We’ve been hearing the theory that the timing of Hezbollah’s Tuesday kidnapping of the two Israeli Defense Force soldiers was planned well in advance and with coordination from Tehran or Damascus. Can you speak to that?
Oy vey. There are a lot of people in Washington trying to walk that story back right now, because it’s not true.
Hezbollah and Israel stand along this border every day observing each other through binoculars and waiting for an opportunity to kill each other. They are at war. They have been for 25 years, no one ever declared a cease-fire between them. … They stand on the border every day and just wait for an opportunity. And on Tuesday morning there were two Humvees full of Israeli soldiers, not under observation from the Israeli side, not under covering fire, sitting out there all alone. The Hezbollah militia commander just couldn’t believe it — so he went and got them.
The Israeli captain in charge of that unit knew he had really screwed up, so he sent an armored personnel carrier to go get them in hot pursuit, and Hezbollah led them right through a minefield.
Now if you’re sitting in Tehran or Damascus or Beirut, and you are part of the terrorist Politburo so to speak, you have a choice. With your head sunk in your hands, thinking “Oh my God,” you can either give [the kidnapped soldiers] back and say “Oops, sorry, wrong time” or you can say, “Hey, this is war.”
It is absolutely ridiculous to believe that the Hezbollah commander on the ground said Tuesday morning, “Go get two Israeli soldiers, would you please?”
And my other favorite passage:
Some are proposing that the Lebanese government send its army into southern Lebanon. What do you think of that idea?
It’s a really great idea. The Lebanese army can’t collect the garbage in Beirut. Neither can the Syrian army. Southern Lebanon is Hezbollah land. … Hezbollah is the second or third most competent military force in the region, after Israel and Iran. It could probably defeat a good sized Egyptian battalion.
Ah, poor Egyptians.
Good to see Mark’s still at it. He was probably my first mentor, taught me about journalism when I was a wee lad at a small Washington-based Middle East politics magazine back in the halycon days of Oslo. He’s known the Palestinian players quite well for years. His son, incidentally, is the head of CNN’s Baghdad bureau.
He certainly takes a different tack in his analysis of the situation than you usually hear.
Perry ascribes too much to accident. Hizbullah accidentally captured a humvee full of Israeli soldiers? They accidentally bombed Haifa?
Hizbullah has said they’d planned the original operation for weeks, before Hamas kidnapped their corporal.
Maybe they made that up. Even so, Perry’s “Hizbullah just accidentally took an Israeli humvee” thesis seems too facile. Don’t you think Hizbullah would have at least run an idea like this past their patrons in Syria and Iran before they took actions they knew would bring the Israelis back to Lebanon?
‘Nuff respect to Perry, but he doesn’t sound very convincing on this one. Perhaps he’s trying to answer the nutcases in Washington beating the drum for war with Syria and Iran. Or perhaps he’s having a hard a time reconciling his admiration for Hizbullah with their actions.
Let’s leave Iran and Syria out of this for a second. Perry ignores Rozen’s question about the end of open hostilities in the south. Hizbullah’s refusal to disarm was looking increasingly untenable in the face of peace on the ground and international and local pressure. The slogan “Resistance isn’t militias” rang hollow when the Israeli wolf wasn’t at the door. Now they have ample justification for keeping their arms.
Perry says:
Here’s what Nasrallah actually http://elijahzarwan.net/blog/?p=181#more-181“ rel=”nofollow”>said (on July 14):
Doesn’t sound to me like Nasrallah was trying to say “We understand hitting Haifia is a major escalation, and we didn’t mean to do that.â€�
Look, no disrespect to Perry, but I think he’d do better to construct his arguments around US national interest. The “Hizbullah’s really alright, this whole thing was just a big accident” line isn’t going to sway many Washington types.
Some good points there, E.
What I get from the interview is that Hizbullah did not expect that the current war would be the Israeli response. The rhetoric we’ve seen from Nasrallah is because the situation has moved from regular skirmishes to full-scale war.
Also, I think it’s perfectly plausible that Hizbullah carried out the kidnapping without consulting Damascus or Tehran. People have over-emphasizing the subservience of HB to foreign countries to make partisan arguments that are really about Syria and Iran, not Hizbullah. I think it probably is fairly independent.
I really do think that Hizbullah did not want this war, and the problem is that it did not think through its actions and their consequences in the current context (Israel’s campaign in Gaza.) Talking about foreign involvement at this point is mere guesswork.
Regarding Haifa, it’s hard to see it as a major escalation in the context of what’s happening in Lebanon. Hizbullah was not about to not respond to the massive Israeli onslaught, especially when Israel says the war’s aim is to eliminate HB entirely.
As for US national interest, it was abandoned in the region a while back for domestic political interest.
I don’t advocate this course of action, but let’s imagine a more proportional Israel reaction: they raid South Lebanon, capture Hizbullah soldiers (or even an entire border village) and then offer them in exchange for the captured Israeli soldiers. Wouldn’t that have been more reasonable than bombing the country’s main infrastructure and killing over 200 people by now?
Israel’s over-reaction makes Hizbullah’s kidnapping (which I thought was stupid and possibly cynical) practically irrelevant. If this was any other country we’d be talking Chapter VII action at the UN or immense pressure for a ceasefire at least. Even in Israel you have people advocating bringing people to the war crimes tribunal. (And yes, send Hizbullah there too for the Haifa attacks.)
Yeah, I have to agree that there aren’t too many people who can do anything more than speculate about foreign involvement (Perry might actually be one of them, but given his almost unique situation, he’s got to be strategic about what he says publicly).
I too used to be suspicious of all this talk of Iranian-Syrian meddling in general because of who it was coming from. Thing is, the groups, not just HB, are pretty open about where they get their money and their guns. That’s not to say that everything HB does starts in Tehran or Damascus, but the money and the guns surely must buy some influence. Semi-covert Syrian and Iranian meddling does look like an unfortunate fact—doubly unfortunate because Israeli generals and the strangelovian beltway freaks can exploit it to advance insane aims.
I still think HB wanted to provoke a reaction. Why? Because they’re sincere about their general aims. Because they wanted to take pressure off Gaza. And because they don’t want to disarm and lose clout.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not defending the Israeli response. Far from it. Israel had a variety of options that would have been more reasonable than the course of action they took. It’s interesting to find many die-hard Israel supporters grudgingly saying Israel’s behaving unreasonably, too. One American reporter who loves Israel tells me he spoke to an Israeli military type last night who told him, off-the-record, “we have a right to be unreasonable.”
Of course they don’t, and I’m totally with you on your point that if this were any other country we’d be talking at least immediate UNSC action, if not Chapter VII action. The US veto of two resolutions aimed at ending the fighting is unjustifiable. Why should Israel behave like a reasonable grownup when no one but Nasrallah and Hamas are around to hold it unaccountable? Sam’s your uncle.
I’m in favor of accountability for war crimes. But I say stop the violence first, then work on accountability.
Right on. Just stop this insanity…