Burton recalled the strike today as he and some 200 other Americans waited to board a Swedish-chartered ship called the Hual Transporter at the port in the Lebanese capital this afternoon. The American group, stranded at the university since the Israel-Hizbullah conflict began last week, had mostly crammed their belongings into a single bag each for the journey to Cyprus. One young man carried a souvenir bottle of Lebanese olive oil as he waited to board the ship. “What’s happening to Lebanon is sad,” says Burton, reflecting on the 10 months he spent in the country. “But I was expecting some kind of conflict here.”
The scene wasn’t exactly Saigon in 1975, when American citizens were plucked off the roof of the U.S. Embassy with choppers, but there was a sense of urgency: roughly 320 Americans were shuttled out of Lebanon today by ship and by helicopter. More than 1,000 are expected to be evacuated on Wednesday by air and on the Orient Queen, a cruise ship that can carry 750 passengers and usually makes a run from Beirut to Cyprus and southern Turkey. U.S. officials are also considering contracting with other commercial ships to evacuate the estimated 8,000 American citizens—out of an estimated 25,000 in Lebanon—who want to leave the country. The departure of the Americans, only a small part of the mass exodus of thousands of foreigners from the country, came as the death toll in seven days of Israel-Hizbullah attacks rose to 235 in Lebanon and 35 in Israel. As the passengers were boarding the ship, Jeffrey Feltman, Washington’s ambassador to Lebanon, barreled into the port in a convoy of six SUVs. “I’m sorry for the reasons why the Americans have to leave the city,” he said, flanked by bodyguards with steely sunglasses who nervously watched the crowd. There was a noticeable lull in bombardment as the passengers boarded the ship and Feltman said both sides had been contacted to ensure safe passage. “We have asked for all facilitation and all safety for the evacuation ships,” he said.
Feltman’s arrival at the port came amid questions about why the U.S. Embassy seemed to have been dragging its feet on the evacuation of its nationals. While the French Embassy yesterday organized a ship that took 1,200 passengers, including some Americans, to Cyprus, U.S. efforts to help its citizens leave the country have been slower to get started. The apparent lethargy seemed particularly surprising given that Americans have long been on a high security alert in Lebanon. The U.S. Embassy is located some 10 miles outside the center of Beirut on a hill and diplomats do not leave the sprawling complex unescorted. Their convoys, usually two or three SUVs with armed guards hanging their weapons out the window, are often visible in the city. Asked about the delays, Feltman said: “There are a lot of Americans who want to leave. But also the important thing is that they leave safely … it doesn’t make any sense to try to do this too quickly.”
Among those trying to leave were the Naim family, who spent a monthlong vacation in Beirut. The couple and their four children were on their way to catch their flight back to Boston after a trip that included a family visit and beach trips when Israeli warplanes hit the city’s airport last week. “We saw the smoke and the circle,” says Jeanette Naim with wide eyes. “It was very scary. We’ve never heard a bomb before.” The family scrambled into the terminal for cover and slipped away when the bombing let up. Over the next few days, they stayed indoors as the bombs dropped. “When you see the black smoke it means something is burning,” says Naim’s 12-year-old son, Gabriel. Naim tried to contact the embassy right away. “We called and we called and we called and we called,” she says. “We didn’t hear anything.” Naim and her family weren’t able to get out today either.
While hundreds of foreigners did get shuttled out, many Lebanese have no option but to face the grim reality on the ground. Thousands of residents of southern Lebanon have made the perilous journey north to the relative safety of Beirut. More than 2,000 of these internally displaced have crammed into an underground parking structure attached to a mall in the center of the city. Many families sit listlessly on the concrete floor waiting for blankets, sheets and food rations handed out by Hizbullah and Amal, another prominent Shiite party. The Lebanese government has also opened up schools to accommodate displaced families. Fouad Yassin left southern Beirut with his wife and three children on Sunday morning. They stayed in their house for three days under heavy bombing before making a break for the eastern part of the city. “The building would shake,” says Yassin, 35, holding his six-day-old daughter wrapped in a blanket. “The glass started to fall out of some of the other buildings.” Yassin took shelter in the Ibn Rashid school and now shares a classroom with his extended family, 10 people in all. Pro-Hizbullah slogans are scrawled on the blackboard in chalk. WE ARE WITH YOU NASRALLAH reads one, referring to Hizbullah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
The Lebanese minister for social affairs, Nayla Moawad, met with a handful of foreign NGO representatives yesterday to coordinate planning for the displaced. “Lebanon is being destroyed,” Moawad said in an interview. “Hundreds are being wounded. Hundreds are being killed. Tens of thousands are fleeing to what they think are safer areas when they can.” But in a city under siege, those places are in perilously short supply.
title: “Barry Behind Israel S Lebanon Strategy” ShowToc: true date: “2023-01-07” author: “John Bowers”
Can these two protagonists be deterred now? And what lessons can be learned from modern thinking about theories of deterrence? The concepts may seem academic, their consequences aren’t. Before World War I, the British thought—bafflingly, in retrospect—that the size of their Navy would deter Germany. That’s deterrence by denial: don’t go to war because you won’t attain your goals. But after World War II, almost all the thinking has been about nuclear deterrence, which boils down to deterrence by cost. If you go to war your society will be destroyed.
Over the decades, Israel has employed both types of deterrence. After its fight for independence in 1948, the Jewish state geared its military to deter its enemies by denial—by convincing Arab states that there was no point in going to war, because their armies could never overrun Israel. To achieve this, Israel (and the United States) poured money into the strike capabilities of the Israeli Air Force. That paid off in the Six Day War of 1967, when the IAF destroyed the Egyptian Air Force on its airfields, thereby stripping the Egyptian Army in Sinai of all air cover.
The 1973 war taught Israel a more ambiguous lesson—thanks to technology. Israel had sought to establish deterrence by denial by constructing a line of forts along the Suez Canal that was meant to delay any Egyptian advance for long enough to allow Israeli air power to intervene once more. But the Egyptian attack was sufficiently well executed that the forts were swiftly overrun or bypassed. The Egyptian Army then advanced into Sinai only so far as it could still shelter under cover of the new generation of Soviet antiaircraft and antitank missiles. Thus 1973 marked the first missile war. Israeli losses to these weapons were such that after 48 hours it effectively abandoned its Sinai campaign and focused on the Syrian advance across the Golan Heights. There, the Syrians’ own Soviet-supplied mobile air defenses exacted an unexpected toll. Israel saved itself by switching tactics, concentrating its air power against the supply convoys bringing fuel and munitions up the road from Damascus. The Israeli defense of Golan was an epic tank battle, but the reality is that the lead Syrian tanks got to the edge of Golan, with the way down to Galilee open before them—and ran out of gas.
The missile war forced a shift in Israeli thinking. With denial deterrence tougher than ever, Israel’s leaders instead focused on a crash effort to produce nuclear weapons and, in essence, to adopt NATO’s very different notion of deterrence by cost. (NATO’s declared policy was simple: if the Soviet Union tried to invade Western Europe, and if the Warsaw Pact nations got more than halfway across West Germany, NATO would resort to nuclear strikes.) Israel never abandoned one concept for another. Its air force was still burnished as its ultimate conventional weapon. But since 1973, nuclear deterrence has been Israel’s ultimate insurance policy.
Two developments have brought this Israeli strategy into question. The first is that Arab states have slowly increased their own technological capabilities. If one of them manages to develop a deliverable nuclear weapon, “mutual assured destruction” would become the uneasy modus vivendi in the region. The second development: the rise of the nonstate actor. Nuclear deterrence only works against states that have cities that can be put at risk. But Hizbullah is, in poli-sci parlance, a nonstate actor. It has no hostages to nuclear fortune. What would it gain Israel to threaten to nuke Beirut? At the same time, though, Hizbullah—even though a nonstate actor—has been able (courtesy of its state sponsors) to acquire missiles that, albeit crude, can reach into the depths of Israel.
Deepening Israel’s dilemma is Iran, an Islamic but not an Arab state. In regional terms a technological giant, the country is well set on the road to acquiring nuclear weapons and already has the missiles to deliver them. Tehran’s festering sense of multiple grievances, its historic ambitions to be a great power and, crucially, the rise of Islamism as the rallying cry of Arab identity have combined to bring Iran into the Arab-Israel conflict. This same upsurge of Islamism potentially, at least, brings two other Arab nations into contention: Egypt and Saudi Arabia. If either regime fell, Islamist governments could take over in both. Would they then join the struggle against Israel?
The Olmert government grasps these realities. Everything suggests they explain what Israel is doing in Lebanon now. The same notions of deterrence—viewed through a mirror—also usefully explain Hizbullah’s actions. Hizbullah provoked the conflict after spending years preparing their defenses inside Lebanon. Israel’s response: a plan to smash Hizbullah’s border fortifications and launch deeper airstrikes against roads and bridges to prevent resupply. Ground troops would then move in, in relatively small numbers, to mop up. Hizbullah’s ability to operate close to the border would be quashed. Deterrence by denial would be reasserted.
Israel, however, clearly underestimated how intricate Hizbullah’s defenses were—and how fiercely, or with what tactical skill, Hizbullah’s ranks would fight back. The sequence of events following U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s visit to Israel this week suggests that Olmert’s cabinet has finally recognized its hubris. Its plan now? Clear a wide zone across southern Lebanon. Expel its inhabitants. Create in effect a free-fire zone. Meanwhile, so pummel the infrastructure of Lebanon as to, hopefully, bring about some political realignment—where those Lebanese groups antagonistic to Hizbullah’s Shia base will try to save their country by cracking down on the militant group. And, it follows, upon the Shia if necessary. Deterrence by cost. The devastation of Lebanon usefully sends a message to Syria and Iran, too: you could be next.
This could work in the short term. While Israel may be exaggerating how much damage it has done to Hizbullah, the movement has clearly taken heavy losses from which it could take years to recover. But deterrence by cost? Will the Israeli campaign have wreaked such havoc on Lebanon as to succeed in what I take to be the aim: altering the balance of political power inside Lebanon? Given the size of Lebanon’s Shia population, that is surely unlikely.
Some Israeli analysts argue that Israel has for years been practicing a new sort of deterrence: something the distinguished Israeli soldier Maj. Gen. Doron Almog describes as “cumulative deterrence.” As Almog explained it in the winter 2004 issue of Parameters, the U.S. Army War College journal, cumulative deterrence is a succession of “victories achieved over the short, medium and long terms that gradually wear down the enemy.” This demands “specific military responses to specific threats or hostile acts”—responses designed to “create an image of overwhelming military supremacy.” Almog points to the changes in Egyptian and Syrian government policies after the ‘73 war as evidence that cumulative deterrence works.
It’s a strange sort of deterrence that demands repeated wars. Nonetheless, Almog does have a point. Destruction and bloodshed can change a nation’s attitudes. Germany and Japan emerged from World War II ready to reconsider their futures—but that was after most major cities in both countries had been razed, millions of their people slaughtered and the traumatized survivors left starving in the rubble. By historical analogy, then, Israel might succeed in changing the Shia mindset, might succeed in provoking a sea change in Lebanon’s politics. But only if Israel is willing to commit destruction in Lebanon on a World War II city-busting scale.
So the Lebanon campaign has, I would argue, brought Israel face to face with the appalling logic of deterrence by conventional means. There is an historical precedent: ancient Rome. Rome, too, had a strategy of deterrence by cost. To work, Rome found, the cost had to be horrifying. In a struggle lasting 120 years, Rome fought three wars against Carthage, its main rival in the Mediterranean. The great Carthaginian general, Hannibal, even penetrated northern Italy and inflicted on Rome a defeat of strategic proportions at Cannae. Rome realized that only total destruction would end the contest: Scipio took Carthage, slaughtered most of its inhabitants and sold the rest into slavery, razed the city and sowed its fields with salt. Scipio’s savagery did actually deter, over the next several hundred years, other ambitious Mediterranean powers. It failed, however, against the Germanic tribes that ultimately swarmed across Rome’s frontiers. Why? Because they, like Hizbullah, were nonstate actors.
That leaves me to contemplate Yasir Arafat’s comment when the 1973 war ended with the Egyptian Army surrounded in the Sinai and the Israelis at the gates of Damascus. “You forget,” he told me after I remarked that a military solution didn’t look too promising for the Arab nations. “The Crusades took 200 years.” What time frame is anyone contemplating here?
