THE GRASS IS ALWAYS GREENER ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE LITANI

What the war is about (Saul Singer, Jerusalem Post, August 17th, 2006)

It is hard to find anyone in Israel who says we won this war besides the prime minister and those around him. The same goes for Israel's friends abroad, who almost uniformly term it a resounding defeat. But I found someone who disagrees - in Lebanon:

"Hizbullah at best won a tactical victory in standing its ground. However, its rocket deterrent has effectively been neutralized for years, because Shi'ite civilians cannot soon be put through such trauma again.

"Hizbullah's skills were on display in a fight that was largely meaningless, and you can be assured that next time the Israelis will come better prepared; the vague Lebanese consensus behind the party, never very strong anyway, has been shattered, so that Hizbullah cannot be as adventurist in the future as it was in the past. Arab hostility to Hizbullah has escalated, and was on display during the recent diplomacy; and for the foreseeable future Hizbullah will have to behave more like the Salvation Army than a 'resistance' because of the hundreds of thousands of Shi'ites it must take care of.

"For all these reasons and more, I don't see this as a victory for Hizbullah, and I'm not even mentioning the billions of dollars of losses Lebanon must face. In its calculations, strangely, Hizbullah never seemed to factor in the losses outside the Shi'ite community."

Never in the field of human conflict has so much conflicting, confusing analysis been thrown at so many by so few. Anyone reading the strategic wisdom of pundits far and wide over the past week could be forgiven for feeling as if he is in a dream where all the world’s sportswriters are arguing bitterly about which team won a baseball game that was called for rain in the third inning. In an Israel that has just devastated south Lebanon and badly bruised the enemy, rage against the political and strategic blunders of this “defeat” is being thrown around willy-nilly in the most apocalyptic of language, which is bizarre to anyone who remembers 1973. Surely, though, we are now familiar enough with Arab psychology to know that the mass crowing over Hezbollah’s “victory” and the mindless hero-worship of Nasrallah are pretty good clues that they know full well they didn’t win.