Feeding the Enemy - New York Times
The New York Times

July 18, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist

Feeding the Enemy
By
NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

One of the broader tragedies in the Middle East is "the boomerang syndrome."

Impatient Arabs backed violence and thus put Ariel Sharon and now Ehud
Olmert into power, while utterly discrediting Israeli doves. Some Arabs
seethed at
their daily discomforts, and so they backed provocations that are now vastly
multiplying the suffering in Gaza and Lebanon alike.

I'm afraid that impatient Israelis may now be falling into the same trap.
Israelis, outraged by attacks and kidnappings, have escalated the conflict
by
launching an assault on Lebanon that may make life in Israel far more
dangerous for many years to come.

It's easy to sympathize with Israeli outrage, particularly since the attacks
on it follow its withdrawals first from Lebanon and then from Gaza. But the
winners in this conflict, in the medium to long term, are likely to be
hard-liners throughout the Islamic world.

The Iranian and Syrian regimes are illegitimate, incompetent and unpopular,
but they may be able to exploit anger at the television images from Lebanon
into a longer lease on life for themselves. Pakistani extremists will be
strengthened in their calls for jihad. In Sudan, President Omar Hassan
al-Bashir
will rally popular anger to resist U.N. peacekeepers in Darfur. In Iraq,
sympathy for Lebanese Shiites may strengthen Iraq's own extremist Shiite
militias.

Meanwhile, it's not clear what Israel can achieve militarily in Lebanon. The
12,000 missiles controlled by Hezbollah are not kept in arsenals, but in
unmarked
homes and garages, so it's uncertain that Israel will be able to destroy
very many. If Israel continues with a limited air war for a couple of weeks,
it
will produce enough television footage of bleeding Lebanese to anger the
world, but not enough to achieve any substantial shift in power on the
ground.

Until this month, Hezbollah had been on the defensive in Lebanon. It was und
er pressure to disarm and was resented as a pawn of Syria and Iran. Al Qaeda
had even tried to assassinate its leader, Hassan Nasrallah.

But now Sheik Nasrallah, one of the canniest politicians in the region, has
kidnapped not only Israeli soldiers but the Middle East conflict. He may
well
emerge with more credibility than ever among Sunnis as well as Shiites.

A rule of thumb in the Middle East is that anyone who makes confident
predictions is too dogmatic to be worth listening to. Maybe I'm wrong and
Israel will
achieve its short-term security goals, for it's conceivable that the warfare
will galvanize the U.N. Security Council - and Lebanon itself - to disarm
Hezbollah. But there's also the longer term to worry about, and the fury at
Israel will be much harder to dismantle than Katyusha rockets.

I hitchhiked through Lebanon and the region while a student in 1982, shortly
after the Israeli invasion. Though Syria had recently massacred some 10,000
to 20,000 of its people in Hama - the center of town was rubble - most Arabs
weren't exercised about Syrians killing Syrians, they were enraged by
Israelis
killing Arabs. That may not be fair, but that's reality: Sheik Nasrallah's
power today arises in part from Israeli bombing back in 1982.

Likewise, the sheik's radical successor in 2030 will be empowered in part
because of Israeli bombings in 2006.

"It is simple to join emotionally in George Bush's culture war against the
axis of evil," editorialized Haaretz, the Israeli newspaper, "but it must be
remembered that, at the end of the day, it is the citizens of Israel and not
the Americans who have to continue living in the Middle East. Therefore, we
have to think of ways that will make it possible for us to coexist, even
with those we do not enjoy being with."

Plenty of experience shows that Israel can't deter private terror networks,
but that it can deter states. Syria, for example, despises Israel but doesn'
t
launch rockets or kidnap soldiers. So Israel might benefit from firmer
states in Lebanon and Gaza that actually control their territories. Instead,
the
latest Israeli offensives foster anarchy to both the north and the south,
potentially nurturing militant groups that are not subject to classical
deterrence.

If Israel is ever to achieve real security, we have a pretty good idea how
it will be achieved: the kind of two-state solution reached in the private
Geneva
accord of 2003 between Arab and Israeli peaceniks. The fighting in Lebanon
pushes that possibility even farther away - and in that sense, each bombing
mission harms Israel's future as well as Lebanon's.

Posted by Miriam V.