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Edited on Sat Jul-15-06 11:30 PM by The Magistrate
There are not really any good options in this situation confronting Israel. Destruction of an irregular force is not easily achieved, and requires first of all the capability either to completely sequester the area in which it operates, or to completely depopulate the area by deportation or massacre. The first is beyond Israeli power, and the second is out of fashion nowadays to the point of being outrageously criminal.
Probably the "best" Israel could do would be to re-establish a buffer zone in southern Lebanon, sufficiently deep to deny Hezbollah launching sites in ready range of its northern cities and towns. This could certainly be achieved, and maintained despite international protests, but would simply resume the war of attrition Israel found it wisest to abandon a few years ago.
The leaders of Israel doubtless hope, or imagine, that their actions may convince the leaders of Lebanon, Syria, and Iran to take steps to rein in Hezbollah, but that strikes me as an unlikely outcome, and hence an unusually forlorn hope. It would certainly be the right course for those governments to take, but the latter two particularly doubtless imagine they will draw more political benefit and prestige by standing vocally alongside Hezbollah than by curbing it.
Nonetheless, the Israeli government must do something about rocket attacks and military raids across its northern border: its own internal political imperatives demand some action, loud and violent enough to give its citizens heart that something is being done to protect them. So far, despite hyperbole routinely employed in description, the response has been a good deal more noise than mayhem.
There have been two developments reported today that show some promise.
The first is the contentious meeting of the Arab League, which did not even manage a majority expression of support for Hezbollah, as Nasrallah probably expected it would do, but rather issued in a thumping majority rejecting his and his organization's actions. Syria was left quite isolated, and this bodes well for diplomatic pressure on it to do what it can to resolve, rather than exacerbate, the situation. It seems pretty clear that the major countries of the Arab world do not want a regional explosion, and are not going to jump on the projected band-wagon Nasrallah hoped to create behind his view of himself as the vanguard of Arab resistance.
The second is the report of some statements by the Lebanese leadership that it may indeed dispatch its national armed forces into Hezbollah's area in the south of the country. Obviously this would be the ideal solution, certainly from Israel's point of view, and probably in the eyes of much of the world as well. The reluctance of the Lebanese government to do this previously is perfectly ubnderstandable, and certainly at bottom one point of the Israeli operation has been to make not doing it even more uncomfortable than doing it might be. This is not an elevated exercise, obviously, but sometimes there really are only crude and cruel tools available. If the Lebanese government had real, if quiet, backing from major Arab governments, in such an effort to extend its authority through the whole of its country, it would have some prospect of success, anyway. Or at least enough of an appearance of success for a while that Israel would be able to consider its face had been saved, too, and stand down in response.
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