The controversy over imposing an immediate ceasefire in Lebanon reflects a basic issue in dealing with terrorism and especially hostage taking –how to solve the short term problem without creating more problems in the long term.
Without acknowledging it because to do so would mean tarnishing the memory of a Republican icon, the Bush Administration apparently is heeding lessons from the Reagan Administration. During the 1980's, the Reagan Administration talked the tough talk but folded its tents and made deals in reaction to terrorist bombings and hostage-taking in Lebanon by the same terrorist group, Hezbollah, that precipitated the current crisis by crossing the international border to seize Israeli hostages and then launching rockets against Israeli civilians.
U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and others calling for an immediate ceasefire seem to have forgotten much history and hard facts of life.
The deaths of civilians in Lebanon are heartbreaking and a major tragedy. There is almost no way one can ignore the dramatic television footage and photos, especially from the village of Qana where a building housing civilians was hit this weekend. It is impossible not to be moved by the scenes on TV. The repeated dramatic airing on Arab television stirs already hot emotions and the numerous human interest stories on Western television add to the pressures for an immediate ceasefire.
These calls, however, are another grasping for short term “solutions” that can lead to more deaths in the future.
President Bush’s stance that a Lebanon ceasefire should be sustainable is not as calloused a response to the immediate suffering as many,especially in the Arab world, contend. Whether or not the President has the Reagan administration in mind, his effort to make sure that Hezbollah is not in a position to create future crises with more rocket launchings and cross-border attacks has a solid basis in relatively recent history.
In the 1980s when Hezbollah took more than three dozen westerners hostage, Reagan Administration officials made deals to solve the short term problem. These were the infamous deals orchestrated by Ollie North to trade antitank missiles to Iran, the prime backer of the Hezbollah hostage takers. But shortly after each American hostage was released, another was taken. And when Reagan withdrew the U.S. peacekeeping force in Lebanon after a Hezbollah suicide bomber killed 241 U.S. Marines, Navy and Army personnel, this was taken as a further sign in the region that the Americans were weak and paper tigers.
Israel’s past hostage deals with Hezbollah added to the perception of weakness when in 2004 they swapped 433 Arab prisoners for the bodies of three Israeli soldiers killed by the Hezbollah and a businessman who had been lured into a trap.
These U.S. and Israeli fixes were short term. They fertilized the ground for long term problems---the growth of Hezbollah, the emergence of other extremist groups such as al Qaeda and especially the Iranian-Syrian supply of an estimated 13,000 rockets and extensive construction of underground tunnels, bunkers and storage facilities. Many of them were deliberately located in civilian areas, a trick used by the PLO before the Israelis drove it out of Lebanon in 1982.
Several additional points need to be made in this age of media-influenced foreign policy:
• Emotional reactions are dangerous -- not just because of street mobs attacking U.N. facilities in Beirut or other forms of violence but because they often affect the judgments of policy makers.
-- The hyperbole by Lebanese officials and others in calling the Qana bombing a “massacre” and war crimes is too often reported at face value, especially when they are silent about Hezbollah’s deliberate firing of rockets packed with ball bearings designed to kill and main Israeli civilians. Initial assertions that Israel deliberately hit civilian targets or killed huge numbers of people often turn out to be unsubstantiated. A recent case was the bomb that hit the U.N. Observer post.U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan originally claimed it was deliberate. However the Canadian media has reported that that a couple days before he was killed, the Canadian Army observer had earlier emailed that Hezbollah was firing at Israel from nearby positions.
-- Exactly what happened in the Qana explosion also may not be clear cut. Israeli officials said that the building collapsed hours after Israel struck a near by launcher emplacement. The suggestionsthat explosives may have been stored in the building may be self serving but there have been media reports that the roof of the building had not been hit, as would normally been the case if the building struck by a bomb. The Israelis had nothing to gain by deliberately hitting a civilian target, and obviously much to lose. If a smart bomb or laser guided bomb went astray it would not be the first time for either Israel or the U.S.
-- The U.S. Israel and other countries have made deals to release hostages because policy makers were affected by the emotions and pressures from family members and the public.
• Pictures may not lie but they can distort. (And in the age of digital photography they can be made to lie.)
-- It is easy for photographers to focus on a destroyed building, such as the Hezbollah headquartersin southern Beirut, but one has to look closely to note that the nearby buildings apparently suffered only superficial damage. Photos of damage to one area of a city can give the false impression that the whole city is destroyed. Demonstrations can be filmed with a tight focus, giving the impression that more people are taking part than is the case.
-- In January, 1983, I went to Beirut as part of a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff team to look at proposals for U.S foreign assistance following the Israeli withdrawal the previous year. As a result of watching the television coverage of Israel's invasion to oust the PLO, I half expected to see most of the city leveled. Instead, as we drove in from the south past rows of intact apartment buildings, an American military attaché pointed out the occasional blackened corner apartment that had been burnt out. There had been PLO machine gun nests or rocket launcher in those apartments he said, that were knocked out by Israelis. He said the TV photos had focused on the billowing smoke, making it appear as if the entire building and section of the city was on fire. But in reality, the damage was confined to one or two apartments in a relatively small number of buildings.
(For the record, the proposed foreign assistance program was largely designed to help the Shia residents of southern Lenabon who had been ignored by the Lebanonese government. The program collapsed when Shia terrorists blew up the American embassy in 1983, killing Agency for International Development experts as well as CIA agents and embassy personnel.)
-- In the first Iraq war the U.S. called the fighting to a halt before Saddam Hussein’s armor was destroyed, largely because of TV footage of the “mile of death” – a long line of trucks and other vehicles that had been attacked and burned by American aircraft. Much of the footage focused on the poor drivers of the lead vehicles who were burnt to death in their cabs. Most of the Iraqis in the other vehicles were caught in the traffic jam, jumped out and escaped. Yet the dramatic TV footage and the fears it might make it appear to Arabs as if the U.S. was “piling it on” the Iraqis, was a factor in calling the war short before the elite Republican guard equipment was destroyed. Saddam Hussein thus was left in a better position to attack the Kurds in the north and the marsh people in the south.
One can only wonder whether if real time television coverage existed in World War II, the allied bombing of French and Belgian villages would have caused an outcry to halt the Normandy invasion to roll back Germany’s control of Western Europe.
It is easy and almost par for the course for the U.N. Secretary General, European and Arab officials to react to emotions and photos by calling for an immediate ceasefire in the current Lebanon crisis. But a simple cease fire would allow Hezbollah to re-supply, perhaps with more long range missiles from Iran and Syria and dig in further. Lebanon will be further destabilized. And the next round of fighting is likely to cause even larger numbers of civilian casualties, especially if Hezbollah obtains more large rockets capable of hitting Haifa and perhaps even Tel Aviv and the Israeli military strikes back even harder.
Whatever other elements might be included in an eventual ceasefire deal, they must include arrangements to cut off Syrian and Iranians re-supply of rockets and other weapons to Hezbollah so it does not feel emboldened to launch more cross-border attacks in the future.
A cease fire that allows Hezbollah to claim victory will encourage Iran and the Islamic fundamentalist terrorists who already have left their fatal mark on British, Spanish, Turkish, Iraqi, Saudi, Egyptian, Moroccan, Indonesian, Kenyan and Tanzanian cities in addition to New York and the Pentagon in Washington. The Europeans, Arabs and UN officials who have tried to soft-pedal the threats from fundamentalists and a nuclear equipped Iran and are now clamoring for an immediate cease fire only would be postponing another and perhaps worse crisis.
Short term deals with terrorists too often lead to long term pain.
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