Saturday, August 12, 2006
Makes you think...
Learning From Hezbollah
By Brian E. Humphreys
Saturday, August 12, 2006; Page A21
From my first day in Iraq as a young infantry officer, I was struck by the huge perceptual gulf that separated us from the Iraqis. My first mission was to escort a civil affairs team assigned to supervise the rebuilding of a local school. After tea, smiles and handshakes, we departed and were promptly struck by a roadside bomb. Our modest efforts to close the perceptual gulf, exemplified in our smile-and-wave tactics and civil affairs missions, seemed to my mind well-intentioned but inadequate.
At a deeper level, the motives of the local populace remained largely invisible to us, as people smiled one minute and attempted to blow us up the next. We knew little or nothing about their grievances and aspirations, or where the political fault lines ran in the cluster of small cities in the Sunni Triangle we were tasked with pacifying.
We experienced many periodic spasms of violence that seemed to come out of nowhere before disappearing again. Of course they came from somewhere, but it was a somewhere we didn't understand. In a battalion of more than 800 men, we had one four-man team assigned to interact directly with the local population, and even this team was frequently sidetracked to deal with routine translation duties or interrogations.
Perhaps understandably for a conventional military force trained to focus on the enemy, our primary intelligence focus was on the insurgents. Much less attention was paid to the larger part of the population. Although we were a visible and sometimes forceful presence, I'm not sure we were a truly influential one.
Now, watching the latest news dispatches from Lebanon, I find myself comparing our efforts to introduce a new order in Iraq with Hezbollah's success as an effective practitioner of the art of militarized grass-roots politics. Frankly, it's not a favorable comparison -- for us. Hezbollah's organizational resilience in the face of an all-out conventional assault shows the degree to which it has seamlessly combined the strategic objectives of its sponsors with a localized political and military program.
Using the grass-roots approach, Hezbollah has been able to convert the ignored and dispossessed Shiite underclass of southern Lebanon into a powerful lever in regional politics. It understands that the basic need in any human conflict, whether or not it involves physical violence, is to take care of one's political base before striking out at the opponent.
As many informed observers have pointed out, Hezbollah has engrafted itself to the aims and aspirations of the Lebanese Shiite community so completely that Israel cannot destroy it without also destroying the community, with all the attendant political and moral costs. It is the willingness of women, children and old men to support Hezbollah and its political program at the risk of their lives that gives the organization power far beyond its military means.
Whatever the objective truth of Hezbollah's motives, its many supporters in southern Lebanon believe fervently that it is their organization, not an Iranian surrogate. Few if any American units in Iraq have achieved anything close to this level of success in winning the support of the local population. (Of more concern is the fact that few Iraqi security units or political leaders appear to have done so, either.) Commanders have come and gone, elections have been held, Iraqi soldiers trained, all manner of strategies for dealing with the insurgency attempted -- but with only limited and localized successes. Hezbollah's success among civilians in Lebanon, which is only reinforced by a ruthless pummeling from a reviled enemy, contrasts sharply with the continued fragility of the much more modest U.S. gains in Iraq, achieved at a much higher price.
The lessons should be clear. To engage in insurgency or counterinsurgency -- fancy terms for grass-roots politics by other means -- one must be willing and, most of all, able to work in the underbelly of local politics, as Hezbollah has done in Lebanon. It is the politics of getting people jobs, picking up trash and getting relatives out of jail. Engaging in this politics has the potential to do much more than merely ingratiate an armed force with a local population. It gives that force a mental map of local pressure points and the knowledge of how to press them -- benignly or otherwise -- to get desired results.
Some may say that this is just standard insurgency-counterinsurgency doctrine. True, but one has to ask why Hezbollah has been able to pull it off in Lebanon, while young Americans continue to endure a host of nasty surprises in Iraq.
The writer served in Iraq as a Marine infantry officer in 2004.
What is "Victory?"
News Analysis
Israelis Chase Hint of Victory
Published: August 13, 2006
JERUSALEM, Aug. 12 — Israel’s move to greatly increase its ground forces in Lebanon a day before it is expected to accept a cease-fire has two goals: to damage Hezbollah as much as possible and to conclude the conflict with something that could be called a victory for an Israeli government under domestic pressure.
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Michael Kamber for The New York Times
Israel tripled its ground forces in Lebanon on Saturday in an effort to damage Hezbollah as much as possible before officially accepting a cease-fire.
John Moore/Getty Images
Israeli soldiers heading into southern Lebanon on Saturday. Many in Israel view the army's last push as too late to make a difference in the conflict.
Having begun the war by proclaiming that the aim was the destruction and disarmament of Hezbollah, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will be able to claim only that Hezbollah is badly hurt and, with the help of international troops, effectively restrained — even without the robust new international force or disarming of the militia that Israel initially demanded.
In this last army push, which many here regard as too late to make a big difference, Mr. Olmert wants to ensure that the Iranian-backed militia and its stockpiles are at least cleared out of southern Lebanon. The hope is that inhabitants of the north will be able to return home or emerge from bomb shelters without the daily fear of rocket fire.
The Israeli cabinet is scheduled to meet Sunday to discuss a United Nations Security Council resolution calling for a cease-fire. But the Israeli Army will be pressing forward at least until Monday, if not beyond, trying to destroy Hezbollah rockets and assets. That is a task that Israel does not believe the Lebanese Army, even accompanied by an expanded United Nations force, will dare to do.
Mr. Olmert and his defense minister, Amir Peretz, have been wounded by the perception that they mishandled the war and were overly reluctant to commit sizable ground forces when there was enough time to accomplish the government’s stated goals. The life of the government is likely to have been shortened.
The debate in Israel has not been over the war’s legitimacy — that is widely accepted. The attacks on the government have been over its handling of the assault.
In a familiar pattern of backbiting — the best indication that the war has not gone well — the army leadership is complaining that the politicians did not let the military do its job, and the politicians are complaining that the army promised that the task could be accomplished in a week or two and largely with air power.
As usual in Israel, the army is more popular than the politicians, and it is bound to win the argument. But the army’s performance against Hezbollah will lead to considerable introspection and criticism about failures in strategic analysis, intelligence, training and preparedness, especially among the reserves.
There will also be sharp criticism of governmental preparedness, with the image of many thousands of poorer Israelis huddling for a month in decrepit bomb shelters with inadequate public services and supplies.
Mr. Olmert, who leads the centrist Kadima Party, is going to face a postwar onslaught from the right, in particular from Benjamin Netanyahu. Mr. Netanyahu, the Likud Party leader, favored a major military operation to destroy what he called “an Iranian army division” fighting in “a war conceived, organized, trained and equipped by Iran, with Iran’s goal of destroying Israel and its fantasy ideology of building a once-glorious Muslim empire in which we are merely the first pit stop.”
There is more of this talk to come, and from another rival on the right: Avigdor Lieberman, who is already very popular among the Russians who make up a large number of the Jewish Israelis living in the north, many of whom were too poor to seek shelter in southern towns.
Mr. Olmert’s plan to extend the policy of unilateralism by removing up to 70,000 Israeli settlers from the West Bank, behind the separation barrier, also appears moribund. The rocket wars have made the barrier look flimsy, and one year after Ariel Sharon and Mr. Olmert pulled 9,000 Israeli settlers out of Gaza unilaterally, many onetime supporters of the plan say that critics like Mr. Netanyahu appear to have been correct — that the disengagement provided little security or stability.
The plan to hand over more territory in the West Bank to a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority that could use more sophisticated rockets to hit Tel Aviv is now being dismissed as folly by many in the center, not just on the right — an unexpected gift to the settler movement.
“A year after the withdrawal of Gaza, there is a huge ‘I told you so’ hanging in the air, and it’s hard to argue with, when Qassams are still flying out of Gaza and nothing has moved forward,” said Tom Segev, an Israeli historian. “Like Oslo, Gaza disengagement was a good idea, but it was managed very badly. But instead of criticizing the management, we criticize the thing itself.”
Itamar Rabinovich, a former ambassador to Washington, said bluntly: “Two notions have died. First, unilateralism, and second, separation by the fence. Missiles dwarf the fence.”
Israelis also fear there has been damage done to their relationship with the United States, where some may complain that the Israelis were given time to clobber Hezbollah and did not get the job done.
Mr. Rabinovich is more sanguine. “Part of the reckoning will be our reputation as a strategic partner, when we tell the Americans, ‘Give us the tools and we’ll do the job,’ ” he said. “Part of our self-image is of military miracle workers, and we didn’t do that this time.”
Still, he said, Lebanon reinforces Israel’s view that the real danger in the region is Iran, Hezbollah’s patron, and that the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran is aimed at Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan too.
For Mr. Segev, the Lebanese war seems like a side show to Israel’s main and persisting problem: the Palestinians. Israel still faces a crisis in Gaza, including the unknown fate of a soldier captured June 25, and unresolved disputes over the Hamas-led government.
“This war is a huge detour from the real problem, like an accident that shouldn’t have happened,” Mr. Segev said. “The Palestinian problem persists, and again the government looks to be bad managers.”
Friday, August 11, 2006
THREE CHEERS FOR NOT BEING COMPLETE MORONS!!!
Israeli Leader Backs Deal Set for Approval by U.N. Council
Published: August 11, 2006
UNITED NATIONS, Aug. 11 — Ambassadors negotiating a resolution to halt the fighting in Lebanon reported agreement on a final text today and predicted a vote on it by evening.
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Stan Hondo/AFP -- Getty Images
John Bolton, United States Ambassador to the United Nations, discussed the proposed resolution to halt the fighting in Lebanon.
“We are now very, very close to agreement and our aspiration to have a vote at the end of the afternoon remains,” said John R. Bolton, the American ambassador.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrived at the United Nations this morning saying she expected final action on the resolution within hours. Other foreign ministers, including France’s Philippe Douste-Blazy and Britain’s Margaret Beckett, were also expected to participate in a vote.
In Jerusalem, Israeli officials said today that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had accepted the deal and informed the United States of his decision, according to the Associated Press. Mr. Olmert will recommend that his government approve the deal in its Sunday meeting, said Gideon Meir, a senior official in the Israeli Foreign Ministry.
But the Associated Press also reported that an Israeli official said the government’s offensive against Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon would continue at least until Sunday’s Cabinet vote.
Ambassadors had been upbeat Thursday about settling the disputes over the text, which have consumed a week of intensive negotiations, but Thursday evening the accord was set back by objections from Lebanon over the nature of the international force that is to be sent into South Lebanon once the truce is declared.
Lebanon opposed the invocation in the text of Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter, which gives peacekeepers the right to use broad military firepower. The United States and Israel believe that the international force that goes into south Lebanon must be strong enough to prevent Hezbollah from reoccupying the area.
Mr. Bolton and his French counterpart, Jean-Marc de la Sabliére, had worked into the night to adjust the language before sending a revised version overnight to Beirut.
Nassir Al-Nasser, the ambassador of Qatar, the Arab representative on the Council, said that the revised language shifts the emphasis to Chapter VI. That chapter sets up procedures for peaceful settlement of conflict before the kind of military enforcement envisioned in Chapter VII is resorted to.
It was not clear whether the final text, which Mr. Al-Nasser said was still undergoing last-minute changes, would use the Chapter VII designation for the 20,000-member stabilization force that is ultimately to take responsibility for the area.
That force is expected to be led by France and to include troops from other European countries. Both Britain and the United States have said they will offer logistical support, but no soldiers.
Mr. Al-Nasser indicated that the Lebanese were now supportive and a vote would occur later today.
The original French-American draft, introduced last Saturday left the creation of that force to a second resolution, which would also be responsible for setting up the disarmament of Hezbollah, demarcating the borders of Lebanon, establishing an arms embargo to prevent the entry of unauthorized weapons and empowering the Lebanese army to control all its territory.
Hezbollah would be expected to pull out of all areas south of the Litani River, which is roughly 15 miles from the border with Israeli.
The final text works off a formula that would have the Israelis depart in phases while the Lebanese Army, along with a reinforced Unifil, the United Nations force in Lebanon, moved progressively into the area. Fouad Siniora, the Lebanese prime minister, said Monday that he was sending 15,000 members of his military to southern Lebanon.
The phased withdrawal and deployment approach was an essential compromise after Lebanon and the 22-member Arab League early this week objected to the first French-American draft that would have permitted the Israeli military to remain in South Lebanon.
The text called for an immediate cessation of “all attacks” by Hezbollah but only of “all offensive military operations” by Israel. Since Israel has classed its war effort as one taken in self-defense, Lebanon said this amounted to a ceasefire against only one side, Hezbollah, and demanded that Israel be ordered to withdraw immediately behind the existing border.
Hezbollah had reacted by saying it would agree to no ceasefire as long as Israeli solders remained in Lebanon.
Israel has little respect for Unifil, but Dan Gillerman, the Israeli ambassador, went on Israel’s Channel 1 Thursday to reassure Israelis that the enhanced Unifil would be “completely different from the blue helmets we know today.”
The agreement brings to an end a four-week period in which the Security Council has been excoriated, particularly throughout the Middle East, for having taken no significant action to stop the fighting.
Secretary General Kofi Annan, who has been among those criticizing the Council, said today, “I think we’ve had enough discussions, the issues have been discussed all around and it is time for decision, and I hope the Council will take firm action today.”
“Each day that the discussions go on, the death, the killings and the destruction continues in the region, and civilians on both sides continue to suffer,” he said.
Lost in the rush of diplomatic activity today was a resolution introduced Thursday night by Russia calling for a 72-hour “humanitarian ceasefire” to enable aid workers to reach the thousands of wounded, ill and hungry in Lebanon cut off from international assistance.
Vitaly I. Churkin, the Russian ambassador, said he was taking the action because his country had lost patience with the slow pace of diplomacy at a time when people were dying in large numbers and military forces and militias were threatening to escalate their activity.
He said, however, that Moscow would withdraw the measure if it appeared that the French-American draft could come to a vote.
Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Massive Manatee Is Spotted in Hudson River
Published: August 7, 2006
Added to the chronicles of great beasts that have descended upon New York City in the year 2006 is one that is arguably the greatest of them all. A beast, upwards of 1,000 pounds and a cousin to the elephant, which dwarfs the coyote, the deer and the dolphin that preceded it. A beast that, at hundreds of miles north of its natural habitat, has most likely made the longest and most arduous journey among them. A beast, with a pudgy-nosed face and a sweet-potato-shaped body, that could even be considered cute: a manatee.
Over the past week, boaters and bloggers have been energetically tracking a manatee in its lumbering expedition along the Atlantic Coast and up the Hudson River.
John H. Vargo, the publisher of Boating on the Hudson magazine, put out an alert last week, much to the incredulity of some boaters.
“Some were laughing about it, because it couldn’t possibly be true,” Mr. Vargo said.
The manatee has been spotted at 23rd Street near Chelsea Piers, West 125th Street, and later in Westchester County. It appeared to be healthy.
Randy Shull, a boater from Ossining, spotted the manatee about 4:30 p.m. yesterday while his 21-foot boat was floating at Kingsland Point Park in Sleepy Hollow.
“It was gigantic,” Mr. Shull said. “When we saw it surface, its back was just mammoth.”
It is unusual, but not unprecedented for manatees to travel this far north — the seaweed-munching sea creatures are commonly associated with the warm waters of Florida.
Manatees have been reported along the shores of Long Island and even as far north as Rhode Island. It is unusual, however, for a manatee to be spotted inland in a river this far north.
“I’m 70 years old, and I’ve been on the river my entire life,” Mr. Vargo said. “I’ve seen dolphins and everything else, but never a manatee.”
Tuesday, August 08, 2006
"Collateral Damage"
Survivors
After Bomb Kills Loved Ones, Life Turns Ghostly
Published: August 8, 2006
TYRE, Lebanon, Aug. 7 — After a bomb hits, the remains of a life are modest.
Ghazi Samra, a fisherman, is feeling the new shape of his. Last month, his wife, one of his daughters and a granddaughter were killed in an Israeli airstrike. Since then, his life has shrunk to the size of one crooked city block. He tries to sleep in an apartment that is not his own. He wears his wife’s glasses, more out of a craving for closeness to her than as an aid to see. The shirt and shorts he is wearing are his brother’s. He has not felt able to return to his own apartment.
“I became a different person,” said Mr. Samra, sitting on a battered chair in a local gathering space at the intersection of two narrow stone streets. “I can’t talk with my children. I’m not wearing my own clothes.”
Across Lebanon and Israel, missiles, rockets and bombs have punched holes into families and, slowly, painstakingly, the survivors are trying to put themselves back together again. It is a quiet process that unfolds in the private space of people’s lives. It is full of ache and of empty places. It is a major consequence of war that often goes unnoticed, after the flash of bombs and the headlines that chronicle them fade away.
For Mr. Samra, who is 50, the healing is happening in a warren of narrow stone streets in the old section of this town. He begins his day with a short walk down a narrow alley to the place, several doorways down, where he passes the hours. He walks slowly, in leather sandals, usually smoking a cigarette. It is supposed to be an exercise in forgetting, but often it is the first few minutes of another day full of extremely painful memories.
Those memories began on the late afternoon of July 16, when his wife, a granddaughter and four of his children, afraid of a possible airstrike, sought shelter in the basement of a nearby building, as theirs lacked one. The building housed the main office for the city’s emergency workers, and the family felt sure it would be safe.
They were wrong. Around 5:30 p.m., missiles struck the building’s foundations and its top floors. Residents now say a Hezbollah official may have been living there. There was no response from the Israeli Defense Ministry to a request, submitted last week, for comment about the target.
Mr. Samra had been sitting with friends elsewhere. He raced to the building and frantically began to dig. He found his 5-year-old daughter, Sally, torn apart. Her torso and an arm lay separate from her legs. Another daughter, Noor, 8, was moving under the rubble. His granddaughter Lynn, not yet 2, had part of her face smashed. His wife, Alia Waabi, had died immediately.
Two other daughters, Zahra and Mirna, made it to safety, though Zahra was badly injured.
“This is my family,” he said, his face creased, sitting under the eaves of the stone houses. “Three of them are buried and three of them are in hospitals.”
After the adrenaline of the rescue and its aftermath fell away, Mr. Samra sank into blankness. He could not focus on anything. He had trouble remembering things. His vision seemed to blur.
He found it difficult to process what had happened. One thing that keeps him from mourning properly is that his wife and daughter will not be able to have a proper burial until the violence has died down. They were temporarily buried in an empty lot with dozens of others. They were assigned numbers. Alia is No. 35 and Sally is No. 67.
“They are numbers now,’’ he said. “There are no names anymore.”
He tried twice to return to his apartment, but he turned back both times. On Sunday, his friend opened it for a visitor. The rooms were still neatly composed, life suspended. Dishes were done. Laundry — tiny pink pants, a head scarf, a bra — was hanging on lines. But details showed something was wrong. The clothes were dusty from the pulverized concrete and soot of the explosion. A bowl of cucumbers and a pot of beans in the refrigerator were covered with mold.
As is often the case, the deaths felt arbitrary. On another day, Mr. Samra’s family might not have gone to the building at all. It was the first time they decided to hide. The timing of the missile strike could not have been worse. The family had eaten dinner early to be underground before dark.
This plunged Mr. Samra into guilt. He would often take his family to Cyprus in times of danger, throughout Lebanon’s fraught recent history, and briefly considered it in this case, but assumed Tyre would be safe.
Areas hit by bombs are often a jumble of incongruities. Bread spilled out into the road from a van that was hit by a missile in northern Tyre on Sunday morning. The area around the basement where Mr. Samra’s family was hit was a swirl of household items — a shampoo bottle, a high heel from a shoe, a shower curtain — mixed with ragged concrete and wire.
“Regret is killing me inside,” Mr. Samra said. “I should have taken them away.”
The rest of the family was having difficulties of its own. When 17-year-old Zahra awoke in her hospital bed, she did not know that her mother had been killed. Mr. Samra did not have the heart to tell her. Her face had been burned, and when she walked into the bathroom and looked into the mirror, she sobbed, said her brother Muhammad, who was with her.
Mr. Samra passed the afternoon watching the small neighborhood move around him. He has not returned to work. Muhammad has taken over visiting the hospitalized girls.
“My wife was my life,” he said, looking toward a television set up near the couches in the narrow alley.
“My heart aches.”
