Letting Terrorists Fight Another Day

November 20, 2006

In Gaza, the summer war never ended. Palestinian militants continued their rocket attacks on Israeli border communities, and their weapons buildup and underground development, with frequent interruptions by the Israel Defense Force. After a particularly bloody Israeli intervention on November 8, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal declared that a state of war with Israel had existed since the end of last year.

Hezbollah remains in southern Lebanon, its underground network intact after the Israeli government cringed from committing to the kind of bloody infantry invasion necessary to uproot it, and continues importing arms through Syria from the bosses in Iran. A recent London Times report cites Israeli intelligence that Hezbollah’s Lebanese armaments already are above pre-war levels.

The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon has foresworn preventing Hezbollah’s rearmament, unless requested by the Lebanese government, which announced a useless policy of forbidding only plainly visible Hezbollah weaponry. The previous UNIFIL mission, for any humanitarian good it did, occupied southern Lebanon for the very period in which Hezbollah seized and militarized the region, and if the current UNIFIL mission continues meekly observing as Hezbollah again renders southern Lebanon a war zone, it will have been worse than useless.

Politically, Hezbollah was the de facto government of southern Lebanon before the war; Now it threatens to hijack the Lebanese national government, demanding over-representation in the cabinet amounting to a veto over national policy. The United States took the unusual step recently of warning that Hezbollah, its native Lebanese political allies, and the Iranian and Syrian puppeteers are plotting to topple Lebanon’s fragile democracy.

Any notions that Hezbollah’s ultimate aims are anything other than genocidal should have been dispelled long ago by Hezbollah’s “Secretary General” himself, Hassan Nasrallah: “It is an open war until the elimination of Israel and until the death of the last Jew on earth.” Hezbollah’s war against Israel is not for Lebanon’s sake, or defensive.

Israeli discontent with the government’s prosecution of the war, that it declined to finish the job it began, expending lives and national credibility without seriously impeding the enemy, registered in polling practically overnight. Support has swung from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his centrist Kadima-led government toward the rightist Likud Party of Binyamin Netanyahu and smaller right-wing factions like Yisrael Beiteinu, with a current Angus Reid Global Monitor poll finding that a new election would give Likud nearly double Kadima’s seats and make Netanyahu Prime Minister.

Regardless of the party in power, Israeli territorial concessions are over for the foreseeable future. The West Bank withdrawal plan was a casualty of the war, and settlements slated for abandonment only months ago are again building apace.

Withdrawing from southern Lebanon and Gaza did not buy even tolerance for Israel. It served only to move Hezbollah and Hamas that much closer to Israel’s heart. The territories Israel conceded to Lebanon and the Palestinians were converted to militarized zones, forward bases in the war on Israel’s very existence, magazines and launch pads for tens of thousands of anti-civilian rockets.

The Kadima Party which leads the Israeli government was founded in 2005 by then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, precisely because Sharon’s own Likud Party refused support for his “disengagement” policy of unilaterally withdrawing Jewish settlements and IDF outposts from Israel’s controversial and vulnerable fringes. Now Olmert’s Kadima government has had to jettison the disengagement policy that was its raison d’etre.

The Israeli government was written a diplomatic blank cheque by the United States to deal with Hezbollah, but ultimately squandered its opportunity with hesitation and half-measures until the clock had run out.

America is heavily invested in the success of the Lebanese government, the position of which was becoming shakier with every day of Israel’s war. Lebanon was one of the great triumphs of the democracy project in the wider Middle East, ending the 30-year Syrian Baathist occupation and gaining an unprecedented freedom in the Cedar Revolution, sparked only weeks after the success of the first Iraqi national election.

The Cedar Revolution and a free and democratic government in Lebanon is just the sort of thing the United States is counting on if its democratization strategy has any hope of prevailing, and the strain which the war was putting on that tenuous government made a compelling argument for America to let Israel know the window for war was closing.

Plus, the United States was coming under pressure to halt Israel’s campaign against Shiite Hezbollah from Shiite allies in Iraq like Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, whose support has been vital to the effort there, and if Israel was not going to finish the job in any event, then there was no reason to continue alienating helpful friends.

So the war was halted. And the terrorists remained entrenched and uncontained, and emboldened by what passes for victory in their world: surviving to fight another day.

Andrew W. Smith, Tulsa, Oklahoma and Cape Sable Island, Nova Scotia