WASHINGTON - As fighting between Israel
and Lebanon's Hezbollah persists, an Israeli
strategy of enlarging the conflict seems to be
crystallizing.
Neo-conservative pundits in
the US have pointed an accusatory finger at the
usual suspect, Tehran, arguing that Hezbollah was
pushed by Iran to open a new front against Israel
to capitalize on Israel's involvement in Gaza and
to draw attention away from the controversy around
Tehran's nuclear program.
Recalling
Hezbollah's close ties to Iran and Syria, both
Washington and Tel Aviv argue that the clashes
must have the support and blessing of these two
states.
Such a conclusion rests on the
assumption that Tehran and
Hezbollah could have predicted
Israel's reaction to the ambush and kidnapping of
two Israeli soldiers.
Yet, mindful of the
decades-long fighting between Israel and Hezbollah
- in which kidnappings of soldiers have been the
rule rather than the exception - the assertion
that Iran and Hezbollah aimed to draw Israel into
a major war remains unconfirmed.
Israel's
heavy-handed response, which risks embroiling the
entire region in a war, is somewhat unprecedented
and unlikely to have been predicted by Hezbollah,
despite Israel's shelling of the Gaza strip after
Palestinian fighters took an Israeli soldier
prisoner.
Clearly, Iranian President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad seeks to exploit the conflict -
both by appealing to the disgruntled Arab and
Muslim public outside of Iran by defying the US
and Israel, and by drawing attention away from its
nuclear program and sending the West a signal of
what its allies in the region are capable of. But
credible intelligence proving this was an Iranian
trap is yet to surface.
In fact, much
indicates that Iran, Syria and Hezbollah have
little to gain from an extensive confrontation
with Israel at this time. Syria is in a weak
position - the George W Bush administration
refuses to talk to it, its diplomatic
maneuverability is limited and its army is in
shambles. Just the other week, Israel humiliated
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad by having Israeli
jets break the sound barrier over his palace in
Damascus. Assad's inability to respond was a
poignant reminder to the Arabs of their impotence.
Hezbollah, in turn, needs to prove to the
Lebanese public that it doesn't need Israel's
enmity to justify its existence. Dragging Israel
into the heart of Beirut, recently rebuilt after
decades of warfare, does the exact opposite. It
sends Lebanese society the signal that Hezbollah's
continued existence comes at great peril for
Lebanon's future.
"It led us to a war we
are not prepared to fight," Yassin Soueid, a
retired Lebanese general, told the Washington
Post. "Israel could hit the presidential palace
... They can hit wherever they want, and there is
nothing we can do about it."
Iran, on the
other hand, is playing a high-risk game with the
West over the nuclear issue. Its strategy seems to
be to continuously defy the US, but stop short of
trapping itself in a military confrontation it
knows it cannot win.
While Ahmadinejad
huffs and puffs - he has warned Israel that it
"will face a crushing response" if it attacks
Syria, and accused Arab leaders who have refused
to cheer on Hezbollah of being "complicit in the
Zionist regime's barbarism" - there is little
evidence showing an active Iranian role in the
fighting.
"This is rhetoric, not actual
policy," Mohammad Atrianfar, editor of the
reformist Iranian newspaper Shargh, told Time
Magazine's Azadeh Moaveni.
Accusing
Israeli officials of using the Lebanon crisis to
find new reasons to attack Iran, Anthony Cordesman
of the Center for Strategic and International
Studies writes: "There is no evidence that [Iran]
dominates the Hezbollah or has more control than
Syria ... Until there are hard facts, Iran's role
in all of this is a matter of speculation, and
conspiracy theories are not facts or news."
On the contrary, the one state that may
have a strategic interest in expanding the
conflict is Israel itself. Numerous Western states
have condemned Israel's actions as
disproportionate and inflammatory. "One could ask
if today there is not a sort of will to destroy
Lebanon," France's President Jacques Chirac told
reporters. "I find, honestly, like most Europeans,
that the reactions are completely
disproportionate."
Tel Aviv seems to have
- with a potential future showdown with Iran in
mind - sought an opportunity to neutralize
Hezbollah and Hamas in order to weaken Iran's
deterrence and retaliation capabilities. Over the
past few months, Israel's policy on Iran has been
reassessed, partly due to Iranian warnings that it
would retaliate against Israel if the US targeted
its nuclear facilities.
Through Hamas and
Hezbollah, Iran could bring the war to Israeli
territory, a scenario that has further accentuated
Israel's vulnerability to asymmetric warfare. By
preemptively attacking Hamas and Hezbollah now,
Israel can significantly deprive Iran of its
capabilities to retaliate against the Jewish state
in the event of a US assault on Iran. Once Iran
obtains a nuclear capability, however, this option
may no longer be available to Israel.
Furthermore, Israel's harsh reaction may
be motivated by a need to conceal the reduced
strategic maneuverability it enjoys as a result of
Washington's failure in Iraq. Though Israel
certainly possesses the military means to fend off
any conventional Arab offensives, the strength of
its deterrence is to a large extent tied to US
military prowess.
An overextended US may
embolden Israel's enemies, who may be tempted to
test Israel's resolve and ability to uphold its
tough posture. Through its crushing response and
by expanding the conflict, Israel seeks to conceal
this potential vulnerability and signal the Arabs
to abandon any adventurous ideas that the US
difficulties in Iraq may have given them.
What may have started with a Hezbollah
ambush on an Israeli convoy seems to be ending
with a much larger Israeli campaign to reduce its
vulnerability to Iranian retaliation, while
exposing Tehran by neutralizing its deterrence
capabilities in the Levant.
Dr Trita
Parsi is the author of Treacherous
Triangle - The Secret Dealings of Israel, Iran and
the United States (Yale University Press,
2007).
