The Next War, Part II

Six years ago, bowing to the United Nations, Israel withdrew from Lebanon. Lebanon’s Israeli border region was then militarized by Iran’s Hezbollah, openly dedicated to Israel’s destruction. For the most part, Hezbollah in Lebanon did not transgress Israel’s border until July 12, the date by which Iran was required to respond to the international diplomatic proposal for resolving the Iranian nuclear issue. On that day, Iran said nothing on the diplomatic package, but Hezbollah launched its simultaneous rocket attack and kidnapping raid against Israel, killing six Israeli soldiers and capturing two. Hezbollah’s July 12 attack may have been Iran’s answer to diplomacy.

The current Mideast war is now limited to Israeli and Hezbollah forces in a corner of the Levant, but it is another chapter in the larger story of Iran’s confrontation with the West. Hezbollah’s relationship with Iran is such that its deliberate provocation of July 12 is unlikely to be some spontaneous and independent action. Assuming it did direct the provocation, Iran’s interests in engaging Israel through Hezbollah may have been to distract the West from the nuclear issue, to assert the Iranian sphere as the new champion of the fight against Israel, to probe Israeli and Western capabilities and resolve, or to provoke a conflict that might ultimately give it a pretext to obliterate Israel.

Calling Israel’s war a “disproportionate response” to the kidnapping of a couple soldiers is superficial and facile. The Hezbollah incursion tripped the wire on an apparently long-planned Israeli rollback of Hezbollah’s militarization of southern Lebanon, intended to degrade Hezbollah’s offensive military capability.

Hezbollah had amassed 10,000-13,000 rockets intended for the Israeli people, just across the border from Israel, acting as the terrorist hand of an Iranian regime declaring daily its intent to eradicate the Jewish state and exterminate the Jewish people.

A disproportionate response to a couple of kidnapped soldiers? Yes. But a proportionate response to a massing of the offensive forces of a mortal enemy.

As Hezbollah is Iran’s proxy, Israel is in effect America’s.

A conventional wisdom has been forming that the United States cannot undertake further military action, having “overreached” on Iraq, the argument goes.

But if America is “bogged down,” it is on the democracy-building front, not the military front. The United States Armed Forces led the smashing of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship in a scant three weeks, and if it has not yet contained the insurgents, it has certainly gone undefeated in battle against them.

If, heaven forbid, the democracy project did become irretrievably lost, then America would be no less likely to act militarily; Rather, it is likely that future American military action would be minus the Good Samaritan work of rebuilding and democratizing, and that happens to be the prevailing American thinking on the use of force against Iran.

In fact, Americans’ patience for the democratization strategy, in the face of the costs and international vilification, is wearing very thin. There is no reason to believe that the alternative, in a world of enemies actively pursuing America’s demise, would be some sort of passive non-interventionism: Sitting and watching as enemies arm and attack. An alternative with ever-multiplying advocates is the “Rubble doesn’t make trouble” doctrine. Punitive and deterrent strikes, and strikes to degrade potential threats, without the burdensome rebuilding and democratizing efforts that America would only be condemned for, anyway: “This time we won’t stick around to fix your godforsaken country.” And who would be able to blame them?

The spectrum of military options on Iran, from most to least likely, may go something like the following: Limited strikes against Iran’s first lines of defense plus its nuclear production, probably only intended to set the nuclear program back temporarily; Strikes to derail Iran’s nuclear production and its military capabilities generally; Attacks to degrade Iranian nuclear and military power plus “decapitation strikes” against the Iranian leadership, and aid to a coalition of domestic opposition in hopes of forming a new secular democratic government; And, the least likely, a full-scale invasion to destroy Iran’s nuclear potential and armed forces entirely, overthrow the regime, and establish a new democracy.

There are compelling reasons enough to avoid even limited military action -- let alone all-out war -- in Iran especially, and a healthy appreciation of them will spur an earnest pursuit of more diplomatic options. But if, after all the diplomatic efforts, Western intelligence confirms that Iran is on the point of acquiring the bomb, or if, for reasons best known to themselves, the Iranian leadership decides to strike a first blow, then all bets are off.

Andrew W. Smith, Cape Sable Island, NS and Tulsa, OK

Published in The Chronicle-Herald, Halifax, Nova Scotia