I've been developing a slow ulcer over the recent Lebanon fiasco. Nevertheless, I haven't posted about it simply because I've been under-informed while on the road. Until a couple of days ago, my only source of information was European CNN, manned entirely by clueless Brits with weird accents and weirder first names (Fionnualla?). As a friend of mine from Moscow once pointed out, at least with Pravda, if you had the decoder you could figure out what was going on. CNN is simply an informationless channel.

Anyway, I was predisposed to a particular narrative and, now that I have the basic facts, I think I get it. Two separate wars were fought. The war that was fought by the soldiers on the ground was to free our prisoners and destroy Hizballah. The soldiers were motivated and, in many many cases, downright heroic. Unfortunately, the war they were fighting failed. Israel did not control the timing of the war: the timing of its start, its escalation and its ending were all determined by others. As a result, no orderly progression of intermediate objectives was ever established. In the end, we sued for a ceasefire having achieved none of our ultimate objectives: the prisoners were not freed, rocket fire on the North is merely on hold and the forces who will move in to South Lebanon will hamper us but not Hizballah.

The reason things played out this way is that Olmert et al were fighting an entirely different war than the people were -- they were fighting for European and American objectives, not (entirely) Israeli ones. In the European and American world views, there are two kinds of Arabs: those that are wedded to a dangerous and threatening Islamist ideology and those you can do business with. There are subtleties: the dividing line between the two groups is different for Europeans and Americans. Europeans (think: French) will do business with pretty much anybody while the Americans set the bar slightly higher -- Saudi Arabian monarchs, Egyptian dictators, Iraqi Shiites, Fatah and so forth are the good guys in this narrative but Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hizballah are bad. The word "democracy" should not enter your conscousness here; even for the Americans the only question is whether there's anybody on the other end sane enough to talk to. For the Europeans and Americans, the purpose of this war was to strengthen the Lebanese government, who - from this point of view - are the good guys.

Let's not beat around the bush here. Olmert, Livni, Halutz et al all got where they are by ass-licking and horse-trading. Sharon's stroke simply cut out the middle man. From the beginning their objective was simply to do the American's bidding and empower the Lebanese government. In short, for them this war was not even diplomacy by other means -- it was diplomacy, period. They were afraid that executing the war properly, actually fighting to win, could weaken the Lebanese government or diminish the chances that it would quickly replace us in the South. The early reliance on air strikes against infrastructure (an American tactic), the delay in sending in massive ground troops, the subordination of the timing of attacks to diplomatic maneuvers were all consequences of a definition of victory that is unsuited to the proper execution of a war.

In the end, even the American objective of weakening Iran in Lebanon was not achieved. Honestly, I don't now how much this matters. The next round was inevitable regardless of the outcome in this round and in that round Iran and the U.S. won't be able to continue hiding behind proxies.

As for politics, it is very hard to convince MKs to bring down a government if their chances of personally getting re-elected are slim -- and the nobodies in Kadima are almost all in that category. The likeliest short-term outcome is that Olmert will try to strengthen himself by bringing some right-wing parties into his coalition. (They should stay out and let him disintegrate but I doubt they will.) The long-term consequences will be far greater. This war has made all the more obvious how wide is the yawning gap between the patriots who fight for their country and the craven, cynical opportunists who run it. But that's fodder for future posts.