Lebanon Roundup
By Read Hilzoy. Critical passage:
If we’re going to argue about this, let’s at least recognize that we are not living in a world in which any state of affairs we might want is achievable. Stopping Hezbollah from firing rockets is difficult. Katyushas are nine or ten feet long, which makes them a lot easier to smuggle and to conceal than, say, your average ICBM. They can be fired from any hard surface, using a pipe and a car battery. Hezbollah has hidden them all over southern Lebanon, and they would not be hard to smuggle in from Syria. A force with popular support — say, the army of a popular Lebanese government — might be able to keep actions against Israel to a minimum, if not to stop them altogether. But an unpopular occupying force, whether Israeli or multinational, probably will not, even if it does have the right mandate and rules of engagement.
If you think I’m wrong about this, then argue with me. But don’t just ask me whether Israel is supposed to just accept the presence of people willing to use rockets on the other side of the border, without explaining what alternative there is. And don’t say that Israel has to do what it’s doing since it was attacked, without being willing to explain why exactly you think that Israel’s actions will in fact make it more secure.
Read Yglesias on deterrence.
By committing themselves to a war whose strategic objectives they can’t achieve without the deus ex machina of massive European intervention, the Israelis have put themselves in a very awkward — very dangerous — position. Tit-for-tat retaliations combined with vigorous diplomacy might have taught Hezbollah a lesson about the dangers of future raids and nudged Lebanon in the direction of taking responsibility for the south. But Israel and the United States have now put themselves in the position of arguing that a return to the status quo ante is unacceptable without having a strategy for forcing anything else. And, certainly, the pre-war situation was sub-optimal, but its merits can be too easily dismissed. Israelis were much better off than Lebanese Shiites or Palestinians (and the general situation in Lebanon was moving in a direction favorable to Israel) and therefore had the most to lose from rocking the boat.
Again, I’m glad that I don’t believe it’s possible to create a deterrent reputation for resolve. Otherwise, I might think that Israel was in serious trouble.