Beware the siren Lebanon

JERUSALEM: ARIEL SHARON wakes up from his long coma in a sweat and says he's had a terrible nightmare. "What was it?" ask his aides. "I dreamed we were back in Lebanon."

The bitter joke, which has been making the rounds here since the war against Hezbollah last summer, goes to the heart of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's broken career. For a quarter-century, Lebanon has been the graveyard of Israeli politicians reckless enough to venture there.

Some, like Menachem Begin, never emerged again. That may be the fate of Olmert. A government commission issued a scathing first report last week on his leadership during the first five days of the war. A final segment, due some time this summer, may well urge him to resign. His foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, has already said he should.

Some politicians, like Sharon, managed to stagger out of Lebanon and eventually revive — despite, in his case, having been labeled by many a war criminal for not preventing or halting massacres of Palestinians by Israel's Lebanese Christian allies.

When he did emerge, his famous impetuosity was seared away. In a sense, it was the nightmare of Lebanon that had taught Sharon patience and allowed him to become a statesman in his second career.

Ehud

Barak, the former Labor Party prime minister, hopes for just such a resurrection.

It was Barak who suddenly pulled Israel out of Lebanon in 2000 to concentrate — in vain — on efforts to make peace first with Syria and then with the Palestinians. But his was a unilateral act, and neither he nor his successors reinforced it with the retaliation he had promised Hezbollah if it violated the border. Many Israelis now believe the combination made last summer's war inevitable.

"Lebanon has significantly harmed or destroyed the political careers of nearly every Israeli politician that has touched it," said Chuck Freilich, formerly Israel's deputy national security adviser and now at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. "The reason is not simply the nature of Lebanon, but the nature of Israeli decision-making in the last few decades, which has been shortsighted, focused on the immediate future and not part of a thought-out strategy."

But there is also a broader question of what might work in the specific conundrum of Lebanon. A sectarian patchwork of a state without a powerful central government or army, Lebanon has always been riven by religion and ethnicity and dominated by external forces like Syria or externally sponsored ones like Hezbollah and, before it, the Palestine Liberation Organization.

In trying to attack its enemies within Lebanon, Israel has always come up against the difficulties of conventional warfare against nonstate actors taking refuge in a semi-state.

Mark Heller, director of research for the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, notes that Lebanon itself was never an enemy, "but a theater in which the enemy operates" without a central address.

So Lebanon has become a marker, he said, for "the inability of the Israeli public in general, and the political system in particular, to adapt to the fact that it can't hold governments and armies to the same standards in Lebanon that it was holding them to before 1982 — before Lebanon."

In 1982, Sharon, as defense minister, pressed Begin into a full-scale attack on the PLO and Yasser Arafat, to deny them Lebanon as a theater of operations for attacks on Israel.

At first, the war went spectacularly well, and Arafat had to slink off to Tunis. But Sharon and Israel fell victim to the classic trap of assuming that Lebanon could be restructured to Israel's liking. The hand-picked Christian president, Bashir Gemayel, was assassinated nine days before he was to take office; the initially welcoming Shiites of southern Lebanon revolted against their occupiers. Hezbollah, with the help of Iran, took hold.

Clinton Bailey, an Israeli scholar of the Bedouin culture, was an Israeli intelligence officer at the time. As he and I traveled to the Awali River in 1983, he told me: "We knew where the Palestinians had every gun — in this building, on the second floor, third window from the left. But what we didn't know was that the Shiites would turn against us."

Israel's occupation lasted 18 years, testimony to a continuing illusion of what it might be possible to accomplish, if only the Lebanese could be freed from outside pressures like Syria and Iran to follow their own self-interest. Of course, that never happened.

So what made Olmert's war so astonishing was that despite his long apprenticeship to Sharon, he bought all the old assumptions about Lebanon, hoping to have a masterstroke against Hezbollah by turning the central government of Fuad Siniora against it. Instead, the Israeli decision to bomb all over Lebanon, and not just Hezbollah targets in the south, weakened Siniora.

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