Tuesday, August 8. 2006
From The Jerusalem Post -- Editorial;
The Lebanese government, presumably representing Hezbollah, has rejected the draft Security Council resolution on ending the current hostilities, apparently in the belief that the US and Israel are essentially suing for peace and that it can therefore squeeze out a better deal.
This is actually an opportunity for Israel to turn the tables and correct its premature declaration of victory and tentative embrace of a cease-fire.
In a speech on August 1, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert started laying out his argument that Israel had already won, since the reality on the ground had changed: Hezbollah will no longer sit on the northern border; Israel has destroyed Hezbollah's long-range missile capability; a strategic threat controlled by Iran has been removed, and Israel has demonstrated the strength of its citizenry and its unwillingness to be paralyzed by the threat of rockets.
The problem is that all this may true, but largely irrelevant. Throughout Lebanon and the Muslim world, there is an expectation that if Hezbollah survives as an organization, it will become an even stronger force in Lebanon than it was before this war.
So long as Hassan Nasrallah is alive and has an organization to lead, his survival will make him a hero in the Arab world, and his path - that of seeking Israel's destruction - will be seen to have been vindicated.
Until now, Olmert seemed to have been convinced, under his deterrence-based theory of victory, that a cease-fire in the near future was acceptable and there was no point continuing the ground operation further north. But neither an international force nor the Lebanese government can be relied upon to finish the job unless Hezbollah has been truly vanquished. Israel, accordingly, does not have a satisfactory option of stopping now and declaring victory.
Victory needs to be defined as it originally was when this conflict began more than three weeks ago - by Hizbullah's destruction as a military force. The Bush administration should need little persuasion that if Hezbollah becomes more powerful within Lebanon, it will be a victory for Iran and a defeat for the US.
Bush, by agreeing to the French draft resolution, and Olmert, with an initial readiness to redefine victory to allow for Hizbullah's survival, have complicated their shared vital goals. But the damage can be undone so long as the US continues to back Israel's insistence that an agreement be reached on an international force before the cease-fire resolution takes effect.
Time and again, Israel has wanted to believe that how its actions are perceived in the Arab world does not matter. Creating a perception of weakness and defeat can have real consequences. The common objective of addressing the underlying causes of the next war begins by ending this war with Hezbollah's indisputable defeat.
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