Operation Contradiction

I've gotten to the point where I've read so much about the Israel-Hezbollah situation, and events on the ground are so fluid, that I'm having a hard time making sense of what's happening. Or maybe the media is just breathlessly reporting new news without understanding the sequence of events.

First I read that Palestine has agreed to a deal to release their hostage and stop rocket attacks in exchange for future prisoner releases from Israel. But there's some fine print:

The deal, agreed on Sunday, is to halt the rocket attacks in return for a cessation of Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip, and to release Corporal Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier captured on June 25, in exchange for the freeing of Palestinian prisoners at some point in the future.

An adviser to Mr Abbas told the Guardian that all Palestinian politicians were united on the need to free the Israeli soldier and stop all violence in Gaza, but the obstacles were the Israeli government and the Hamas leadership in Damascus.

"The problem is that both Islamic Jihad and Hamas have to seek the advice of their political bureaux in Damascus and we are waiting for their response," he said.

So there's a deal in place, only the Israeli government hasn't agreed, and Hamas (the Palestinian government, at least in Parliament) hasn't agreed. Maybe that non-deal deal is why 23 died in Gaza today. The incursions into Gaza are being overshadowed by the Lebanese war, but they are ongoing.

Similarly, I read in one paper that Hezbollah is ready to move into the "post-Haifa phase" of combat, targeting cities further into Israel, and yet at the same time I read that another Hezbollah leader is surprised by the ferocity of the Israeli repsonse. One is a confident tone, the other not so much. That probably reflects the full range of opinion in the organization, actually. I don't know that Hezbollah expected this, and I don't know that their leader Nasrallah even courted this. It feels like a few radicals within the organization free-lanced this one, and Hezbollah had no choice but to back them up.

The fighting is clearly intensifying, as the international conference on Lebanon failed to broker a deal, and 9 Israeli troops died trying to take a town that the IDF claimed to have taken on Monday. Then there was this confusion.

There's much discussion of putting a multinational, NATO-led force in southern Lebanon as part of a ceasefire agreement in the Israel-Lebanon conflict, but Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, according to a story in the Washington Post, has said that she does "not think that it is anticipated that U.S. ground forces . . . are expected for that force." However, a well-connected former CIA officer has told me that the Bush Administration is in fact considering exactly such a deployment.

Good thing we're not involved in any other conflicts and have the troops to spare to the effort. And good thing we're not already seen as an occupier anywhere else in the Middle East, wouldn't want to give the wrong impression.

Perhaps the best source of news I've read today comes from this anecdotal account from the great Billmon:

My friend is an old Middle East hand who has some good sources on the Israeli side, mostly ex-military and ex-Mossad, plus some contacts among the Bush I realist crowd -- although of course they're not in government any more either.

He didn't have any secret dope on what the next military or diplomatic moves will be -- it seems to be purely day-to-day now -- but he DID get a clear sense that the Americans and the Israelis both understand now that they are in serious danger of losing the war.

They're freaking out about this, of course, because they're deathly afraid that if Israel is seen to fail, and fail badly, against Hizbullah, everybody and their Palestinian uncle will get it into their heads that they can take a crack at the Zionist entity. (The tough guy realists see this as a disaster in its own right; the "cry and shoot" gang frets the IDF will have to pound the West Bank and Gaza even harder to re-establish the balance of terror. Either way, it's an unacceptable outcome.)

Plan B, then, is to try to "make something happen" on the ground -- although what, exactly, isn't clear. Today it was killing a low-level Hizbullah leader (in a border village they supposedly secured three days ago) and pumping him up as a big catch (shades of Zarqawi's 28,000 "lieutenants".) Tomorrow it will be something else -- maybe the capture of the "terror capital" of south Lebanon, beautiful downtown Bint Jbeil.

But, of course, I'm getting the impression from reading between the lines of the official propaganda that the IDF is struggling just to produce these little symbolic victories -- they seem to be "securing" the same objectives over and over again. So my guess is that the internal debate will now turn to how many more divisions to commit to the battle, how far north to push, etc. My friend can't tell, nor can I, if the primary objective is still to smash the hell out of Hizbullah, or whether the Israelis are just looking to save a little face.

I think it's premature to talk about losing a war that's barely begun. But I've no doubt that the PERCEPTION could be there among a certain paranoiac element in the IDF or our government (which needs lots and lots of victories to counteract the negatives). At any rate, this mentality of losing - more than losing itself, whatever losing would mean in such a conflict - could be the worst thing that could happen for the future of Israel.