain their resort to barbarism.
In such a climate of racism, any suggestion (e.g., the warning by UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Louise Arbour) that Israel may be guilty of war crimes could be easily brushed aside. Whatever the ostensible defence for Israel's conduct, the real unstated justification was that the laws of war do not apply to lesser beings such as Arabs and Palestinians.
The resort to such tactics can be better appreciated if one bears in mind Maxime Rodinson's characterisation of Israel as 'a colonial-settler state'. As he wrote in his analysis of the character of the Jewish state, 'the creation of the State of Israel on Palestinian soil is the culmination of a process that fits perfectly into the great European-American movement of expansion in the 19th and 20th centuries whose aim was to settle new inhabitants among other peoples or to dominate them economically and politically.'6  

Colonial warfare

The use of aerial bombing to terrorise civilians has a long pedigree. In his A History of Bombing, Sven Lindqvist reminds us that aerial bombing was first developed, experimented and perfected in colonial wars waged by Western colonial powers before it became a feature of modern warfare. The French, pioneers of this form of 'colonial warfare' when they bombed villages, markets and grazing herds to crush resistance in Morocco in 1912, even invented a special airplane called 'Type Colonial' where their pilots could sit in the shade with plenty of space to shoot the indigenes in comfort. Israel's use of aerial bombing to terrorise civilians is in keeping with this time-honoured colonial tradition.
Not only was aerial bombing viewed as useful in terrorising civilians, but it was viewed by some as even decisive in winning colonial wars. This was certainly the view of the British Squadron chief, Arthur Harris, who was involved in the 1919 bombing of Dacca, Jalalabad and Kabul during the Third Afghan War. According to Harris (later known as 'Bomber Harris' after his notorious fire-bombing of Dresden in the Second World War), this war was won by a 10-kilo strike on the Afghan king's palace. Significantly, Israeli pilots, reflecting a similar faith in the decisive role of such weapons in war, resorted to dropping 500lb bombs on alleged Hezbollah bunkers in Lebanon, evidently believing that this would clinch an early victory.
However, this whole strategy clearly did not work. 'Bunker-busting' bombs did not succeed in crushing Hezbollah. The terrorising of civilians only resulted in pushing more people to support Hezbollah and stiffening the resistance. 
A colonial war is premised on the belief that a coloniser can hold on to the colonised territory only as long as the colonised people live in awe and fear of its military power and its capacity to inflict unacceptable punishment. The moment this mystique of colonial invincibility is broken, the whole edifice of imperial power will begin to totter. 
For Israel, the need to 'crush' Hezbollah was an imperative not only to create a strategic buffer state in Lebanon, but also to send a resounding message to the Palestinians that resistance is futile. Israel was fully aware that any success achieved by Hezbollah would only serve to embolden the Palestinians. As a 'colonial-settler state', Israel had to emerge victorious if it was to keep the Palestinians under subjugation.
However, after about a month of relentless bombing and the deployment of more than 10,000 ground troops (later increased to 30,000), the prospect of 'crushing' Hezbollah evaporated as Hezbollah's resistance showed no sign of flagging. As a result, Israel was forced to change its goal to a more modest one: to 'severely compromise' Hezbollah's ability to fight Israel inside Lebanon. But even this limited goal began to slip away as Hezbollah demonstrated more dramatically than ever its capacity to hit back at will with unlimited volleys of Katyusha rockets.
In the end, with even this limited goal eluding it, Israel had to fall back upon a favourable diplomatic conclusion to this conflict to create a perception of victory.
In this respect, the original US-French draft resolution at the UN Security Council for a 'cessation of hostilities' appeared to be a godsend. It was so blatantly biased in favour of Israel that journalist Robert Fisk was compelled to comment that the draft 'showed just who is running Washington's Middle East policy: Israel'7 (for a critical analysis of this draft resolution, see the article by Phyllis Bennis in this issue).
Why France, which originally opposed many of the inequitable provisions of the draft, accepted them is still a mystery. It is inconceivable that France would have taken such a step without ascertaining from its friends in the Lebanese administration that the draft could be forced through the cabinet. Is it possible that these elements hoped to use the continued presence of Israel - the draft did not require Israel to withdraw from Lebanese soil - as a means of bringing public pressure to bear on Hezbollah to take steps to disarm?
This suspicion is strengthened by the comments of the US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton, who, when questioned at a press conference about the concerns of the Lebanese government, hinted that he had sounded out its views - from presumably these same elements.
But what these high and mighty people had failed to reckon with was the force of the swelling tide of public opinion and anger in the Arab world.
The growing anger against Israeli aggression and US collusion has resulted in a groundswell of sympathy and support for Hezbollah across the Arab world. More significantly, this mounting bitterness has translated into anger against Arab governments which are viewed as impotent and servile to the US.
In the face of this explosion of public fury, Arab governments were forced to act. Even Western client states such as Saudi Arabia and Jordan which were initially critical of Hezbollah were compelled to display support for the Lebanese people and express opposition to the proposed US-French draft.
The result was that a high-level delegation of the Arab League which went to New York on 8 August after an Arab Foreign Ministers meeting in Beirut was pushed to express its strongest opposition to the draft. In the ordinary course of things, such a delegation would have got a polite hearing but nothing more. But the delegation evidently managed to communicate to the French and other members of the Security Council the extent of public anger in the Middle East and the potential for real instability in the region.
Fearful of losing their influence in the Middle East, especially in Lebanon, the French agreed to reopen the draft for further amendments.
The most glaring defect in the original draft was that it failed to provide for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon. The text (UN Security Council Resolution 1701) has now been rectified to require Israel 'to withdraw all of its forces from southern Lebanon' in parallel with the deployment of Lebanese government forces and an expanded UNIFIL (UN peacekeepers) force in that area. While the stated objective of this deployment is to ensure that 'there will be no weapons without the consent of the government of Lebanon and no authority other than that of the government of Lebanon', there is no specific provision for this force to undertake the disarmament of Hezbollah. It has been left to the UN Secretary-General to work out, after consultation with the governments of Lebanon and Israel, proposals for such disarmament - proposals which are to be presented to the UN Security Council within 30 days.
For Israel, the acceptance of this revision is a humiliating climbdown. From the beginning, it was strongly opposed to this sort of arrangement as it felt that both the Lebanese army and UNIFIL were too weak to undertake the task. The Israelis had demanded the deployment, under a robust Chapter VII mandate, of troops from NATO member states, which they hoped would not only police south Lebanon but also actually undertake the task of disarming Hezbollah! 
The fact that the disarming of Hezbollah is now to be undertaken in accordance with proposals to be framed by the UN Secretary-General after consultation with, inter alia, the Lebanese government makes it almost inevitable that the process will not take the violent form the Israelis had been hoping for. The Lebanese government has made it clear that it is only prepared to realise this aim through the same process of negotiation and consultation with Hezbollah which it had been engaged in before Israel's invasion. In this, they have the full support of the French, who have made it clear that they see such disarmament as a political process, not a military one.
In the end, Israel failed to even secure a commitment in the ceasefire resolution that its two abducted soldiers would be released. According to a report in the London Times8, Israel has been secretly negotiating (through the good offices of a German diplomat) their return in exchange for three Lebanese prisoners in Israeli jails - something it vowed never to do from the beginning of the crisis!
In a word, the war has been an unmitigated disaster for Israel and its crusade to realise the US vision of a 'new Middle East'.		

T Rajamoorthy, a senior member of the Malaysian Bar, is one of the Editors of Third World Resurgence.

Endnotes

1. 	Sven Lindqvist (2001), A History of Bombing, London: Granta, section 74.
2. 	Ibid., section 106.
3. 	Seymour M Hersh, 'Watching Lebanon', The New Yorker, 21 August 2006.
4. 	Wm Roger Louis and Roger Owen (eds.) (2002), A Revolutionary Year: The Middle East in 1958, London and New York: IB Tauris, Washington DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press.
5. 	Benny Morris (2001), Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881-2001, New York: Vintage, p. 497.
6. 	Maxime Rodinson (1973), Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?, New York: Monad Press, p. 91.
7. 	Robert Fisk, 'This draft shows who is running America's policy ... Israel', The Independent, 7 August 2006.
8.	'Ceasefire holds as both sides claim Lebanon success', The Times, 15 August 2006.