The war in Lebanon has already started, with Israel detonating hidden explosives in Hezbollah pagers and field radios, while carrying out the heaviest air strikes on southern Lebanon since the Israeli invasion of 2006.
Israel said this week that the safe return of 60,000 evacuees to the north of the countrywas now an official war aim, something that could happen only – and perhaps not even then – if the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) invade and occupy Lebanon at least as far north as the Litani river.
The Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, called the Israeli booby-trapping of communications devices “an act of war”, and promised to retaliate at a time and place of the Lebanese Shia guerrilla movement’s choosing. After allowing itself to become a victim of an Israeli sabotage operation through gross security lapses, Hezbollah will need to restore its credibility as an effective military organisation.
The escalation of the low-level conflict between Israel and Hezbollah into the initial phases of a full-scale war comes almost a year after the start of the war in Gaza on 7 October last year. But already these two very different conflicts have one crucial factor in common: there is no reason that either should end.
Two savage confrontations
In other words, these two savage confrontations may rage for the foreseeable future in the heart of the Middle East. They will not only destabilise the region, but send waves of instability sweeping across Europe and the wider world.
The importance of this latter point is too little understood: most agree that immigration from the Middle East and North Africa is the most destabilising force in European politics, fuelling the explosive rise of right-wing, anti-immigrant parties.
Yet few connect up the dots linking these domestic political developments with foreign interventions in Afghanistan in 2001, Iraq in 2003 and Syria and Libya in 2011, though they produced failed states, forcing a great exodus of desperate people fleeing war and seeking safety in Europe.
Western politicians often forget that wars that they helped to foment are still going on, even as Afghans, Syrians, Kurds and others cram into fragile dinghies to cross the Mediterranean from North Africa to Italy or the Channel from France to Kent.
Standard-bearer of Palestinian resistance
Political leaders, who seriously imagine that migrants will be deterred by the threat of being sent to Rwanda or Albania, do not understand that the influx will never stop so long as people need to escape from a great zone of violent conflicts that now stretches – almost without interruption – west to east from Libya to Afghanistan and north to south from Ukraine to South Sudan.
Gaza and Lebanon are the most recent grim additions to this long list of wars in this huge area to which no end is in sight. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declared war aim is to destroy Hamas, but he has instead turned it into the standard-bearer of Palestinian resistance.
He says that he aims to save the Israeli hostages held in the tunnels beneath Gaza by armed force, but it is far more likely that their captors will execute them (as recently happened to six hostages) if Israeli soldiers get close.
Unattainable goals
Meanwhile, the area of conflict is growing as Israeli settlers run amok on the West Bank. Contrary to President Joe Biden’s periodic claims that a ceasefire is around the corner, the Wall Street Journal quotes officials from the White House, the US State Department and the Pentagon as saying anonymously that no ceasefire is likely before Biden steps down in January – and even this may prove over optimistic.
The fundamental problem is that Israel is trying to solve a political problem – the relationship between seven million Palestinians and seven million Israeli Jews living between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea – by military means alone, and this cannot be done.
Netanyahu has pursued unattainable goals in Gaza and may now do the same in Lebanon fighting Hezbollah, a far stronger force than Hamas, despite its heavy casualties this week.
Nasrallah, along with his main backer Iran, do not want a full-scale war with Israel, but prefer a draining, drawn-out conflict that plays to their strengths in guerrilla tactics.
A long period of relative peace
Western governments and media misleadingly refer to Hezbollah, along with the Iraqi militias, the Houthis in Yemen and the Alawi regime in Syria as “Iranian proxies”, but their real strength is that they are primarily the Shia communities in arms.
I was in Lebanon in 1982 when the IDF won a swift military victory, forcing out the Palestine Liberation Organisation only to find it replaced by the far more dangerous forerunners of Hezbollah. Along the way, I witnessed the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians by a Christian militia under the eyes of the Israeli forces.
In 2000, Israel withdrew from south Lebanon after being harassed for 18 years by Shia guerrillas. In 2006, a brief Israeli invasion inflicted massive destruction but was seen as a failure, though it ushered in a long period of relative peace on the Israel/Lebanon border until the Gaza war.
Israeli generals speak today of northern Israel being the new centre of their military activity, as the 98th Division moves north from Gaza.
Air power
Netanyahu could order an invasion or rely primarily on air power to turn this part of Lebanon into a free-fire zone, striking at Hezbollah units and driving out the Shia population.
Israel would like to inflict a high enough price on Hezbollah and the Lebanese Shia to force Nasrallah to abandon support for Gaza, though this is very unlikely to happen.
A second possibility, writes Amos Harel in Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, is “that Israel may be trying to drag Hezbollah into an all-out war”.
If the latter is the case, it is easy to see why Netanyahu believes this is a good moment for Israel to attack, while the US is absorbed in the presidential election campaign and Biden, for all his long ignored and increasingly pathetic calls for a ceasefire, refuses to choke off the supply of arms and ammunition to Israel.
Booby-trapped pagers
For Israel, the first weeks of its war are usually the best. Its technical, military and intelligence prowess achieves spectacular results, as with its ingenious supply of booby-trapped pagers and walkie-talkies to Hezbollah. But as the war progresses, as in Lebanon in 1982 and again in Gaza in 2023-24, the lack of achievable goals becomes evident.
“Political and strategic preparations must go hand in hand,” wrote Sir Eyre Crowe, a famed Foreign Office mandarin before the First World War. “Failure of such harmony must lead either to military disaster or political retreat.”
Israel is a prime example of this fatal inability to gear its war-making capacity to feasible political objectives.
Put more crudely, Israel may reduce southern Lebanon to a wasteland and turn Beirut into another Gaza, but without making itself more secure.
Further Thoughts
“You have nothing to fear but fear itself,” Franklin D Roosevelt famously reassured Americans in his inaugural address as US president in 1933. This was at the height of the Great Depression when the unemployed were fighting for scraps of food at the back of luxury hotels in New York and Chicago. People took heart from his buoyant self-confidence, though the Depression did not end until 1940.
Not so Sir Keir Starmer, who loses no opportunity to say that there is a whole lot to be frightened of. Instead of an upbeat FDR, Starmer spreads post-general election gloom, declaring things to be frighteningly bad, getting worse, but it is not his fault and there is not much he can do about it. Since nobody much likes a messenger bringing bad tidings, his popularity sinks to new lows.
Starmer seemed at first to present himself in the tradition of an old English Puritan, virtuously refusing to hide the bad news, so unlike Boris Johnson with his mindless boosterism. Possibly optimism and realism could be combined. As Sir Toby Belch in Twelfth Night asks Malvolio: “Dost though think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
Starmer is particularly vulnerable to such questions because it turns out that he is partial to cakes and ale, but generally likes them to be paid for by some big corporate do-gooder, with no ulterior motives. Starmer then doubles down on this by claiming he does it all to save the nation money, inviting the inevitable question as to why he does not pay for the cakes and ale himself?
In the weeks since the general election, Labour has shown a worrying skill in regularly shooting its political feet, something that Rishi Sunak’s government was famous for. Over-confidence following an election landslide explains much, but possibly Starmer and Rachel Reeves really do have political tin ears. As was obvious to past Tory chancellors, cutting the number of pensioners who get the winter fuel allowance from 12 to two million guarantees winter television screens filled with pictures of freezing pensioners.
Beneath the Radar
Belief in magical war-winning weapons is a feature of all military conflicts. Almost always they are oversold. Invariably, they do not work quite as well as expected and the enemy soon comes up with effective counter-measure. This was true of the German use of poison gas and of unrestricted submarine warfare in the First World War and V-1 and V-2 missiles in the Second.
More sensibly, the Nobel Prize-winning British experimental physicist Sir Patrick Blackett, in charge of British scientific research in the Second World War, decreed that all effort should go into improving the performance of existing weapons and not into new ones. He believed the latter option required too many resources, took too long and might be of uncertain military effectiveness. Yet politicians and public today, as in the past, are often fixated on the idea that there is a war-winning wonder weapon that will irrevocably tip the military balance towards them and give them victory. Evidence to the contrary is ignored.
A spectacular example of this type of magical thinking is revealed in a Financial Times story by John Paul Rathbone in Kyiv about the Storm Shadow cruise missiles, together with French Scalps and American ATACMS. These are being promoted as potentially changing the military balance in the war in favour of Ukraine because they would enable it to strike at Russian airfields and other facilities behind the Russian front line.
The Storm Shadow issue receives wall-to-wall coverage in the media, with Sir Keir Starmer discussing it with Joe Biden. For his part, Vladmir Putin has said that if the West does supply these medium-range missiles, the whole nature of the war will change because they can only be guided with direct Western assistance.
Rathbone points out that the transformative impact of these missiles is not quite what it appears to be: “One problem, according to Western officials, is that Russia began moving its aviation assets deeper inside Russia about three months ago, beyond the 250km range of Storm Shadows and the up to 300km range of ATACMS.”
There are now far fewer appropriate Russian targets, which is perhaps fortunate because the inventories of Storm Shadows and Scalps are limited. The piece quotes military analyst Michael Kofman as saying that deployment of the missiles has been so long discussed that, if and when it happens, “there is no longer any point”. A Western official confirmed that “the missiles are no strategic panacea for Ukraine’s strategic military situation”.
Cockburn Picks
In Gaza, the Israel Defence Forces are supposedly trying to free the hostages hidden in the tunnels. Six were recently found shot to death by their captors.
Seymour Hersh points out in his Substack that as soon as Israeli sappers get close to where the hostages are held, the noise they make blowing up armoured doors alerts Hamas fighters that their discovery is close, and they shoot the hostages if there is any risk of them being rescued. The tunnels have many armoured doors, so the sappers have no choice but to blow them up and alert those holding the surviving hostages.
Hersh writes that “it has long been clear to the senior officers responsible for hostage recovery that the successful rescue of hostages kept underground is impossible because, as an Israeli insider explained to me, there is no way to hide the noisy preparations for blowing up the reinforced doors that are invariably present at underground hostage sites. The six hostages were slain, and their guards escaped two to three days before the IDF team found the reinforced door.”
Patrick Cockburn’s new book Believe Nothing Until It Is Officially Denied: Claud Cockburn and the Invention of Guerrilla Journalism will be published by Verso on 22 October