Herbert Zweibon

On June 9, 2005 then Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told a meeting of the far left American Israel Policy Forum: “We are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies.” True to his sentiments, as Prime Minister Olmert has failed to fight and has now lost the war with Hezbollah.

As Laurent Murawiec of the Hudson Institute puts it: “Israel has been defied and found wanting: it neither defended territory and population from attack nor brought the war to its enemy. A hesitant war never tried to hit the enemy’s center of gravity.” Nor was a glove laid on Syria, the conduit of arms to Hezbollah. After a month of somnolence, Olmert seemed to be emerging from his coma. He was not tired of being Prime Minister and when polls made it obvious the public was rapidly growing tired of losing he finally bestirred himself to send in sizable ground forces.

Yet according to Yuval Steinitz, former chairman of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, even this was phony, “an attempt to create the futile display of a near victory snatched from our hands at the last moment by UN involvement.”

In any case, after a month of witnessing what Steinitz calls Israel’s “new concept of static, low-risk war” President Bush had grown tired. The President, who had run interference at the UN, providing Israel a strategic opportunity to launch lethal blows at Hezbollah and Syria, gave in to his State Department. UN Resolution 1701 simply ensures that there will be a larger UN force to set up flags in cozy proximity to Hezbollah fortifications. President Bush’s claim that Hezbollah will be disarmed is ridiculous on its face.

National Interest editor Nikolas Gvosdev points out a far more likely outcome, noting that in Kosovo the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army has transformed itself from a terrorist organization on the State Department’s watch-list into the province’s official police force. What is to prevent Hezbollah from cloaking itself with the veneer of Lebanon’s state sovereignty? Certainly the poorly equipped Lebanese army, a nest of sectarian divisions, easily capable of fissuring into battling militias, is in no position to take on Hezbollah.

If Israel’s defeat is obvious, that of the United States will soon be no less so. Iran, as financier, supplier, trainer, ideological inspiration and controller of Hezbollah has had a huge victory in its battle with the Great Satan for regional influence. The U.S. can expect Iran to step up support for Shiite militias targeting the U.S. – and militias in Iraq, whatever their allegiance, now see what such forces can achieve. Syria has already announced its plan to create forces on the Hezbollah model, trained by Hezbollah leaders. For the impact is not confined to Shiite Islam. As Yussuf Ibrahim wrote in The New York Sun (August 14) “The entire network of mosques, madrassas, Islamic fundamentalist institutions, charities, Islamic parties, and hangers-on are now in an energized frenzy, from Pakistan to Saudi Arabia.”

The movement for democracy in the region, weak at best, has been swept away by what to the Arab masses appears Hezbollah’s stunning victory. Bush’s vision of two states living peacefully side by side had already turned into the Hamas Revolution. Israel’s defeat has definitively transformed Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution into Hezbollah’s Revolution. The likelihood of much of Iraq falling into Iran’s orbit as another Shiite theocracy is greater than ever. What we at AFSI have called dubious allies (the regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan) will be under direct threat, and not by democratic reformers.

It is hard to see any good coming out of this debacle, except perhaps the collapse of the feckless, disgraceful government of Kadima.