The conventional wisdom has been, since the start of the current fighting between Hezbollah and Israel, that Syria, especially, does not want to widen the war. There is more ambiguity about the position of Iran, which is far from the battlefield in any event, and hides behind the international community's fiction that they are merely an interested bystander rather than an active participant. (This fiction is maintained despite the aggressive comments of the Iranian leadership and the provenance of Hezbollah's funds and arms; the international community, including our Western "allies", has been reluctant to actually confront Iran in any meaningful way, and the current crisis merely proves the point.) Israel has little interest in enlarging the battlefield and the United States, currently experiencing our own difficulties bringing calm to Iraq, has no interest in further military involvement either.
Unfortunately, the difficulty Israel has been having in gaining control of Southern Lebanon, in conjunction with the fantasy structure I discussed yesterday, is creating fertile conditions for miscalculation and escalation.
There are two concurrent fantasies that lie at the base of the Arab risk of escalation. Muslim governments around the Middle East have based their legitimacy on two pillars. One pillar has been their fidelity to the absolute authority of the Koran. The Saudis entire claim to legitimacy is based on their possession and management of Mecca and Medina (helped by their oceans of oil, of course). Iran has long challenged Saudi Arabia for primacy based on their belief that their version of Shia Islam is the only true Islam supported by the Koran. If left to their own devices, the fighting in the Middle East would be between these competing radical versions of Shia Islam and Sunni Islam.
The second pillar of belief is much more consequential.
For nearly 60 years now, and much longer in many ways, the legitimacy of Islamic states int he Middle East has been built upon anti-Semitism. As the disparity between the development of the rest of the world, exemplified by the modern technological powerhouse in their midst, and the poverty of economy, intellect, and development of the Muslim World has become more and more marked, those who rely on an external fantasy object upon which to project all of their dysfunction, have had to become increasingly fervent and impassioned in their hatred. The core of the Iranian sickness and the Arab sickness is the belief that Israel, and the Jews, are the cause of all their problems. There can be no other resolution to such a fantasy except genocide.
There are many in the West who would be only too happy to oblige the Muslim world by sacrificing Israel, but the nature of paranoia is such that this would never work. They would still be backward and dysfunctional and would then need to blame someone else for their failures; lest anyone forget, America has been the "Great Satan" and Israel the "Little Satan" at least since the Khomeini revolution ushered in the era of modern fanatical Islam. In any event, neither Israel nor the United States is likely to go down quietly.
Since the Honor-Shame dynamic suggests that anything less than complete devastation of Hezbollah is a victory for Islam, and their belief structure requires genocide of the Jews, the situation has to escalate.
Syria, with typical florid bombast, has been threatening to escalate should Israel and America ignore them:
Secretary Rice's mission to the Middle East has already failed because Syria has issued an ultimatum that augurs a world war soon enough.
The Syrian ultimatum is meant to provoke Israel and to pull America directly into the fighting. The ultimatum threatens that the attacks by Hezbollah — trained, supplied and commanded by Iranian Revolutionary Guards — will increase in intensity unless America negotiates directly with Hezbollah, Syria and Iran. The ultimatum demands that America force Israel to withdraw from Lebanon, to cease tactical strikes on Hezbollah bases and weaponry in Lebanon, to cease tactical strikes on Hamas in Gaza, and to make territorial concessions that would mean that Israel could no longer defend either Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.
Iran, quoted by the Guardian, has joined in and made their own threats:
Iran warned the west yesterday that attempts to broker a Lebanon peace deal at today's Rome summit are destined to fail and it predicted a backlash across the Muslim world unless Israel's military forces were immediately reined in.
Senior government officials said the exclusion from the summit of Iran, Syria and their Lebanese ally Hizbullah meant that no lasting settlement was possible.
Hamid Reza Asefi, the foreign ministry spokesman in Tehran, said: "They should have invited all the countries of the region, including Syria and Iran, if they want peace. How can you tackle these important issues without having representatives of all countries in the region?"
Israel knows that it is once again fighting for its very existence; this is non-negotiable, yet Israel's suicide is the ultimate demand of its enemies.
We already have Hezbollah's admission that they miscalculated Israel's response to their assault on Israel and the killing and kidnapping of Israeli soldiers. They are threatening to use their long range rockets, supplied by Iran, to hit Tel Aviv. No Israeli government can allow Tel Aviv to be hit with a ballistic rocket without a massive response. At that point no response can be considered disproportionate since they will be fighting for their lives.
The attacks on Israel may have provoked open war between the West and Iran prematurely, from the Iranian point of view, yet it is becoming clear that the war which has been going on since 1979, is coming into its final stages. Any cease-fire is a victory for Hezbollah and by extension Syria and Iran. The past 30 years should make it crystal clear that such cease-fires are never meant to be permanent but always seen as mere Hudnas for the Islamists.
I fear that there is really no way out of this and wonder if our leaders are prepared for the worst case scenario, the one that is playing out before our very eyes.
Perhaps there can be other outcomes. Amnon Rubinstein, in the New York Sun, lays out what he sees as the only way to ensure Israel's safety against such enemies:
Yet, Israel's grave security problems will not be solved even if Hezbollah is eventually smashed to smithereens in Lebanon. Israel's enemies are bound to acquire, some time in the future, nuclear, or al least "dirty," weapons. The only way to secure Israel's survival in the face of this menace is twofold: to develop — even at great costs — a reliable anti-missile missile system and, secondly, to use every political channel in order to include Israel within a mutual defense pact with America — either within or outside NATO. Such a pact might reduce Iran's willingness to enter into a total war, the first act of which is being acted prematurely in Lebanon's Hezbollah bastion.
As Ahmadinejad has pointed out, however, all it would take is one nuke to effectively destroy Israel; unfortunatley, no anti-missile system can ever be guaranteed to be 100% effective.
There is one more myth that has great relevance in these parlous times: There is a wide spread belief that Golda Meir contemplated the "Samson Option" during the darkest days of the Yom Kippur War. There is no comfort in the thought.
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