ILLOGICAL ACTS BREED INEVITABLE REACTIONS:

As Mideast Smoke Clears, Political Fates May Shift (Robin Wright, 8/13/06, Washington Post)

"This is a war that has not had a clear logic, but it does have a large number of casualties and losers," said Robert Malley of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group. "Israel's government is in trouble. Lebanon as a country has lost a lot. U.S. standing is worse. Democracy promotion has been hurt. The credibility of the U.N. Security Council has been eroded. Even the anti-terror agenda has lost. So on almost every count, you see diminished assets and credibility."

Israel lost by failing to achieve its strategic objectives in response to the capture of its soldiers, analysts said. It has already paid a huge political, physical and psychological price -- with perhaps more to come, as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert appears imperiled, they added.

"The pressure is rising in Israel to interpret this as a debacle. Israel is nowhere close to having achieved its goal of destroying Hezbollah or its arsenal. It will also have to deal with the moral and humanitarian crisis that it caused," said Ellen Laipson, president of the Henry L. Stimson Center, a defense think tank, and formerly of the National Intelligence Council. "It looks like the denouement will create a crisis in Israeli politics that will not be easily fixable."

The conflict has affected Israeli civilians more than in any previous war, with the northernmost quarter of the country fleeing sustained Hezbollah missile attacks, analysts noted. It has proved that Israel cannot force peace through military means, said former U.S. ambassador to Israel Edward P. Djerejian. [...]

[A]merica's image abroad emerges from the crisis badly battered, in part due to prolonged negotiations widely perceived in the Arab world as deliberate to allow Israel to pursue its military agenda -- with U.S.-manufactured weaponry, analysts said.

Rice's comment on the conflict as part of the "birth pangs" of a new Middle East was particularly "crude, insensitive and cruel," said Rami G. Khouri, an analyst and columnist for Beirut's Daily Star newspaper. "She was basically seen as saying you have to kill Arabs to remake them and you have to allow Israel to destroy Arab movements to make better nations.

"If it is a new Mideast, it won't be the one she is expecting," Khouri said, particularly coming after deeply troubled U.S.-led efforts to transform Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Afghanistan.

Five years into the process, there's really no excuse for the Administration's inability to reckon with the fact that democracy in the Middle East will be Islamic, as ours is Judeo-Christian (maybe even resembling Cromwell's England or Winthrop's MA for awhile), not secular, like Europe's.

MORE:
Islamic radical groups are not all alike (Laura Rozen, August 13, 2006, Boston Globe)

IN COUNTERTERRORISM analysis, there are two primary questions: What is a terrorist group's capability? And what is its intent?

President Bush has declared the current conflict in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah to be part of the US-led global war on terror. ``The current crisis is part of a larger struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of terror in the Middle East," Bush said in Miami last month. But there are practical reasons not to collapse Al Qaeda and Hezbollah into the same mold. Although Hezbollah has the capability and a history of killing Americans, that group is not currently trying to kill Americans. Al Qaeda and its imitators are -- as is evident from the exposure Thursday of a London-based conspiracy, possibly linked to Al Qaeda, to blow up transatlantic jetliners.

While there's been ample discussion of why terrorist groups attack US interests, it's also vital to understand why some terrorists hold back. [...]

According to former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Bob Graham, Hezbollah has a larger presence in the United States than Al Qaeda does. Nevertheless, experts say the group will continue to exercise restraint against Americans. ``I don't see much prospect of Hezbollah attacking US targets," Koch says . ``They've got their hands full with the war against Israel, and this is their winner."

Despite suggestions by some politicians that Islamic radical groups are all alike, Hezbollah is not Al Qaeda. ``President Bush and some congressmen paint Hezbollah the same way as Al Qaeda," says Dennis Pluchinsky, who recently retired after 28 years as a State Department counterterrorism analyst. ``But I don't think [Hezbollah] has a global agenda. Al Qaeda has initiated a global jihad. Al Qaeda and other global jihadists really believe it's Islam's manifest destiny to rule the earth. Hezbollah is fairly pragmatic; they want to set up an Islamic state in Lebanon."

Pluchinsky says as esteem for Hezbollah has risen , Al Qaeda has tried to get in on the action. ``Now bin Laden has an opportunity to step forward and show support, and to try to link what's happening in Lebanon to what's happening in Iraq and Afghanistan. And Hezbollah says, `No, there's no link at all.' "

Jabotinsky's ghost: Beyond the war in Lebanon lies the ultimate question of Israel's coexistence with a Palestinian state. To confront it, Ehud Olmert knows he must break with the political tradition into which he was born. (Geoffrey Wheatcroft, August 13, 2006, Boston Globe)

Like his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, Olmert was born into the political tradition known as Revisionist Zionism, founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky. A brilliant and intensely controversial figure, Jabotinsky split the Zionist movement in the 1920s, preaching a ``Greater Israel," with a Jewish majority outweighing the Arab population, to be won by force and guarded, in his famous phrase, by an ``Iron Wall." In the words of the former State Department adviser Aaron David Miller, Olmert is ``one of Likud's princes from a prominent Revisionist family." And if Olmert is a prince, Livni is a princess: Both are children of the Irgun, the armed rightists who followed Jabotinsky and fought both British and Arabs. Livni is one of the few prominent Israelis who can still quote from ``Jabo's" works, and her father's gravestone bears a map of that Greater Israel.

Jabotinsky did not live to see the creation of the Jewish state-which was not, in any case, the one he had dreamed of. And indeed the situation today is paradoxical. In his lifetime, Jabotinsky's appeal to his followers was his apparent realism and rejection of compromise, rather than the evasions and denial of other Zionists. As it turned out, Zionism found, like any other political movement, that realism itself means compromise, and that it may be better to accept what you can get rather than hold out for what you want.

Posted by Orrin Judd at August 13, 2006 10:00 AM