Iran's lack of judgement most alarming part of latest crisis - 20 July 2006

The most alarming part of the latest Middle East crisis is what it says about the nature of the present regime in Tehran. The most important aspect is what is to be done with Lebanon once the fighting stops.

Of all the participants in the crisis, Israel’s position is the easiest to fathom. It wishes to force the Palestinians to into a ceasefire that holds, while it resumes its unilateral withdrawal from Palestinian territories. It wants to destroy the power of Hezbollah in Lebanon and force the Lebanese government and army to take responsibility for security in south Lebanon and along the border with Israel (even though Lebanon’s army is 50% Hezbollah, Israel believes that the fact that they are in Lebanese Army uniforms limits their ability to act independently of official Lebanese policy). It wants to prevent any return of Syrian power to Lebanon and to keep Damascus isolated. And it wants the major powers to take the toughest possible line with Iran over its nuclear programme.

For the most part it is achieving these goals, albeit at some reputational cost. For a start, Hezbollah’s strength is being seriously degraded. It is thought that about 30% of Hezbollah’s operational capabilities and about 50% of its rockets (in particular the Fajr rocket launchers) has been destroyed. Nor is that the end of it. The full IDF plan for reducing Hezbollah has not yet been completed. It is still going after some 600 Hezbollah storage bunkers, and it is still attempting to decapitate the organization.

Israeli sources say that the IDF is targeting the 12 most senior members of the group, who are thought to be hiding in bunkers in the Dahiya quarter of southern Beirut. These targets include Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah, Ibrahim Akil, and Imad Mughniye.

There have even been some diplomatic gains for Israel, with the G-8’s statement on the crisis being seen as a significant achievement as it provided support for Israel’s basic position that Hezbollah and Hamas should stop launching attacks on Israel and return the abducted soldiers. It also called on the Lebanese government to implement UN Security Council Resolution 1559, which calls for Beirut to disarm Hezbollah.

As one of the Haaretz newspaper’s columnists put it: "It took nearly 40 years for Israel to be seen in a just war…a global diplomatic bonanza. This is the second time since 1948 that Israel has been defending its territory rather than occupied territory, or, as in 1956, engaging in a fraudulent conspiracy to safeguard the interests of the West in the region. This time it’s classic: blows of justice aimed at an organization that is ignoring an agreement over an international border, and is running rampant under the protection of its government and those who pull its strings from Damascus and Tehran."

There has also been very strong domestic support (86%) for Ehud Olmert’s government and the drive to destroy Hezbollah’s power.

On the other hand, the belief in the West and elsewhere that Israel tends to react to attacks with disproportionate force has been strengthened. And Hezbollah’s success in attacking targets deep inside Israel, and even an Israeli naval ship, has dented its image of military invulnerability. Furthermore, everyone living north of the Haifa to Afula line, that is 20% of the Israeli population, is having their lives hugely disrupted.

The Arab position is more complex. Arab public opinion is strongly behind Hezbollah and Hamas, but the principal Sunni Arab powers of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt are opposed to any increase in Iranian power and influence in the Arab world, and they particularly do not want the confrontation between Israel and Hezbollah to distract the major powers from the need to curb Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

Saudi Arabia has come out with a surprisingly public criticism of Hezbollah, despite (or perhaps because) of the fact that Arab public opinion is rallying behind Hezbollah and Hamas. Arab public opinion knows that these non-state actors are doing what their governments (with the very marginal exception of Saddam Hussein) have singularly failed to do since 1973: inflict military pain on Israel.

Saudi clerics have been deployed to counter public support for Hezbollah, with leading hardline cleric Nasser al-Omar saying: "We should not raise our hand in respect to just anyone who fights the Israeli-American forces. Hezbollah is not fighting on behalf of Sunni Muslims in Palestine or elsewhere, it is a tool in the hands of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard let loose to realise an Iranian agenda."

Syria is a separate case. It is close to Hezbollah and has allowed Iran to use Syria as a conduit for arms supplies to Hezbollah. But Bashar Assad has lost control of the process. His father Hafez used Hezbollah to try to force Israel into negotiations over the Golan Heights. Bashar is just being used by Hezbollah and Iran. This weakness alarms Israel and could lead to a review of policies towards Damascus. Regime change will be climbing up the agenda again.

Which brings us to Iran. There has been much speculation over the degree to which Iran intended to precipitate the current crisis. There has also been almost opposite speculation that Iran intentionally sparked the crisis to divert attention from its nuclear programme by precipitating a clash on the Lebanon-Israel border. This latter suggestion seems unlikely, as the one certain result of all this has been to reinforce in Western and Israeli minds just how dangerous the current regime in Tehran is.

Our view is that the crisis is further proof that Iran under President Ahmadinejad is a far less predictable - therefore far more dangerous - proposition than under any previous leader of revolutionary Iran since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini. The surprisingly pragmatic statecraft that has often characterized Iranian foreign policy has been replaced by something much less predictable.

Iran’s strategic position has been immeasurably strengthened by the fall of Saddam Hussein, and the sensible and pragmatic policy would be to consolidate those gains. Instead it has precipitated a crisis, which far from strengthening its position could lead to the near destruction of Hezbollah, the increasing isolation of Syria (its only Arab ally outside of Iraq), a hardening of Western (and of course Israeli) opinion against its nuclear programme, and the open animosity of the main Sunni Arab powers.

The only gain to Iran will be increased support on the Arab street, but that is not something that can be easily banked, and does not in any case outweigh the other losses.

It would seem, therefore, that Iran has done Israel a considerable favour. It has damaged its own international standing even further, and it has provided a justification for attacking Hezbollah that is satisfactory to almost all the leaders that count (except for France’s President Chirac).

But the problem, as ever, is the aftermath. When Israel withdrew its forces from southern Lebanon in 2000, the Lebanese government was unable to reassert its authority and allowed Hezbollah to establish a state-within-a-state. It will be the same this time around unless there is a concerted international effort (based on Saudi Arabian money and Western military force) to bolster the Lebanese state.

The nightmare scenario, for Israel, is that the Hezbollah leadership survives the onslaught intact and emerges from its bunkers bloodied but unbowed. Hezbollah’s rank-and-file will certainly survive as, like all guerrilla armies faced by overwhelming conventional force, it has just melted away to avoid a confrontation it cannot win. And although its arsenal will have been seriously depleted, if Hezbollah still controls southern Lebanon more or less unmolested by the Lebanese state, it can rebuild with the help of Syria and Iran. In the meantime its reputation as the only organization capable of taking on the Israeli state and surviving will have been enhanced throughout the Arab world - and so, too, to the horror of Riyadh, Cairo, and Amman, will Tehran’s reputation. JdeC.

NOTE: The crisis in Lebanon has not come out of the blue. As the following chronology shows, it is the end result of six months rising tensions.

- 25 January: Hamas wins Palestinian parliamentary elections

- 30 January: Hamas rejects the call from the Mideast Quartet for it to renounce violence and recognize Israel.

- 19 February: Israel halts its monthly transfer of millions of dollars to the Palestinian Authority ahead of the formation of a Hamas-led government.

- 29 March: Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh takes office.

- 10 April: Hamas says that it considers Israel’s severing of contacts with the Palestinian government to be "a declaration of war". The EU severs political contacts.

- 9 June: Hamas’s armed wing calls off its 16-month truce following the killing of seven family members on a Gaza beach by Israeli shells.

- 25 June: Militants from Gaza launch a raid into Israel and capture Corporal Gilad Shalit.

- 28 June: Israeli forces push back into Gaza.

- 29 June: Israeli troops in the West Bank arrest a third of the Palestinian cabinet and more than 20 Hamas parliamentarians.

- 3 July: Israeli forces move into northern Gaza. Three days later the offensive is intensified after Hamas fires a rocket at the Israeli city of Ashkelon for the first time.

- 8 July: Prime Minister Haniyeh calls for a ceasefire with Israel. Israel says that Hamas must first free Corporal Shalit.

- 12 July: Hezbollah guerrillas capture two Israeli soldiers and kill up to eight in an attack across the Lebanese border.

- 13 July: Israeli aircraft bomb runways at Beirut airport, and the navy blockades Lebanese ports.

- 14 July: Israeli warplanes attack the Beirut-Damascus highway. The air and sea blockade is intensified.

- 15 July: An Israeli missile in southern Lebanon kills 20, including 15 children.

- 16 July: Hezbollah rockets kill eight in the Israeli city of Haifa, bringing to 12 the number of Israelis killed.

- Israel attacks Beirut’s Shi’ite southern suburbs.

- Over 110 people have been killed in the five-day offensive.