Game over for the neocons in Lebanon

Was just talking to a friend who was noting that there is intense anger toward Israel within the administration for botching the war. He thinks the attitude was, "What's the point of giving them more time when they do nothing with it?" He thinks it's the worst defeat for Israel since 1948. He also guesses that the reason that the French flipped against the first resolution wasn't so much the Lebanese reaction as the realization of how poorly Israel was faring militarily. His general rule when it comes to U.N. resolutions in the Middle East is that they either simply reflect the facts on the ground, or make the victor give away a little bit of his victory; they never let someone pull victory out of a hat from defeat. So Israel will utlimately (sic) get from this resoltuon (sic) what they won on the ground, which is to say not much.
--Rich Lowry (hat tip to Glenn Greenwald)

This has been bothering me for weeks. Though they continue to write about how moral Israel's position is, neocons, Israel's more dogmatic supporters, and their allies (including some members of my family) never seem to say what Israel is accomplishing (in spite of repeated inquiries in some cases). Perhaps because the answer is "not much," and they don't want to admit that they're defending Israel's right to bomb civilian and dual-use targets for no reason whatsoever. Israel is less secure than ever. This was in no way inevitable; it could have been avoided if Israel had taken a saner, slower, more reasoned approach. The world (including Israel opponents like Juan Cole) was ready to support some kind of Israeli action against Hezbollah (the U.N. had already said that the group should not exist), and the group's support in Lebanon was precarious.

The next time someone rushes to support Israel's right to continue its bombing campaign, ask them if they can name any successful missions thus far that have been worth the innocent lives lost. Ask them why they have more confidence in the value of the civilian targets the Israeli Air Force is attacking than the pilots flying those missions do. Ask them whether they have captured Hezbollah's leaders and permanently blocked Iranian assets or whether they have only inflamed tensions and made themselves less secure in the long run. At the rate Israel is going, what would be accomplished by continuing? Don't accept analogies to other conflicts unless they can point to a situation where a well-trained guerilla army was defeated by force from across the border without a full occupation. Don't accept the argument that the conflict will only end when Hezbollah is disarmed; Israel's current strategy won't lead to their disarmament. They've suffered little militarily but are now heroes throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds. And their local opponents--the Lebanese government--is in shambles, so they'll be even harder to contain than before. Israel took a great opportunity and countless lives and threw them away in pursuit of an unimaginably risky strategy of turning foes into friends through force. Well, they changed the region all right, but not in the way they had hoped.

I'll conclude by quoting Glenn Greenwald, who just posted on the same subject: the war has been totally "bizarre" because the "ambitions were so grand and sweeping from the start-- the amount of brutality and slaughter required to accomplish them were far in excess of what could be tolerated -- that it was almost designed to fail from the start. One could say exactly that of the general neoconservative view on all matters." And one would be right.

Tags: dave, disenchantedidealist, ideology, incompetence, israel, military, nationalreview, terror, violence, war