June 13, 2004
REVERSAL:
Taking the High Ground: In Gaza, Israel should follow the Lebanon model. Get out all the way and deal with enemies from the moral and strategic high ground. (THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, 6/13/04, NY Times)
With that U.N.-approved pullout, Israel completely reversed its situation: It went from holding the strategic and moral low ground, to holding the strategic and moral high ground. When Israel was occupying south Lebanon it was embroiled in a guerrilla war in which it could never use its vast military superiority. It was going mano a mano with Hezbollah. Worse, any Hezbollah attack on Israel was seen by the world as legitimate resistance. Once Israel was out, it could use its superior air power to retaliate for Hezbollah attacks — and the world didn't care."Sure," say the critics, "But the Palestinians saw the Israeli withdrawal as a sign of weakness and it triggered their Intifada II." Well, maybe the Palestinians did watch too much Hezbollah TV. Their mistake. But I'll tell you who didn't misread Israel's withdrawal: the people it was directed at — Hezbollah, Lebanon and Syria.
Hezbollah knows it can't launch any serious attack on Israel from Lebanon now without triggering a massive retaliation in which Israel's air force would destroy all the power plants of Beirut. This would bring down the wrath of all of Lebanon on Hezbollah — because the Lebanese public would not consider an unprovoked Hezbollah attack on Israel as legitimate, or worth sacrificing for, now that Israel is out of Lebanon and Lebanon's sovereignty is restored.
"In every conflict, the extent to which a party can muster domestic support and international support, and the extent to which its public will withstand higher thresholds of pain, is very much a function of the degree of international legitimacy for that cause," argues Shibley Telhami, Middle East studies professor at the University of Maryland. "As soon as Israel withdrew from Lebanon to the internationally recognized border, the legitimacy factor shifted from Hezbollah to Israel. This may seem abstract, but it's not."
When you have legitimacy on your side, your people, and the world, support you more, and the other side's people, and the world, support them less.
Which is why the last thing Yassir Arafat wants is a state. Posted by Orrin Judd at June 13, 2004 11:24 AM
Lebanon's sovereignty is restored? Has anyone told Baby Bashar?
Posted by: David Cohen at June 13, 2004 12:56 PMI do not share Friedman's optimism on the ability of the Lebanese people to "restain" Hezbollah. Fanatics are not restrained; they are driven out, shamed, or killed. The Western media's descriptions of Hezbollah as a quasi-government, with all the trappings of a society, remind me too much of the way the press used to fawn over each new leader in the Soviet Union. Terror and subjugation are terror and subjugation.
Posted by: jim hamlen at June 13, 2004 1:18 PMCommunists parties did fairly well immediately after the Wall fell. Hezbollah and Hamas should fair similarly.
Posted by: oj at June 13, 2004 2:51 PMIf Friedman thinks its a good idea, it isn't.
Posted by: Robert Schwartz at June 13, 2004 3:56 PMWhat is it with Brandeis grads; Hoffman,
Blumenthal & Freidman, Tom using the Lebanon
withdrawal as some sort of successful template
is something short of breathtaking pigheadedness.
But there is a difference between the fall of communism and the "fall" of radical Islam. The communists were the official government, and people knew where they lived - they were despised for their betrayal of their own people (in toadying to the Soviets). The Rumanian Army was not going to fight to defend Caecescu, once the tide turned. Even the Russian Army did not fight to defend the 'pro-communist' coup in 1991. There was some limited Western tradition behind what happened.
The Islamic radicals are shadow figures, who roar and kill and go hide somewhere. They do not run governments, they attack them. The people are not going to overcome gangsters like this without overt outside help (re: Afghanistan). If the US Army went and killed 5000 nutcase clerics in the world tomorrow, I have no doubt we would all be safer. But these people know how to dodge - otherwise, the war on terror would have been over before the end of 2001.
Posted by: jim hamlen at June 14, 2004 10:04 AM