A Third Lebanon War Could Be Much Worse than the Second

Hezbollah's Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah recently announced that he could hit any and every place in Israel with long-range missiles. That would mean that, unlike in 2006, Hezbollah could strike not only the northern cities of Kiryat Shmona and Haifa but also Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Ben-Gurion International Airport, and the Dimona nuclear-power plant.

I dismissed his claim as a wild boast last week, but Israeli army commander Major General Gabi Ashkenazi confirmed it this week. So while we've all been worried about Iran's nuclear-weapons program, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been quietly arming his chief terrorist proxy with more advanced conventional weapons.

A Third Lebanon War could make the Second Lebanon War in 2006 look like a minor kerfuffle. And the Second Lebanon War was anything but. When Noah Pollak and I covered it from the Israeli side, we found the whole northern swath of the country emptied of people and cars like it was the end of the world. The city of Tiberias looked like a zombie movie set. Kiryat Shmona is so close to the border that the air raid sirens often didn't start wailing until after Hezbollah's incoming Katyusha rockets had already exploded.

Meanwhile, pitched battles between the Israel Defense Forces and Hezbollah seriously chewed up South Lebanon. The centers of entire towns were pulverized by Israeli air and artillery strikes. More than a thousand people were killed, many of them civilians used by Hezbollah as human shields.

Hezbollah is much more dangerous than any terrorist group that has ever been fielded from the West Bank or Gaza. It managed to create hundreds of thousands of refugees inside Israel, and it did so with fewer and shorter range rockets than it has now. And while the "Party of God" may think it's terrific that it can do what Hamas in Gaza only fantasizes about, its arsenal indirectly threatens Lebanon just as much if not more than it threatens Israel. Nasrallah can unleash a great deal of destruction, but it's still no match for what the IDF can dish out while fighting back.

If Israel's nuclear power plant comes under fire, if Tel Aviv skyscrapers explode from missile attacks, if Hezbollah manages to turn all of Israel into a kill zone where there is no place to run, Israelis will panic like they haven't since the 1973 Yom Kippur War when it briefly appeared the Egyptian army might overrun the whole country. I wouldn't want to be anywhere in Lebanon while Israelis are actively fending off that kind of assault. No country can afford to be restrained while fighting for its survival.

Read the rest in Commentary Magazine.

Damascus Reverts to Form

Well, that didn’t last long. Last week, Syrian President Bashar Assad announced he would resume peace negotiations with Israel without preconditions, but now he suddenly says it’s impossible. “What we lack is an Israeli partner,” he said, “who is ready to go forward and ready to come to a result.”

As an absolute dictator and a state sponsor of terrorism, Assad is in no position to boohoo about how the region’s only mature liberal democracy supposedly isn’t a peace partner — but he wouldn’t do this if he didn’t think he could get away with it. If even the United States, of all countries, is behaving as though Israel were the problem, why shouldn’t he play along?

In a different historical context, it might be amusing, as Baghdad Bob’s alternate-universe pronouncements were, to listen to the tyrannical Assad talk as though he’s the Syrian equivalent of Israel’s dovish Shimon Peres, while the elected Israeli prime minister is a Jewish Yasir Arafat. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, though, is acting as though the first part were true.

Sarkozy is working hard to boost France’s influence in the Middle East by carving out a role for himself as a mediator between Israelis and Arabs. When Assad and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced last week that they would hold talks, they did it through him. And this weekend Sarkozy offered to host Assad, Netanyahu, and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas at a summit in Paris. He can’t host any such thing, however, if the belligerents on the Arab side are shut out. So Assad has to be brought in from the cold, whether he’s earned it or not.

He hasn’t. And now that his reputation is getting an undeserved scrubbing, brace yourself for the worst sort of passive-aggressive Orwellian grandstanding.

“What Obama said about peace was a good thing,” he said. “We agree with him on the principles, but as I said, what’s the action plan? The sponsor has to draw up an action plan.”

Notice what he’s done here? He’s portraying himself as though not only Netanyahu but also Barack Obama were less interested in peace than he is. It should be obvious, though, that Assad isn’t serious. He supports terrorist organizations that kill Americans, Israelis, Iraqis, and Lebanese — not exactly the sort of behavior one associates with leaders who agree with Barack Obama “on the principles.” Yet he’s blaming the United States for his own roguish behavior, because the U.S. does not have an “action plan.”

Read the rest in Commentary Magazine.

Amazing Photographs from Afghanistan

Take a look at these extraordinary pictures from Afghanistan by David Guttenfelder at the Denver Post Media Center.

The Show Needn't Go On

This week the Israeli government announced will resume negotiations with Syria without preconditions, and the Syrians responded in kind.

Peace talks, if they ever actually start, aren't going anywhere, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu knows it. He's going through the motions so Western diplomats don't throw him and his country out in the cold. Syria's Bashar Assad knows it too. He's going through the motions so that he and his country can come in from the cold.

It has been years since I spoke to a single person in the Middle East who thinks the Arab-Israeli conflict will be resolved any time soon. Last time I visited Jerusalem with a half-dozen American colleagues, Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh bluntly told us to stop asking "What's the solution?"

"I don't see a real peace emerging over here," he said. "We should stop talking about it."

Some Westerners, though, can't stop talking about it and get bent out of shape when they hear comments like Toameh's from either side. As Evelyn Gordon pointed out here a few days ago, French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner can't see the difference between Israeli disillusionment about the prospects for peace and an abandonment of the desire for peace in the abstract.

“What really hurts me," Kouchner said, "and this shocks us, is that before there used to be a great peace movement in Israel. … It seems to me, and I hope that I am completely wrong, that this desire has completely vanished, as though people no longer believe in it.”

It's not that people over there no longer want it. They've learned the hard way, repeatedly, that the Arab-Israeli conflict is no more stoppable right now than are plate tectonics.

Because supposedly right-thinking Westerners are appalled, Israel and Syria will pretend to hold talks while the more seasoned Western diplomats will pretend the talks stand a chance. It's like the old Russian joke about Communism: "We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us."

Read the rest in Commentary Magazine.

The Lives of Others

Twenty years ago, citizens of East Germany destroyed the Berlin Wall and set off a series of revolutions that demolished the totalitarian police states of Europe.

Like me, you probably won't be able to fly to Berlin to commemorate the anniversary this week. Might I suggest a film, then, if you'd like to mark the date?

If you haven't yet seen it, pick up or rent a copy of The Lives of Others, about East German civilians under surveillance by Stasi agents. It's one of the best films I've ever seen, and certainly the best film ever made about communism.

As many as 100 million people were murdered by communist regimes in the 20th century, but Hollywood is strangely uninterested in the topic. Perhaps one day Steven Spielberg will tackle Stalinism as he did Nazism. Until then, The Lives of Others is the film to watch, and what better time than the twentieth anniversary of the wall's destruction in Germany?

Post-Communist Postcards

Home from the East

I'm home again from an absolutely fascinating tour of post-communist Eastern Europe and can start writing about it as soon as I get my interviews transcribed.

After leaving Romania, I was supposed to visit Chernobyl and the apocalyptic ghost city of Pripyat outside Kiev, Ukraine, but the trip was cancelled at the last minute. The Chernobyl Administration wasn't letting anyone into the area for reasons that aren't clear to me and may never be – perhaps because of a radiation leak, or maybe for more mundane reasons.

So I went to Crimea instead, the part of Ukraine that may be lopped off and reattached to Russia if Vladimir Putin decides to go on another Georgian-style adventure.

Traveling from the eastern edge of the European Union into Ukraine is educational, to say the least. Romania, Hungary, Poland, and other formerly Eastern bloc countries have largely recovered from communism, but much of Ukraine outside Kiev is still ruined. It still hasn't fully recovered from Soviet collectivization, the genocidal terror-famine, the Stalinist purges, and dekulakization. Kiev is a magnificent city and Crimea is a jewel, but large parts of the countryside feel haunted and doomed.

Stand by for photos and stories.