War I: An Ominous Turning Point in the Mideast

A woman is rescued after a Hezbollah rocket kills three in Haifa

I have said from the outset of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict that it is not merely another chapter in the struggle between Israel and its historic foes for land and power, but rather a new chapter in the War on Terrorism. And, as it increasingly appears, an ominous turning point, as well.

Just as the Hamdan vs. Rumsfeld ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court was a turning point in the application of war conventions in the age of global terrorism, the Israel-Hezbollah conflict is a turning point in what a non-state terrorist entity is capable of doing.

This comes crashing home -- literally in the rocket attacks on Haifa and other Israeli targets -- as we find out that Hezbollah is much better organized and has an arsenal supplied by Iran and Syria that is deeper and much more sophisticated and than had been tought.

Which raises the horrifying -- if inevitable -- prospect that a non-state terrorist entity can move beyond imposing its will on weaklings like Lebanon and take on a nation like Israel.

Matthew Stannard addresses this emerging new order in a San Francisco Chronicle article in which he cites military analysts, including William Lind, director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congree Foundation, a Washington think tank.

Says Lind:

I think it's something new, in that a non-state organization has undertaken a major, sustained, broad-scale, and so far, the successful military offensive against a state. What changes here . . . is that non-state forces are able to challenge states militarily -- and win.

Warfare as we have known it -- and as it is being employed in the conventional sense by the U.S. in Iraq and by Israel in Lebanon, both against entrenched guerrilla forces -- seems more passé by the day.

The tide may yet turn in these theaters, but the U.S.'s chronic inability to fight counterinsurgency warfare and Israel's inability to stop rocket attacks are ominous indeed.

Let's take a brief pause here to note that the harsh criticism of Defense Secretary Rumsfeld's conduct of the war in Iraq has been justified -- up to a point.

That point does include his efforts to wean the Army brass from conventional war to so-called assymetrical war against guerrilla and terrorist forces. Rummy usually gets his way, but it's safe to say they while he tried here he failed and we're all worse for it.

'ALAS WAR, TO OTHERS A REAL DECLARATION OF PEACE'

No less a light than philosopher-writer Bernard-Henri Levy also notes that the Israel-Hebollah smackdown is not yet another chapter in the Same Old Same Old and also places it in an ominous context in a New York Times Magazine essay:

Israel did not go to war because its borders had been violated. It did not send its planes over southern Lebanon for the pleasure of punishing a country that permitted Hezbollah to construct its state-within-a-state. It reacted with such vigor because the Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map and his drive for a nuclear weapon came simultaneously with the provocations of Hamas and Hezbollah. The conjunction, for the first time, of a clearly annihilating will with the weapons to go with it created a new situation. We should listen to the Israelis when they tell us they had no other choice anymore. We should listen to Zivit Seri tell us, in front of a crushed building whose concrete slabs are balancing on tips of twisted metal, that, for Israel, it was five minutes to midnight.

This analysis will be lost on the Israel baiters and Jew haters who sees Israel's forays into Lebanon as overreactions, but the stakes are much greater.

Levy concludes his essay by writing about Simon, an 82-year-old Israeli:

[T]he present impasse, far from discouraging him, seems mysteriously to stimulate him. So I listen to him. I listen to this Wise Man of Israel explain to me that his country must simultaneously “win this war,” foil this “quartet of evil” made up by Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah and clear the way for “paths of speech and dialogue” that will, one day, lead the Middle East somewhere. And as I listen to him, and let myself be lulled by his oft-repeated, indefinite prophecies, I find that, today, for some reason, those prophecies have a new coefficient of obviousness and force. I, too, catch myself imagining the glory of a Jewish state that would dare, at the same time, almost in the same gesture and with the same movement, to deliver two things at once: to some, alas, war; to others, a real declaration of peace that would be recognized as such and accepted.

(Hat tip to Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Dish for the head's up on Levy.)