The day after US President Barack Obama announced that he was deploying additional US forces to Afghanistan, an event occurred in Beirut that brought home the stakes in that battle.
In this 2007 photo, Lebanese army soldiers sit on their tank, during a patrol in front of destroyed buildings, that were destroyed during the fighting between the Lebanese army and Fatah Islam group, inside the Nahr el-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon.
Photo: AP [file]
On Wednesday, Hamas leaders flew to Beirut to pay their respects to Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah. The Sunni jihadists reportedly came to the commander of the Shi'ite jihadist Iranian proxy terror force to receive Nasrallah's blessing for the deal they are now negotiating with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's government. If the deal resembles what is being reported, it will represent the worst non-territorial capitulation of a free nation to jihadist forces in recent years. According to media reports this week, Israel has agreed to release up to 2,000 Muslim terrorists from its prisons in exchange for the release of Israeli hostage Gilad Schalit.
If the deal goes through, it will constitute a massive victory for Hamas. The fact that as they stand at the precipice of such a great triumph, Hamas's leaders felt it necessary to come on bended knee to Nasrallah demonstrates Hizbullah's power.
Hizbullah won two strategic victories against Israel. First in May 2000, then prime minister Ehud Barak gave Hizbullah southern Lebanon on a silver platter by withdrawing IDF forces from the area after 18 years. Barak's decision to withdraw from Lebanon came at the end of a year of strategic dithering during which he refused to adopt a strategy for victory over the Iranian proxy. Instead Barak wildly understated or ignored the threat a Hizbullah-controlled south Lebanon would constitute for Israel, and repeatedly announced his intention to leave without victory which - due to his understatement of the Hizbullah threat - was supposed to be unnecessary.
In the months that preceded Israel's withdrawal, Israeli officials gave frequent media interviews in which they condemned as corrupt and ineffective Israel's Lebanese partners in the South Lebanese Army. Incidents of SLA soldiers and officers acting as double agents for Hizbullah were given wide coverage in the Israeli media. At the same time the rationale for their defection to Hizbullah was studiously ignored by the pacifist news editors who championed Barak's strategy of retreat.
Most of the SLA soldiers who spied for Hizbullah in the months preceding Israel's withdrawal were spurred to act as they did because Barak's declared intention of withdrawing IDF forces from the country without first defeating Hizbullah left them in a lurch. Unlike Barak and his protean chorus in the Israeli media, SLA forces understood that an Israeli withdrawal meant a Hizbullah victory. Anticipating that victory, spying for Hizbullah became their life insurance policy. Only by switching sides could they hope to spare their families from the swords of the victorious Iranian-controlled mujahadin. As for their SLA comrades who remained loyal to Israel to the bitter end, they fled to the Israeli border by the thousands with their families in the hours that followed Israel's middle-of-the-night retreat. Today the former fighters live in penury as stateless refugees among the Israelis who betrayed them.
After Israel withdrew, Hizbullah was heralded as the hero of the Islamic world. Iran's currency rose. Nasrallah built a terror state in south Lebanon and began making inroads in the Lebanese political arena incrementally increasing Hizbullah's influence over the Lebanese state.
The Palestinians took a lesson from Lebanon. Yasser Arafat's response to Hizbullah's victory was to reject peace and prepare for a renewed terror war against Israel. In June 2000 Arafat tasked Fatah commander Marwan Barghouti with forging operational alliances with Hamas and Islamic Jihad and forming the Aksa Martyrs Brigades terror group from Fatah forces.
Hizbullah's rise was stymied temporarily in 2003 with the US-led invasion of Iraq. Hizbullah received a body blow following the Syrian-ordered February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq Hariri. In the aftermath of Hariri's murder, the anti-Syrian, pro-Western March 14 movement in Lebanon forced Syria to withdraw its forces from the country. For a brief moment, there was hope that denied Syrian protection Hizbullah would be unable to maintain its control over south Lebanon.
Alas, it wasn't to be. Israel, then on the brink of reenacting the failed withdrawal from south Lebanon in Gaza, was unwilling to help the March 14 forces. And the US, distracted by the escalating insurgency in Iraq, would do nothing substantive to protect the March 14 forces from the far stronger Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hizbullah. So in the end, despite the temporary setbacks, Hizbullah was able to strong-arm its way into Fuad Siniora's government and received governmental support for its state-within-a-state in south Lebanon.
Israel was given a second opportunity to defeat Hizbullah in July 2006. After Hizbullah attacked an IDF border patrol, abducted two soldiers and began bombarding the North with rockets and missiles, prime minister Ehud Olmert declared that Israel would return to Lebanon and defeat Hizbullah.
But then Olmert changed his mind. Upon reflection, Olmert decided that he wasn't interested in victory. He knew that he needed to do something because the public demanded action. But to actually defeat Hizbullah as he had promised, he would have had to order the IDF to reconquer south Lebanon. Ordering such an operation would constitute an implicit repudiation of his government's central goal - reenacting the withdrawals from Lebanon and from Gaza in Judea and Samaria.
And so, Olmert opted for a sound and light show. He sent IDF forces into battles with no strategic purpose. He called up the reserves but then failed to deploy them in sufficient numbers in battle until after the UN Security Council had already passed a ceasefire resolution that legitimated Hizbullah and ignored its state sponsors in Syria and Iran.
This week, Israel was condemned by UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon for protecting Jewish property rights in Jerusalem. Israel was also condemned during the annual UN Day of Solidarity with the Palestinians in their war against Israel.
