Interventions Read Free Page B

of a popular guerrilla organization with ample means of survival and retaliation.
    On the day of the attack, I told Condoleeza Rice that I feared Israel would soon discover the limits to what could be achieved by force. There had to be a political agreement, a political understanding, I argued. Hizbollah was an organization with deep roots in Lebanese society and represented many long-standing, popular local grievances. It could not be disarmed by military means alone. But Israeli leader Ehud Olmert would have none of it. In my call with the prime minister the next day, he said that Israel was “not going to stop any military operation against Hizbollah,” but rather was going to “intensify it.”
    Olmert’s demands were, in principle, legitimate: a release of the Israeli soldiers captured in the raid, withdrawal from the border, and the complete disarmament of Hizbollah as called for in UN Security Council resolution 1559. That did not mean, however, that they were obtainable through war. Indeed, everything we knew about the history of guerrilla warfare—in the region and around the world—suggested that there would ultimately have to be a negotiated solution, no matter how long or relentlessly Israel struck Lebanese targets.
    Insisting on these conditions being met even before agreeing to a cessation of hostilities was a recipe for war without end. This much I knew from the first hours of the conflict, and over the next three weeks I took this message to anyone with power to influence the parties. Ten years of painful, drawn-out negotiations with the Palestinians and Israelis had taught me a grim lesson about the futility of killing off the first stages of a settlement between mortal foes.
    Israel was already under siege on a second front, Gaza, where Hamas had attacked an Israeli border post two weeks earlier, killing two soldiers and kidnapping a young corporal, Gilad Shalit. An Israeli leader without a military background, Olmert needed to demonstrate decisiveness and strength. And ample license was given. The United States, along with the United Kingdom, took the view that Hizbollah had given the Israelis a unique opportunity to crush what had become a state within a state in Lebanon. Washington appeared to have decided that its primary responsibility in the early stages of the conflict was to buy time for the Israeli Air Force to inflict what it hoped would be a strategic defeat on the movement.
    For an organization like Hizbollah, mere survival means victory. Ever since its founding in response to the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Hizbollah had become part of the fabric of Lebanese society—whether one liked it or not. And I made clear my own disapproval when I spoke to the Security Council one week into the conflict and condemned Hizbollah’s “deliberate targeting of Israeli population centers with hundreds of indiscriminate weapons.” I concluded that “whatever other agendas they may serve, Hizbollah’s actions, which it portrays as defending Palestinian and Lebanese interests, in fact do neither. On the contrary, they hold an entire nation hostage.”
    By not losing, Hizbollah was winning. And for Israel, much more than another battlefield victory had been gambled. The essential myth of Israel’s invincibility—its strategic deterrence of its Arab neighbors—was now at risk. As its military commanders and political leadership came to recognize their miscalculation, their tactics became ever more desperate. Over the following three weeks, Israel carried out a widespread air campaign stretching from suspected Hizbollah positions in the south to the suburbs of Beirut and every major infrastructure artery, including bridges, roads, and air and sea ports. The state of Lebanon was being crippled, and more than one thousand civilians were killed—without, however, putting a halt to Hizbollah’s indiscriminate rocket attacks. During the same