Both sides will now undoubtedly spin the stalemate into talk of victory, yet as the guns fall silent, the old clich? that there are no winners in war, just losers, rings uncomfortably true.
Israel launched its massive military offensive in response to the kidnapping of two of its soldiers by Hizbollah militants. The scale of the violence was intended to re-establish the deterrent principle by which Israel stands so firmly in a region where it is surrounded by enemies.
Yet while Israel’s missiles may have smashed Lebanon to pieces, they have failed both in their short-term objective of securing the release of the two soldiers whose seizure sparked the war, and in the long-term aim of eradicating Hizbollah and removing the threat of its missiles, which rained deep into Israel until the very last day of this campaign. Israel’s actions have not made its citizens any safer, quite the contrary. In the longer-term, it may even be more critical than that, undermining the deterrence that Israel believes has secured its survival for more than half a century.
Neither do Israel’s patrons in Washington come out of this with glory. The willingness to encourage the savage and utterly disproportionate destruction of a sovereign state will have done little to enhance the credit of an administration already tainted by the catastrophic failure of its policy in Iraq.
Indeed, Lebanon was perhaps one of America’s only recent successes in the Middle East, the withdrawal of Syrian forces broadly welcomed and the emergence of a truly sovereign democracy encouraged from Washington. Yet here was America encouraging the destruction of that very democratic state which it had until now claimed as an ally.
Hizbollah will of course claim success, and from a short-term political standpoint it may well be right. Yet what kind of success is it when your country is destroyed, when homes across Hizbollah’s constituency in southern Lebanon and the suburbs of Beirut have been reduced to dust, when over a thousand civilians have been killed?
And while the party will undoubtedly emerge stronger, that very success could be fatal to Lebanon, undermining the delicate sectarian balance that holds the country together at a time when the war has destroyed the budding hope of economic recovery. Hizbollah has always prided itself on looking after its people, providing a kind of state within the state. Yet once the flush of victory has worn off, what will it tell the homeless and the hungry in the south, and what will it tell the rest of Lebanon as the country sinks back into the mire from which it had worked so hard to extricate itself?
