Friday, August 04, 2006

Lebanon, etc.   [Rich Lowry]

Some things I've been picking up late yesterday and this morning:

—The first of the U.N. resolutions could come Monday, but could be as late as Wednesday, just depending. It will call for a ceasefire, and set the political conditions for a international force. Militarily, the later, the better, of course, since Israel still has work to do against Hezbollah.

—We are working very closely with the French on all this.

—The first U.N. resolution will, of course, be meaningless if Hezbollah doesn't accept the ceasefire, which seems quite possible. (Although I would think the obvious play would be to accept it, claim victory, and live to fight another day.) If Hezbollah keeps shooting, Israel keeps at it too.

—The Israelis say they want 15,000 international troops. A writer in the Wall Street Journal today says it needs to be more like 25,000. But it's shaping up to be more like 9,000-10,000. That's still a lot. The Europeans are being amazingly forthcoming in offering troops (in theory at least). Why anyone would volunteer for this mission is a bit of a mystery to me.

—I don't know why, for instance, Hezbollah wouldn't just start killing or kidnapping the international troops. Apparently the thinking is that Hezbollah isn't al Qaeda, and wants to preserve enough of its respectability not to be utterly cast into the outer darkness by the Europeans and by all the rest of the Lebanese political players. We'll see...

—There are very real fears within the administration that Saniora's government could fall. It's been a balancing act between giving Israel the running room to hit Hezbollah and not fatally destabilizing the government.

—The refugee situation is adding a huge element of volatility into Lebanese politics—besides the fact that the government is seeing its country ravaged by two armies it doesn't control. My undertsanding is that the refugee flow has resembled Katrina in some respects. The more well-do people with some place to go got out first. Now the poorer Shia have been flooding north with no place to go, and that is profoundly unsettling to the other confessional groups.

—The hope within the administration is that the wave of popularity for Hezbollah will wilt away when it's clear that it has been dealt a severe blow, defined as: all the infrastruture and command-and-control it has built up over ten years is destroyed; it can't get back to the border; it is denuded of its heavy arms; it is kept from Syrian/Iranian re-supply.

—At least one pro-Israel hawk in the adminsitration I was talking to this morning very much shares Krauthammer's view that Israel has been given a unique opportunity that it has been blowing. He can't believe that we're three weeks into the war and Israel hasn't made more progress. He thinks they should swept into the Bekaa Valley from the beginning; should have called up more reserves immediately; and need another division to do what they need to do.

—It seems that some of the Israeli bombing in its initial campaign was just to "do something" immediately in the wake of the Hezbollah kidnappings. Yes, some of it had a strategic purpose, as has been noted here—"isolating the battlefield." But some of it was ill-considered.

—The Lebanese military is a joke. They stay in their barracks. They have basically no mobility, letting their equipment rust away. Morale's not great either. As they have lost capability, they have lost confidence too.

—At the end of the day, no matter what they say, the Israelis will probably exchange prisoners with Hezbollah in some form or other.

—If Hezbollah hits Tel Aviv, all bets are off and the political/diplomatic deck gets shuffled again.

08/04 12:47 PMShare