[Peace-discuss] New Yorker Article on Lebanon

[Chuck Minne]

Watching Lebanon
  
        By Seymour M. Hersh
        The New Yorker

        21 August 2006 Issue

        In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on
    July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack
    on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed
    strangely passive. "It's a moment of clarification," President
    George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July
    16th. "It's now become clear why we don't have peace in the Middle
    East." He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its
    supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the "root causes of
    instability," and subsequently said that it was up to those
    countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from
    several governments for the United States to take the lead in
    negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza
    Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until "the conditions
    are conducive."

        The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the
    planning of Israel's retaliatory attacks. President Bush and
    Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former
    intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful
    Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah's heavily
    fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in
    Lebanon could ease Israel's security concerns and also serve as a
    prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran's
    nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.

        Israeli military and intelligence experts I spoke to emphasized
    that the country's immediate security issues were reason enough to
    confront Hezbollah, regardless of what the Bush Administration
    wanted. Shabtai Shavit, a national-security adviser to the Knesset
    who headed the Mossad, Israel's foreign-intelligence service, from
    1989 to 1996, told me, "We do what we think is best for us, and if
    it happens to meet America's requirements, that's just part of a
    relationship between two friends. Hezbollah is armed to the teeth
    and trained in the most advanced technology of guerrilla warfare. It
    was just a matter of time. We had to address it."

        Hezbollah is seen by Israelis as a profound threat - a terrorist
    organization, operating on their border, with a military arsenal
    that, with help from Iran and Syria, has grown stronger since the
    Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon ended, in 2000. Hezbollah's
    leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has said he does not believe that
    Israel is a "legal state." Israeli intelligence estimated at the
    outset of the air war that Hezbollah had roughly five hundred
    medium-range Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets and a few dozen long-range
    Zelzal rockets; the Zelzals, with a range of about two hundred
    kilometres, could reach Tel Aviv. (One rocket hit Haifa the day
    after the kidnappings.) It also has more than twelve thousand
    shorter-range rockets. Since the conflict began, more than three
    thousand of these have been fired at Israel.

        According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current
    thinking of both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had
    devised a plan for attacking Hezbollah - and shared it with Bush
    Administration officials - well before the July 12th kidnappings.
    "It's not that the Israelis had a trap that Hezbollah walked into,"
    he said, "but there was a strong feeling in the White House that
    sooner or later the Israelis were going to do it."

        The Middle East expert said that the Administration had several
    reasons for supporting the Israeli bombing campaign. Within the
    State Department, it was seen as a way to strengthen the Lebanese
    government so that it could assert its authority over the south of
    the country, much of which is controlled by Hezbollah. He went on,
    "The White House was more focussed on stripping Hezbollah of its
    missiles, because, if there was to be a military option against
    Iran's nuclear facilities, it had to get rid of the weapons that
    Hezbollah could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush
    wanted both. Bush was going after Iran, as part of the Axis of Evil,
    and its nuclear sites, and he was interested in going after
    Hezbollah as part of his interest in democratization, with Lebanon
    as one of the crown jewels of Middle East democracy."

        Administration officials denied that they knew of Israel's plan
    for the air war. The White House did not respond to a detailed list
    of questions. In response to a separate request, a National Security
    Council spokesman said, "Prior to Hezbollah's attack on Israel, the
    Israeli government gave no official in Washington any reason to
    believe that Israel was planning to attack. Even after the July 12th
    attack, we did not know what the Israeli plans were." A Pentagon
    spokesman said, "The United States government remains committed to a
    diplomatic solution to the problem of Iran's clandestine nuclear
    weapons program," and denied the story, as did a State Department
    spokesman.

        The United States and Israel have shared intelligence and
    enjoyed close military coöperation for decades, but early this
    spring, according to a former senior intelligence official,
    high-level planners from the U.S. Air Force - under pressure from
    the White House to develop a war plan for a decisive strike against
    Iran's nuclear facilities - began consulting with their counterparts
    in the Israeli Air Force.

        "The big question for our Air Force was how to hit a series of
    hard targets in Iran successfully," the former senior intelligence
    official said. "Who is the closest ally of the U.S. Air Force in its
    planning? It's not Congo - it's Israel. Everybody knows that Iranian
    engineers have been advising Hezbollah on tunnels and underground
    gun emplacements. And so the Air Force went to the Israelis with
    some new tactics and said to them, 'Let's concentrate on the bombing
    and share what we have on Iran and what you have on Lebanon.' " The
    discussions reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of
    Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he said.

        "The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many
    benefits," a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel
    said. "Why oppose it? We'll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles,
    tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran."

        A Pentagon consultant said that the Bush White House "has been
    agitating for some time to find a reason for a preëmptive blow
    against Hezbollah." He added, "It was our intent to have Hezbollah
    diminished, and now we have someone else doing it." (As this article
    went to press, the United Nations Security Council passed a
    ceasefire resolution, although it was unclear if it would change the
    situation on the ground.)

        According to Richard Armitage, who served as Deputy Secretary of
    State in Bush's first term - and who, in 2002, said that Hezbollah
    "may be the A team of terrorists" - Israel's campaign in Lebanon,
    which has faced unexpected difficulties and widespread criticism,
    may, in the end, serve as a warning to the White House about Iran.
    "If the most dominant military force in the region - the Israel
    Defense Forces - can't pacify a country like Lebanon, with a
    population of four million, you should think carefully about taking
    that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population of
    seventy million," Armitage said. "The only thing that the bombing
    has achieved so far is to unite the population against the Israelis."

        Several current and former officials involved in the Middle East
    told me that Israel viewed the soldiers' kidnapping as the opportune
    moment to begin its planned military campaign against Hezbollah.
    "Hezbollah, like clockwork, was instigating something small every
    month or two," the U.S. government consultant with ties to Israel
    said. Two weeks earlier, in late June, members of Hamas, the
    Palestinian group, had tunnelled under the barrier separating
    southern Gaza from Israel and captured an Israeli soldier. Hamas
    also had lobbed a series of rockets at Israeli towns near the border
    with Gaza. In response, Israel had initiated an extensive bombing
    campaign and reoccupied parts of Gaza.

        The Pentagon consultant noted that there had also been
    cross-border incidents involving Israel and Hezbollah, in both
    directions, for some time. "They've been sniping at each other," he
    said. "Either side could have pointed to some incident and said 'We
    have to go to war with these guys' - because they were already at war."

        David Siegel, the spokesman at the Israeli Embassy in
    Washington, said that the Israeli Air Force had not been seeking a
    reason to attack Hezbollah. "We did not plan the campaign. That
    decision was forced on us." There were ongoing alerts that Hezbollah
    "was pressing to go on the attack," Siegel said. "Hezbollah attacks
    every two or three months," but the kidnapping of the soldiers
    raised the stakes.

        In interviews, several Israeli academics, journalists, and
    retired military and intelligence officers all made one point: they
    believed that the Israeli leadership, and not Washington, had
    decided that it would go to war with Hezbollah. Opinion polls showed
    that a broad spectrum of Israelis supported that choice. "The
    neocons in Washington may be happy, but Israel did not need to be
    pushed, because Israel has been wanting to get rid of Hezbollah,"
    Yossi Melman, a journalist for the newspaper Ha'aretz, who has
    written several books about the Israeli intelligence community,
    said. "By provoking Israel, Hezbollah provided that opportunity."

        "We were facing a dilemma," an Israeli official said. Prime
    Minister Ehud Olmert "had to decide whether to go for a local
    response, which we always do, or for a comprehensive response - to
    really take on Hezbollah once and for all." Olmert made his
    decision, the official said, only after a series of Israeli rescue
    efforts failed.

        The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel told
    me, however, that, from Israel's perspective, the decision to take
    strong action had become inevitable weeks earlier, after the Israeli
    Army's signals intelligence group, known as Unit 8200, picked up
    bellicose intercepts in late spring and early summer, involving
    Hamas, Hezbollah, and Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader now living in
    Damascus.

        One intercept was of a meeting in late May of the Hamas
    political and military leadership, with Meshal participating by
    telephone. "Hamas believed the call from Damascus was scrambled, but
    Israel had broken the code," the consultant said. For almost a year
    before its victory in the Palestinian elections in January, Hamas
    had curtailed its terrorist activities. In the late May intercepted
    conversation, the consultant told me, the Hamas leadership said that
    "they got no benefit from it, and were losing standing among the
    Palestinian population." The conclusion, he said, was " 'Let's go
    back into the terror business and then try and wrestle concessions
    from the Israeli government.' " The consultant told me that the U.S.
    and Israel agreed that if the Hamas leadership did so, and if
    Nasrallah backed them up, there should be "a full-scale response."
    In the next several weeks, when Hamas began digging the tunnel into
    Israel, the consultant said, Unit 8200 "picked up signals
    intelligence involving Hamas, Syria, and Hezbollah, saying, in
    essence, that they wanted Hezbollah to 'warm up' the north." In one
    intercept, the consultant said, Nasrallah referred to Olmert and
    Defense Minister Amir Peretz "as seeming to be weak," in comparison
    with the former Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak, who had
    extensive military experience, and said "he thought Israel would
    respond in a small-scale, local way, as they had in the past."

        Earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, the U.S.
    government consultant said, several Israeli officials visited
    Washington, separately, "to get a green light for the bombing
    operation and to find out how much the United States would bear."
    The consultant added, "Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be
    sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the
    Middle East desk of the National Security Council." After that,
    "persuading Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice was on board,"
    the consultant said.

        The initial plan, as outlined by the Israelis, called for a
    major bombing campaign in response to the next Hezbollah
    provocation, according to the Middle East expert with knowledge of
    U.S. and Israeli thinking. Israel believed that, by targeting
    Lebanon's infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and even
    the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade
    Lebanon's large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against
    Hezbollah, according to the former senior intelligence official. The
    airport, highways, and bridges, among other things, have been hit in
    the bombing campaign. The Israeli Air Force had flown almost nine
    thousand missions as of last week. (David Siegel, the Israeli
    spokesman, said that Israel had targeted only sites connected to
    Hezbollah; the bombing of bridges and roads was meant to prevent the
    transport of weapons.)

        The Israeli plan, according to the former senior intelligence
    official, was "the mirror image of what the United States has been
    planning for Iran." (The initial U.S. Air Force proposals for an air
    attack to destroy Iran's nuclear capacity, which included the option
    of intense bombing of civilian infrastructure targets inside Iran,
    have been resisted by the top leadership of the Army, the Navy, and
    the Marine Corps, according to current and former officials. They
    argue that the Air Force plan will not work and will inevitably
    lead, as in the Israeli war with Hezbollah, to the insertion of
    troops on the ground.)

        Uzi Arad, who served for more than two decades in the Mossad,
    told me that to the best of his knowledge the contacts between the
    Israeli and U.S. governments were routine, and that, "in all my
    meetings and conversations with government officials, never once did
    I hear anyone refer to prior coördination with the United States."
    He was troubled by one issue - the speed with which the Olmert
    government went to war. "For the life of me, I've never seen a
    decision to go to war taken so speedily," he said. "We usually go
    through long analyses."

        The key military planner was Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the
    I.D.F. chief of staff, who, during a career in the Israeli Air
    Force, worked on contingency planning for an air war with Iran.
    Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem, and Peretz, a former labor
    leader, could not match his experience and expertise.

        In the early discussions with American officials, I was told by
    the Middle East expert and the government consultant, the Israelis
    repeatedly pointed to the war in Kosovo as an example of what Israel
    would try to achieve. The NATO forces commanded by U.S. Army General
    Wesley Clark methodically bombed and strafed not only military
    targets but tunnels, bridges, and roads, in Kosovo and elsewhere in
    Serbia, for seventy-eight days before forcing Serbian forces to
    withdraw from Kosovo. "Israel studied the Kosovo war as its role
    model," the government consultant said. "The Israelis told Condi
    Rice, 'You did it in about seventy days, but we need half of that -
    thirty-five days.' "

        There are, of course, vast differences between Lebanon and
    Kosovo. Clark, who retired from the military in 2000 and
    unsuccessfully ran as a Democrat for the Presidency in 2004, took
    issue with the analogy: "If it's true that the Israeli campaign is
    based on the American approach in Kosovo, then it missed the point.
    Ours was to use force to obtain a diplomatic objective - it was not
    about killing people." Clark noted in a 2001 book, "Waging Modern
    War," that it was the threat of a possible ground invasion as well
    as the bombing that forced the Serbs to end the war. He told me, "In
    my experience, air campaigns have to be backed, ultimately, by the
    will and capability to finish the job on the ground."

        Kosovo has been cited publicly by Israeli officials and
    journalists since the war began. On August 6th, Prime Minister
    Olmert, responding to European condemnation of the deaths of
    Lebanese civilians, said, "Where do they get the right to preach to
    Israel? European countries attacked Kosovo and killed ten thousand
    civilians. Ten thousand! And none of these countries had to suffer
    before that from a single rocket. I'm not saying it was wrong to
    intervene in Kosovo. But please: don't preach to us about the
    treatment of civilians." (Human Rights Watch estimated the number of
    civilians killed in the NATO bombing to be five hundred; the
    Yugoslav government put the number between twelve hundred and five
    thousand.)

        Cheney's office supported the Israeli plan, as did Elliott
    Abrams, a deputy national-security adviser, according to several
    former and current officials. (A spokesman for the N.S.C. denied
    that Abrams had done so.) They believed that Israel should move
    quickly in its air war against Hezbollah. A former intelligence
    officer said, "We told Israel, 'Look, if you guys have to go, we're
    behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than
    later - the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and
    plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.' "

        Cheney's point, the former senior intelligence official said,
    was "What if the Israelis execute their part of this first, and it's
    really successful? It'd be great. We can learn what to do in Iran by
    watching what the Israelis do in Lebanon."

        The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about
    Hezbollah and Iran is being mishandled by the White House the same
    way intelligence had been when, in 2002 and early 2003, the
    Administration was making the case that Iraq had weapons of mass
    destruction. "The big complaint now in the intelligence community is
    that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top -
    at the insistence of the White House - and not being analyzed at
    all, or scarcely," he said. "It's an awful policy and violates all
    of the N.S.A.'s strictures, and if you complain about it you're
    out," he said. "Cheney had a strong hand in this."

        The long-term Administration goal was to help set up a Sunni
    Arab coalition - including countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and
    Egypt - that would join the United States and Europe to pressure the
    ruling Shiite mullahs in Iran. "But the thought behind that plan was
    that Israel would defeat Hezbollah, not lose to it," the consultant
    with close ties to Israel said. Some officials in Cheney's office
    and at the N.S.C. had become convinced, on the basis of private
    talks, that those nations would moderate their public criticism of
    Israel and blame Hezbollah for creating the crisis that led to war.
    Although they did so at first, they shifted their position in the
    wake of public protests in their countries about the Israeli
    bombing. The White House was clearly disappointed when, late last
    month, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, came to
    Washington and, at a meeting with Bush, called for the President to
    intervene immediately to end the war. The Washington Post reported
    that Washington had hoped to enlist moderate Arab states "in an
    effort to pressure Syria and Iran to rein in Hezbollah, but the
    Saudi move . . . seemed to cloud that initiative."

        The surprising strength of Hezbollah's resistance, and its
    continuing ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face
    of the constant Israeli bombing, the Middle East expert told me, "is
    a massive setback for those in the White House who want to use force
    in Iran. And those who argue that the bombing will create internal
    dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back."

        Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of
    Staff remain deeply concerned that the Administration will have a
    far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should,
    the former senior intelligence official said. "There is no way that
    Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this," he
    said. "When the smoke clears, they'll say it was a success, and
    they'll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran."

        In the White House, especially in the Vice-President's office,
    many officials believe that the military campaign against Hezbollah
    is working and should be carried forward. At the same time, the
    government consultant said, some policymakers in the Administration
    have concluded that the cost of the bombing to Lebanese society is
    too high. "They are telling Israel that it's time to wind down the
    attacks on infrastructure."

        Similar divisions are emerging in Israel. David Siegel, the
    Israeli spokesman, said that his country's leadership believed, as
    of early August, that the air war had been successful, and had
    destroyed more than seventy per cent of Hezbollah's medium- and
    long-range-missile launching capacity. "The problem is short-range
    missiles, without launchers, that can be shot from civilian areas
    and homes," Siegel told me. "The only way to resolve this is ground
    operations - which is why Israel would be forced to expand ground
    operations if the latest round of diplomacy doesn't work." Last
    week, however, there was evidence that the Israeli government was
    troubled by the progress of the war. In an unusual move, Major
    General Moshe Kaplinsky, Halutz's deputy, was put in charge of the
    operation, supplanting Major General Udi Adam. The worry in Israel
    is that Nasrallah might escalate the crisis by firing missiles at
    Tel Aviv. "There is a big debate over how much damage Israel should
    inflict to prevent it," the consultant said. "If Nasrallah hits Tel
    Aviv, what should Israel do? Its goal is to deter more attacks by
    telling Nasrallah that it will destroy his country if he doesn't
    stop, and to remind the Arab world that Israel can set it back
    twenty years. We're no longer playing by the same rules."

        A European intelligence officer told me, "The Israelis have been
    caught in a psychological trap. In earlier years, they had the
    belief that they could solve their problems with toughness. But now,
    with Islamic martyrdom, things have changed, and they need different
    answers. How do you scare people who love martyrdom?" The problem
    with trying to eliminate Hezbollah, the intelligence officer said,
    is the group's ties to the Shiite population in southern Lebanon,
    the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut's southern suburbs, where it operates
    schools, hospitals, a radio station, and various charities.

        A high-level American military planner told me, "We have a lot
    of vulnerability in the region, and we've talked about some of the
    effects of an Iranian or Hezbollah attack on the Saudi regime and on
    the oil infrastructure." There is special concern inside the
    Pentagon, he added, about the oil-producing nations north of the
    Strait of Hormuz. "We have to anticipate the unintended
    consequences," he told me. "Will we be able to absorb a barrel of
    oil at one hundred dollars? There is this almost comical thinking
    that you can do it all from the air, even when you're up against an
    irregular enemy with a dug-in capability. You're not going to be
    successful unless you have a ground presence, but the political
    leadership never considers the worst case. These guys only want to
    hear the best case."

        There is evidence that the Iranians were expecting the war
    against Hezbollah. Vali Nasr, an expert on Shiite Muslims and Iran,
    who is a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and also teaches
    at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey, California, said,
    "Every negative American move against Hezbollah was seen by Iran as
    part of a larger campaign against it. And Iran began to prepare for
    the showdown by supplying more sophisticated weapons to Hezbollah -
    anti-ship and anti-tank missiles - and training its fighters in
    their use. And now Hezbollah is testing Iran's new weapons. Iran
    sees the Bush Administration as trying to marginalize its regional
    role, so it fomented trouble."

        Nasr, an Iranian-American who recently published a study of the
    Sunni-Shiite divide, entitled "The Shia Revival," also said that the
    Iranian leadership believes that Washington's ultimate political
    goal is to get some international force to act as a buffer - to
    physically separate Syria and Lebanon in an effort to isolate and
    disarm Hezbollah, whose main supply route is through Syria.
    "Military action cannot bring about the desired political result,"
    Nasr said. The popularity of Iran's President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad,
    a virulent critic of Israel, is greatest in his own country. If the
    U.S. were to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, Nasr said, "you may
    end up turning Ahmadinejad into another Nasrallah - the rock star of
    the Arab street."

        Donald Rumsfeld, who is one of the Bush Administration's most
    outspoken, and powerful, officials, has said very little publicly
    about the crisis in Lebanon. His relative quiet, compared to his
    aggressive visibility in the run-up to the Iraq war, has prompted a
    debate in Washington about where he stands on the issue.

        Some current and former intelligence officials who were
    interviewed for this article believe that Rumsfeld disagrees with
    Bush and Cheney about the American role in the war between Israel
    and Hezbollah. The U.S. government consultant with close ties to
    Israel said that "there was a feeling that Rumsfeld was jaded in his
    approach to the Israeli war." He added, "Air power and the use of a
    few Special Forces had worked in Afghanistan, and he tried to do it
    again in Iraq. It was the same idea, but it didn't work. He thought
    that Hezbollah was too dug in and the Israeli attack plan would not
    work, and the last thing he wanted was another war on his shift that
    would put the American forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy."

        A Western diplomat said that he understood that Rumsfeld did not
    know all the intricacies of the war plan. "He is angry and worried
    about his troops" in Iraq, the diplomat said. Rumsfeld served in the
    White House during the last year of the war in Vietnam, from which
    American troops withdrew in 1975, "and he did not want to see
    something like this having an impact in Iraq." Rumsfeld's concern,
    the diplomat added, was that an expansion of the war into Iran could
    put the American troops in Iraq at greater risk of attacks by
    pro-Iranian Shiite militias.

        At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on August 3rd,
    Rumsfeld was less than enthusiastic about the war's implications for
    the American troops in Iraq. Asked whether the Administration was
    mindful of the war's impact on Iraq, he testified that, in his
    meetings with Bush and Condoleezza Rice, "there is a sensitivity to
    the desire to not have our country or our interests or our forces
    put at greater risk as a result of what's taking place between
    Israel and Hezbollah. . . . There are a variety of risks that we
    face in that region, and it's a difficult and delicate situation."

        The Pentagon consultant dismissed talk of a split at the top of
    the Administration, however, and said simply, "Rummy is on the team.
    He'd love to see Hezbollah degraded, but he also is a voice for less
    bombing and more innovative Israeli ground operations." The former
    senior intelligence official similarly depicted Rumsfeld as being
    "delighted that Israel is our stalking horse."

        There are also questions about the status of Condoleezza Rice.
    Her initial support for the Israeli air war against Hezbollah has
    reportedly been tempered by dismay at the effects of the attacks on
    Lebanon. The Pentagon consultant said that in early August she began
    privately "agitating" inside the Administration for permission to
    begin direct diplomatic talks with Syria - so far, without much
    success. Last week, the Times reported that Rice had directed an
    Embassy official in Damascus to meet with the Syrian foreign
    minister, though the meeting apparently yielded no results. The
    Times also reported that Rice viewed herself as "trying to be not
    only a peacemaker abroad but also a mediator among contending
    parties" within the Administration. The article pointed to a divide
    between career diplomats in the State Department and "conservatives
    in the government," including Cheney and Abrams, "who were pushing
    for strong American support for Israel."

        The Western diplomat told me his embassy believes that Abrams
    has emerged as a key policymaker on Iran, and on the current
    Hezbollah-Israeli crisis, and that Rice's role has been relatively
    diminished. Rice did not want to make her most recent diplomatic
    trip to the Middle East, the diplomat said. "She only wanted to go
    if she thought there was a real chance to get a ceasefire."

        Bush's strongest supporter in Europe continues to be British
    Prime Minister Tony Blair, but many in Blair's own Foreign Office,
    as a former diplomat said, believe that he has "gone out on a
    particular limb on this" - especially by accepting Bush's refusal to
    seek an immediate and total ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah.
    "Blair stands alone on this," the former diplomat said. "He knows
    he's a lame duck who's on the way out, but he buys it" - the Bush
    policy. "He drinks the White House Kool-Aid as much as anybody in
    Washington." The crisis will really start at the end of August, the
    diplomat added, "when the Iranians" - under a United Nations
    deadline to stop uranium enrichment - "will say no."

        Even those who continue to support Israel's war against
    Hezbollah agree that it is failing to achieve one of its main goals
    - to rally the Lebanese against Hezbollah. "Strategic bombing has
    been a failed military concept for ninety years, and yet air forces
    all over the world keep on doing it," John Arquilla, a defense
    analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me. Arquilla has been
    campaigning for more than a decade, with growing success, to change
    the way America fights terrorism. "The warfare of today is not mass
    on mass," he said. "You have to hunt like a network to defeat a
    network. Israel focussed on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when
    that did not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The
    definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing and
    expecting a different result."

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