VICTORY FOR HEZBOLLAH
Israel Wasn't Hoping for This

From CounterPunch, the Independent's longtime Middle Eastern correspondent Robert Fisk takes stock of the cease-fire situation:

You have to be down here with the Hizbollah amid this terrifying destruction--way south of the Litani river, in the territory from which Israel once vowed to expel them--to realise the nature of the past month of war and of its enormous political significance to the Middle East. Israel's mighty army has already retreated from the neighbouring village of Ghandoutiya after losing 40 men in just over 36 hours of fighting. It has not even managed to penetrate the smashed town of Khiam where the Hizbollah were celebrating yesterday afternoon. In Srifa, I stood with Hizbollah men looking at the empty roads to the south and could see all the way to Israel and the settlement of Mizgav Am on the other side of the frontier. This is not the way the war was supposed to have ended for Israel.

Far from humiliating Iran and Syria--which was the Israeli-American plan--these two supposedly pariah states have been left untouched and the Hizbollah's reputation lionized across the Arab world. The "opportunity" which President George Bush and his Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, apparently saw in the Lebanon war has turned out to be an opportunity for America's enemies to show the weakness of Israel's army. Indeed, last night, scarcely any Israeli armor was to be seen inside Lebanon--just one solitary tank could be glimpsed outside Bint Jbeil and the Israelis had retreated even from the "safe" Christian town of Marjayoun. It is now clear that the 30,000-strong Israeli army reported to be racing north to the Litani river never existed. In fact, it is unlikely that there were yesterday more than 1,000 Israeli soldiers left in all of southern Lebanon, although they did become involved in two fire-fights during the morning, hours after the UN-ceasefire went into effect.

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Don't buy the bullshit coming from the governments of Israel and the US. Hezbollah won this. Yes, Lebanon definitely lost, in that the southern half of the country now lies in ruins, but Hezbollah not only survives, seemingly totally intact, but the state-within-a-state as soon as the cease fire was declared also emerged from the rubble and started rebuilding, which the official government couldn't do. This has served to galvanize the Lebanese around Hezbollah, and their stature among Arabs in general has been elevated to mythical status--the will to resist American and Israeli domination in the region is now stronger than ever. Whatever their aims were, getting back their captured soldiers, ethnic cleansing, disarming their enemy, whatever, Israel has failed utterly. And the US, which has long known about and supported Israel's war plans, has lost as well--all along, what with foreknowledge of the attack, Condi's joke diplomacy, and the ramping up of arms shipments, it's been fairly obvious that this has been something of a proxy war for America, and now we have something of a black eye to show for it.

It's now looking like White House policy in the Middle East has now achieved in a bass-ackward way what it has wanted all along, a clear road to stability. It's a damned shame that anti-Americanism is what's bringing everybody over there together.

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