"The Bush administration ... was closely
involved in the planning of Israel's retaliatory
attacks" against Hezbollah. That is the conclusion
of American journalist Seymour Hersh in his latest
essay in The New Yorker.
If that, indeed,
is true, then America's image as a military power,
along with the image of the Israeli military, has
been severely tarnished. This is not the end of
the negative spillover effect from Israel's
palpable failure to damage severely the fighting
capabilities of Hezbollah. The United States might
be in for more damaging fallout emanating from
this fiasco.
According to Hersh, President
George W Bush - who joined the
Texas Air Guard to avoid
being drafted for Vietnam, and has limited
experience and little knowledge of the potential
capability air power in warfare - and Vice
President Dick Cheney - who used a variety of
legal loopholes to avoid being drafted and being
shipped to South Vietnam in the 1960s - believed
that "a successful Israeli Air Force bombing
campaign against Hezbollah's heavily fortified
underground missile and command and control
complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel's security
concerns and also serve as a prelude to a
potential American preemptive attack to destroy
Iran's nuclear installations, some of which are
also buried deep underground."
White House
sources have "vigorously denied" the veracity of
Hersh's report. Press Secretary Anthony Snow said,
"The piece abounds in fictions," and "assailed"
Hersh's use of "unnamed sources". However, the
editors of The New Yorker stand by the story.
US Department of State officials envisaged
Israel's bombing campaigns "as a way to strengthen
the Lebanese government". One wonders about the
basic wisdom of this rationale. How can one
destroy parts of Lebanon, kill hundreds and
displace thousands of civilians, and expect the
Lebanese government to emerge as a strong entity
from that disaster?
No amount of air
campaigns - no matter how limited the resulting
damage - could have had a positive effect on the
governing capabilities of the Lebanese government.
By the same token, any Israeli ground campaign
would have united the Lebanese behind Hezbollah.
The uncanny unifying power of a war on a polity
under siege was something both the Americans and
Israelis totally ignored while they were planning
or carrying out the military campaign against the
country of Lebanon.
No one in the Bush
administration bothered to revisit the historical
annals to educate themselves about the carnage
that the Israeli invasion and occupation created
in Lebanon in the early 1980s. The very creation
of Hezbollah is associated with that invasion and
the ensuing occupation of that country.
US
president John F Kennedy described many decades
ago how success and failure, related to major
political events, are handled in Washington. He
observed, "Success has many fathers; failure is
always an orphan." In that context, no one in the
Bush administration now admits even having known
about the Israeli air campaign, much less having
any part in it. Hersh does not believe those
statements.
In fact, Robert Novak, another
Washington-based columnist with excellent
political connections, wrote on August 6: "The
Israeli government's effort to clean Hezbollah out
of southern Lebanon was carefully planned by the
IDF [Israel Defense Forces]. US officials informed
me 24 days ago they would give the IDF a week to
liquidate the terrorists before Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice could pursue a ceasefire. But the
long-planned Israeli operation in southern Lebanon
found no quick success as Hezbollah proved itself
a formidable fighting machine."
Hersh's
report, though in harmony with Novak's analysis,
also talks about the Bush administration's lead
role in preparing an air-campaign plan to bomb
Iranian nuclear facilities and then approaching
the Israelis to share intelligence on Iran and
Lebanon - since Iran is reported to have played a
crucial role in advising Hezbollah in constructing
elaborate and complex tunnel systems to store its
missiles and other military wherewithal.
The intended plan was to coordinate an air
campaign with Israel. An anonymous source close to
the US Air Force told Hersh, "The big question for
our air force was how to hit a series of hard
targets in Iran successfully." Hersh states, "And
so the air force went to the Israelis with some
new tactics and said to them, 'Let's concentrate
on the bombing and share what we have on Iran and
what you have on Lebanon.' The discussions reached
the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld."
Hersh's essay supports
what has become part of intuitive thinking - if
not conventional wisdom - among Iran specialists
in Washington about the real intentions of the
Bush administration. There is little doubt that
the neo-cons, both within and outside the
government - are champing at the bit about
attacking Iran - the last major confrontational
state, after North Korea perhaps. Syria has never
been regarded as a challenge of the same caliber
as Iran to the US or to Israel. That was one
reason the template for an air attack on Iran was
handed over to Israel by the Bush administration.
The thinking in Cheney's office, according to
Hersh, was, "We can learn what to do in Iran by
watching what the Israelis do in Lebanon."
The Sunni Arab states were expected to do
the dirty work for the Bush administration after
Israel successfully destroyed the fighting
capabilities of Hezbollah. Egypt, Saudi Arabia and
Jordan were to put pressure on Iran. That plan
would have worked without much pressure from the
United States. The three sycophant Sunni states
were suffering from the growing paranoia from what
they envisaged as the rising Shi'ite power in
their region.
However, the powerful
resistance of Hezbollah and its enormous
popularity in the Arab street also caught the
dictators of those states off guard. They
originally criticized Hezbollah, but "shifted
their position in the wake of public protests in
their countries about the Israeli bombings", in
the words of Hersh.
Hersh's observations
about a number of Bush officials in this episode
are also interesting. Rumsfeld was ambivalent
("jaded") about the Lebanon war. Rice, once again,
distinguished herself by her traditional
characteristic of being bowled over by Cheney and
by demonstrating an absence of independent
thinking that was an attribute of her predecessor,
Colin Powell.
A National Security Council
functionary with strong Israeli ties, Elliott
Abrams, "supported the Israeli plan", even though
his spokesman denied it. The Joint Chiefs of
Staff, once again, lived up to their reputation of
having no backbone in terms of giving strong
advice to the administration that was contrary to
the thinking of Cheney and other neo-cons.
Now that there is ceasefire, there are
ample discussions of who won and who emerged as a
loser in this war. From the Arab perspectives,
there are still two clear winners and three
equally apparent losers. The chief winner is
Hezbollah and its execution of asymmetric war
against the high-tech Israeli military. As much as
he is berated in the US and in Israel, Hezbollah
leader Hassan Nasrallah has created a niche for
himself as an Arab hero of this war.
The
second major winner is Iran and its low-tech
missiles and training of Hezbollah. It is worth
noting, however, that Iran still faces the long
shot of becoming a target of the Bush doctrine of
regime change that continues to lurk in the
background.
The most troublesome aspect of
the general foreign-policy approach of the current
US administration is that it refuses to learn from
its past failures and almost seems eager to repeat
them, regardless of the ensuing catastrophic
consequences. Hersh discusses how "intelligence
about Hezbollah and Iran is [still] being
mishandled by the White House the same way
intelligence had been ... [when] the
administration was making the case that Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction".
The three
major losers of this war are Israel, the United
States and Lebanese democracy. When the ceasefire
was implemented, Hezbollah, though it was bruised
as a fighting force, was still defiant and full of
its combat spirit. The Israeli government, on the
contrary, is already undergoing the post-conflict
acrimonious blame game that might end up costing
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert his job.
The
Bush administration, if it was really using
Israel's air-attack plan as a "dry run" against
Iran, will have to think long and hard about its
next approach toward the Islamic Republic. The
very future of democracy in Lebanon is in jeopardy
for now.
Once all is said and done, the
most welcome development from this fiasco might be
the possibility of a diplomatic engagement between
Iran and the United States, once Washington
finally realizes that giving war a chance in
Lebanon did not lead to any lasting or peaceful
solution to the Hezbollah-Israeli conflict.
Ehsan Ahrari is the CEO of
Strategic Paradigms, an Alexandria, Virginia-based
defense consultancy. He can be reached at
eahrari@cox.net or
stratparadigms@yahoo.com. His columns appear
regularly in Asia Times Online. His website:
www.ehsanahrari.com.
(Copyright 2006
Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
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