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The threat of war

Israel’s campaign in Lebanon is supposed to defeat Hizbullah, but risks destabilising Lebanon and the region as a whole

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FOR days the pictures from both sides of the Israel-Lebanon border have been unremittingly familiar: buildings bombed to rubble, corpses and grief, refugees fleeing to safer areas. Since Hizbullah, the Shia militant party that controls southern Lebanon, kidnapped two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid last week, Israel has been bombing targets across Lebanon, while Hizbullah rockets have fallen on Israel’s northern towns, including the large port city of Haifa. At least 140 Lebanese and 24 Israelis have so far died.

Israel’s goals are to destroy Hizbullah’s military capabilities and, through the civilian population, to put pressure on the Lebanese government, of which Hizbullah forms part, to disarm Hizbullah. Though Israel has aimed most of its bombs at Hizbullah’s rocket launching facilities in southern Lebanon, it has also hammered a residential neighbourhood of Beirut where Hizbullah leaders live and work, hit the airport and highway to Damascus and blockaded the ports. The idea is both to make it harder to get the kidnapped soldiers out of the country and to make ordinary Lebanese feel the consequences of Hizbullah’s actions.

Some European countries have condemned Israel’s response as “disproportionate”, though the United States has largely stuck by it. One question is whether Israel will achieve its goals. In Gaza, where Palestinian militants are holding a soldier they captured late last month, Israel has been adopting a similar strategy: simultaneously trying to secure his release and stamp out the firing of Qassam rockets into Israel. It has attacked militant leaders, shelling the areas where rockets are launched, while also bombing public infrastructure and government buildings in an attempt to put pressure on the Palestinians’ Hamas-run government. So far it is showing little result: although nearly 90 Palestinians have been killed, more Qassams are falling, the soldier remains in captivity, public support for Hamas is steady if not growing, and the government (or what is left of it after a wave of arrests in the West Bank) remains defiant.

The Lebanese, unlike the Palestinians, can at least clearly blame Hizbullah for lighting the fuse after several years of relative calm. But Israel is treading a fine line between alienating the Lebanese from Hizbullah and uniting them against their outside aggressor. And if Israel cannot achieve a decisive victory against Hizbullah with air power, and has to add ground forces, it risks getting bogged down in southern Lebanon once again.

A second question is whether Israel has fallen for a Hizbullah trap. There is much speculation about whether Hizbullah expected Israel’s fierce response. There are reasons to think it did not. Israel had responded to previous kidnappings by agreeing to prisoner exchanges. Hizbullah may have been hoping to secure the release of three prisoners held in Israel. Since 2000 Israel had kept its responses to Hizbullah encroachments on the border somewhat restrained, not wanting to open up a war on its northern border while it was fighting against the Palestinians’ intifada.

Perhaps, with the help of both domestic pressure in Lebanon and a new international peacekeeping force—something that world leaders meeting in St Petersburg agreed to ask the UN to look into—Hizbullah will be beaten back, at least from the south, restoring a fragile calm.

On the other hand, the timing of Hizbullah’s kidnap may have been designed precisely to trigger an Israeli backlash: having gone in so heavy in Gaza in response to the first kidnapping, Israel could hardly stand by and watch as two more soldiers disappeared. Many suspect Hizbullah wants to drag Israel into a war on two fronts, perhaps with the backing of Syria and Iran. These two countries provide financial and material help to both Hamas and Hizbullah and they benefit from chaos and instability in the region. If the fighting prompts not Hizbullah’s capitulation but a breakdown in the fragile balance of power in Lebanon, triggering another of the country’s periodic civil wars, the conflict could spread wider.

Copyright © 2006 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.