Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East (30 page)

Nasrallah had one last issue he wanted to talk about—America’s push for democracy in the Islamic world. He brought it up. For the first time, he ruminated, at length. To talk about democracy and freedoms for the Arab world was “lovely,” he began. But then he asked, rhetorically, if Washington understood the long-term damage when it did not recognize the results—or tried to undermine the parties elected if they were not American allies.

“Your administration says it is assisting the democratic process in our countries, but it has to respect the results of this process,” he said.

“After the Palestinian elections, in my opinion, the American administration made a historic mistake. The Palestinian people have chosen Hamas, and the American administration is punishing all the Palestinian people because they elected Hamas,” he said. “Now the Palestinian people are being starved, besieged, and subjected to huge pressures.

“What will the result be?” he said. Almost certainly, he answered, even greater support for Hamas.

“In the longer run, the real democratic process in our countries will often produce, will bring into being, governments that will be Islamist,” he said. “But you can have mutual respect and ties with them.”

And then he was ready to go. He offered to answer further questions at another time, but he said he still had work to do. Then he got up, offered a polite nod instead of a handshake, and walked across the long room past all the faux-brocade couches, his robes swaying. His security detail asked that I stay until Nasrallah had left.

When I drove out of the
dahiya
that night, most of the lights were out for blocks in all directions. A few generators rumbled noisily in the distance.

During political transitions, vacuums are often filled, at least initially, by those who get there first.

Hezbollah’s fourth phase began on July 12, 2006, a scorching hot summer day along the dusty Lebanese-Israeli border. At 9:05
A.M.
, as Hezbollah fired rockets in other directions to divert attention, a band of Shiite guerrillas scrambled across the fortified security fence into Israel’s northern farmland. The militants found their target on a secluded stretch of road near a peach orchard. In a lightning strike on the small Israeli border patrol, they fired rockets that blew up two Israeli military Humvees, killed three Israeli troops, and wounded two other soldiers.

The Hezbollahis then nabbed the two injured Israelis—Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, both army reservists on their last day of duty—and fled back across the border. Once on Lebanese soil, the Shiite militants shed their fatigues, bundled the wounded Israelis into cars, and sped off.
⁵¹

The raid changed Hezbollah—and the Middle East.

The attack should not have come as a total surprise. Five months earlier, Nasrallah had publicly promised to free prisoners held by Israel in 2006—a vow made at the annual Ashura commemoration of Hussein’s death.
⁵²
The issue of prisoners and long-term detainees—whose offenses ranged from murdering Israeli children to being in the wrong place at the wrong time when Israel carried out its own abductions inside Lebanon—was always wrapped up in the Shiite sense of injustice.

A few hours after the raid, Nasrallah appeared at a hastily organized press conference in the
dahiya.
“This is the only way to shed light on the suffering of ten thousand Lebanese, Palestinian, and Arab detainees in Israeli prisons…after diplomatic means, political discussions, the international community’s interventions, and organizations failed to release them.”

Operation Faithful Promise—hatched a year earlier, planned for five months—was not the first scheme to force a prisoner swap. Hezbollah had done it before.

In 1998, Israel had turned over sixty Lebanese prisoners and the corpses of forty Hezbollah fighters—including Nasrallah’s son, nine months after his death—in exchange for the remains of one Israeli soldier.

In 2000, another Hezbollah cross-border raid had seized three Israeli soldiers, who all died during the operation. In 2004, Nasrallah had swapped their bodies, along with an Israeli businessman who had been in Lebanon under questionable circumstances, in return for 400 Palestinian prisoners, twenty-nine prisoners from other Arab nations, and the bodies of sixty Lebanese guerrillas.

But Israel still held more than 9,000 Palestinians and an unknown number of Lebanese, including three prisoners that Hezbollah particularly wanted.
⁵³
So the Shiite movement organized another raid for another big swap.

Hezbollah claimed that it did not want to fight Israel. “That is not our intention,” Nasrallah told reporters. “We committed to calm all this time, despite all the circumstances. The only exception—and I told some political leaders about it—is imprisonment. We will not forget, ignore, or postpone this suffering…. [But] if the Israelis are considering any military action to bring the hostages home, they are delusional, delusional, delusional.”

Nasrallah miscalculated—grossly.

Israel struck back, instantly and ferociously. It unleashed the most punishing artillery, air and naval assault on Lebanon in almost a quarter century. On the first day alone, its warplanes hit Hezbollah missile launchers and military sites in southern Lebanon. It bombed roads and bridges across the nation, along borders, and in between cities to cut off Hezbollah’s fighters and resupply attempts. It struck power stations, television transmission centers, and Beirut International Airport. Within hours, Lebanon was cut off from the outside world. Israel also sent troops back into Lebanon for the first time since 2000.

Israel wanted more than its two soldiers. The government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, in office only three months, decided to use Nasrallah’s mistake to eliminate his militia as a threat—and perhaps eliminate it altogether. Preferably, that included Nasrallah. Since 1997, Israel had kept a small DNA sample from Nasrallah’s son—in case it was ever needed to identify his father’s body.
⁵⁴

“It seems like we will go to the end now,” Israeli Ambassador Daniel Ayalon told me. “We will not go part way and be held hostage again. We’ll have to go for the kill—Hezbollah neutralization.”

Nasrallah went into hiding. Two days later, the Hezbollah chief abandoned his offer of calm. “The battle today is no longer one of prisoners,” Nasrallah said in a recorded audio message that was relayed across a crackling telephone line to a Beirut television station. “You wanted an open war, let it be an open war. Your government wanted to change the rules of the game, let the rules of the game change.”

The sixth modern Middle East conflict had erupted.

The dynamics of this war were different than any other in the Middle East, especially Israel’s previous thrusts into Lebanon. Its 1978 and 1982 invasions had targeted a secular Palestinian guerrilla movement made up of outsiders no longer welcome in much of Lebanon. Yasser Arafat’s troops were predominantly Sunni, with a smattering of Christians. The fight had its roots in the creation of Israel in 1948 and the conquest of Arab territory in 1967. The battle was between rival nationalisms over a piece of land.

The 2006 conflict, in contrast, played into fourteen centuries of Shiite history and their sense of minority persecution. Israel this time was targeting the most popular Lebanese political and military force on its own turf. The fight pitted one religion against another. And the issues were existential.

“You don’t know who you’re fighting today,” Nasrallah warned. “You’re fighting the children of the Prophet Mohammed, Ali and Hussein and all the Prophet’s household. You’re fighting people who have faith.

“The surprises I promised,” he added, “will begin, from now.”

And then Hezbollah launched its own punishing counterstrikes with missiles and rockets from the vast arsenal Iran and Syria had supplied over the previous six years. Nasrallah had at least 12,000 missiles at his disposal.

For the first time, Israeli civilians bore the brunt of an Israeli war. The entire northern quarter of Israel was vulnerable. Haifa came under irregular missile attack. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis were under fire. Many fled; others spent days in shelters. Hezbollah even hit an Israeli warship, deployed off Lebanon’s coast as part of a naval blockade, with a sophisticated radar-guided missile.

Just as surprising, however, were Hezbollah’s ground forces.

“We are not a regular army, and we will not fight like a regular army,” Nasrallah said in another of his periodic broadcasts during the war.

Yet Hezbollah was also no longer a ragtag group of suicide bombers and individual cells based around neighborhoods and extended families. The Shiite force was well trained, well organized and surprisingly well stocked.

Hezbollah fighters had Russian antitank weapons to pierce Israel’s most advanced tanks. They had body armor, night-vision gear, mortars, and rocket-propelled grenades. They had satellite communications to coordinate attacks and command scattered forces. They drove mobile Katyusha rocket-launching platforms from place to place on the back of GMC trucks. They had teams of scouts with walkie-talkies who zipped around on motorbikes. They had “listening rooms” with equipment to eavesdrop on Israeli communications. They even had Israeli uniforms, complete with Hebrew lettering, for decoys.

Hezbollah troops had trained from purloined American and Israeli military manuals, with particular attention paid to the Vietnam War. They constructed a network of bunkers and tunnels to hide themselves and their missiles. One bunker, near the border town of Maroun al-Ras, was more than twenty-five feet deep. It was connected to a network of tunnels complete with a camera at the entrance, several storage rooms, and many emergency exits.
⁵⁵

Elusive Hezbollah proved hard to find, much less defeat. To the surprise even of the Lebanese, it had become the most effective guerrilla force in the world.

“If you’re waiting for a white flag coming out of the Hezbollah bunker, I can assure you it won’t come,” Israeli Brigadier General Ido Nehushtan told reporters during a wartime briefing. “They will go all the way.”

Israel’s overwhelming air superiority—a full array of warplanes, bombers, helicopter gunships, and unmanned drones—had been key to every earlier victory against the Arabs. In the 1967 war, Israel defeated three conventional armies, which had well over 100,000 troops and sophisticated armor and artillery, in a mere six days. In 1973, air power pushed back the Arabs’ initial gains on the ground. In 1982, Israeli air power gutted Syria’s air force, while Palestinian guerrillas simply abandoned positions under air attack. One of the many tongue-in-cheek T-shirts that appeared in Beirut during that summer war launched by Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin read,
BEGIN AND THE JETS, APPEARING NIGHTLY, IN SUPER-SONIC SOUND.
Protected by air power, Israeli troops blitzed to within ten miles of Beirut in less than two days, surrounding the capital and laying siege for ten weeks, until Arafat finally agreed to put his troops on ships that took them to new places in distant exile.

In 2006, Israeli air power was again impressive. Over thirty-four days, Israel hit more than 7,000 targets in little Lebanon. Air strikes left Lebanon’s infrastructure tattered. More than 15,000 housing units were destroyed. Dozens of southern villages were scarred, charred, and left without electricity and water. Damage was estimated by the United Nations at up to ten billion dollars.

The
dahiya
was particularly ravaged. Satellite photographs of the area before the war showed a dense labyrinth of tall buildings. A week later, whole blocks had been flattened into vacant patches. The Hezbollah headquarters where I had met Nasrallah three months earlier—and the entire security zone around it—were reduced to heaping piles of concrete rubble.

“We’ve decided to put an end to this saga,” said Israeli cabinet minister Isaac Herzog.

Yet in 2006, Israeli air power failed to scare Hezbollah or stop its missiles. For thirty-four days, Hezbollah did more than survive. It returned fire, pounding northern Israel with almost 4,000 missiles—an average of more than 100 per day. And the number did not diminish. The last day of the war was the heaviest—almost 250 Hezbollah missiles slammed into the biblical Galilee.

Israeli ground troops, who outnumbered Hezbollahis by at least ten to one inside Lebanon, had mixed results as well. They were stuck fighting in towns only a few miles inside the border. Rather than advance deeper, units often retreated after blowing up or clearing out suspected military sites. And it was often slow going. CNN correspondent Anderson Cooper went embedded on one mission that was supposed to take three hours, but lasted fourteen. “We moved inch by inch,” he told me.

It was the longest war Israel ever fought. Israel had to constantly adjust its military strategy—and lower its expectations. And, in the end, Israel’s tank-led assault was unable to gain control over a border buffer zone.

In the sixth war, Israel was not invincible. Israel’s aura as the Middle East’s lone impregnable power was shattered.

Rubbing propaganda salt in the military wound was Hezbollah TV. Its headquarters was leveled. Its mountaintop relay towers were felled. Yet the station remained on the air throughout the war, broadcasting Nasrallah’s stream of speeches to his supporters and the outside world over and over again.

At best, Israel fought to a draw. At worst, it achieved few of its goals. Israel lost almost 120 soldiers in only five weeks—a staggering loss compared with 900 troops killed in the eighteen years of its Lebanon occupation. Hezbollah was weakened, but hardly eliminated or disarmed. It still had at least one half of its missile arsenal.