Conventional armies can defeat guerrilla
forces with broad popular support, for it is
perfectly feasible to dismantle a people, destroy
its morale, and if need be expel them. It has
happened in history on occasions beyond count.
The British did it to the Scots
Highlanders after the 1745 rising, and to the
Acadians of Canada after the Seven Years' War;
Ataturk did it to the Greeks of Asia Minor in
1922; and the
Czechs
did it to the Sudeten Germans after 1945. It seems
to be happening again, as half or more of
Lebanon's 1.2 million Shi'ites flee their homes.
To de-fang Hezbollah implies the effective
dissolution of the Shi'ite community, a third of
whom live within Katyusha range of Israel.
A real war - that is, a war that is fought
to a decisive conclusion - finally may have begun
in the Middle East. To the extent Israel's
campaign succeeds, it will have knock-on effects
throughout the region, starting with another
accident-prone multi-ethnic patchwork, namely
Syria, with grave implications for Iraq. It is
easy to say that the present war has unleashed
chaos, but the question is: Upon whom? The
collapse of Lebanon's Shi'ite community opens the
prospect of chaos in the region, but to Israel's
advantage.
Iran will face the humiliation
of seeing dissolved a Shi'ite community it armed
and nurtured, at the same time that Western powers
demand the abandonment of its nuclear-weapons
program. This will be too great for Tehran to
bear; ultimately the West will have to take on
Iran directly, for Iran has other means at its
disposal to make life miserable for the West,
including the so-called oil weapon.
"Fight
a dictatorship, and you must kill the regime;
fight a democracy, and you must kill the people,"
I warned on January 31 (No true Scotsman starts a
war), meaning that one turns a proud
and militant folk into a deracinated rabble.
Sometimes it is not necessary to kill a single
individual to crush an entire people. When a
warlike people rather would fight, eg the
Chechens, the result is butchery.
Blame
George W Bush for this grim necessity in Lebanon,
where the refugee count already has reached 15-30%
of the total population. In the name of Lebanese
democracy, Washington brought Hezbollah into
mainstream politics, and the newly legitimized
Hezbollah in turn became the focus of life for
Lebanon's 1.2 million Shi'ites. To uproot
Hezbollah, one has to uproot the Shi'ite
community.
One has to evaluate with
caution reports trickling in from the battlefield,
but it appears that Hezbollah undertook vast works
of military engineering under the guidance of
Iranian advisers. Who dug the honeycombs of
bunkers underneath Shi'ite villages south of the
Litani River and in the Bekaa Valley? Hezbollah's
fortifications must have provided the lion's share
of the livelihood of numerous Shi'ite villages.
Given that Hezbollah emplaced its rocketry
in Shi'ite civilian neighborhoods, Israel must
reduce civilian areas to stop rocket attacks. The
fact that casualties number in the hundreds rather
than the tens of thousands shows that Israel has
been meticulous about creating refugees rather
than corpses. Nonetheless, Israel has forced the
burden of uncertainty on its enemies, including by
implication Syria and eventually Iran.
At
least 200,000, and perhaps twice that number of
refugees, have descended on Syria, joining half a
million displaced Iraqis and perhaps 300,000
Palestinian refugees. Refugee streams clog the few
undamaged routes between Syria and Lebanon.
Evidently Syria fears destabilization; Information
Minister Mohsen Bilal linked his July 23 threat of
military action against Israel to the "evacuation"
of Lebanon. He told the Spanish daily ABC:
It is unjustifiable that the
superpower [ie, the US] does not work for a
quick ceasefire. What is it waiting for - for
Israel to destroy all of Lebanon so that it has
to be evacuated completely? But Israel is not
the only player in this region. I repeat: If
Israel stages a ground invasion of Lebanon and
comes close to us, Syria will not remain with
its arms crossed. It will enter the
conflict.
[1] Bilal's outburst is all
the more extraordinary given that Israel's most
hawkish defense analysts, eg Michael Oren in the
July 17 New Republic Online, badly want to draw
Syria into the war. It is hard for Israel to root
Hezbollah out of its nest, but easy to destroy
Syrian armor and air capability. The fact that
Israel has not done so already is due to
Washington's horror of further instability in
Mesopotamia. The destabilization of Syria would
produce more chaos in Iraq, as numerous
commentators aver. [2] Washington still hopes that
it can drive a wedge between Syria and Iran, which
must be the second-silliest idea (after "Lebanese
democracy") to possess the United States in years.
What, then, provoked Mohsen Bilal to offer
to jump headlong into an Israeli trap? Contrary to
Washington's hopes, the Bashar al-Assad regime may
not be viable after the destruction of Hezbollah.
The flood of refugees is painful to absorb. In
addition, Syria's economy depends on Lebanon.
Syrian workers in Lebanon remit US$4 billion a
year, double Syria's reported exports. [3] The
Assad regime and its supporters draw substantial
income from Lebanon's black market, which Syria
continues to dominate despite the removal of
Syrian troops last year.
US as well as
Israeli analysts assume that the Syrian regime
will do anything to survive, but in the wake of
Hezbollah's collapse and the breakdown of
Lebanon's Shi'ite community, it may not be obvious
to Bashar Assad how he may accomplish this.
Without the skim from Lebanon's black market and
the remittances from Syrian workers in Lebanon,
the regime's purse will shrivel and its hold on
the reins will slacken. Double-crossing its allies
in Tehran at just that moment might not be the
wisest move, particularly with remnants of
Hezbollah fleeing into Syria.
Peaceful
outcomes are possible when people have peaceable
things to do. Lebanon's Shi'ites, the country's
resentful underclass, have little stake in the
tourism industry and other objects of Saudi
investment in their country. Their livelihood is a
function of war, of Iranian subsidies in
particular. The fortification of southern Lebanon
was not intended as a public-works project but,
like Adolf Hitler's autobahn, it kept
people employed. If Hezbollah is destroyed and the
flow of Iranian largess stops, much of the Shi'ite
population will lose its economic viability, and
the Shi'ite community never will reconstitute
itself in anything resembling its form prior to
July 12. Syria, in turn, may lose a great deal of
economic viability if Lebanon is cut off.
When chaos is inevitable, it's best to
learn to like it, as I advised on March 14 (How I learned to stop worrying and
love chaos). Ultimately the chaos in
the Middle East plays to US advantage. In the
meantime, it would not hurt to print gasoline
ration cards.
