Leveraging – reloaded

Earlier I wrote about Thomas Friedman’s column, It’s all about leverage. In retrospect the construction of that post was awkward and needs a real makeover.

Friedman, is capable of astute observations. In his op-ed today he argue that Iran, Syria and their proxies have gained leverage in the Middle East in a number of ways:

Principle No. 1: Always seek “control without responsibility.” In Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq, Iran & Friends have veto power over the politics, without being held fully responsible for the electricity. America’s allies, by contrast, tend to have “responsibility without control.”Principle No. 2: Always insist on being able to both run for political office and bear arms. In Lebanon, Gaza and Iraq, America’s opponents are both in the government and have their own militias.

Principle No. 3: Use suicide bombing and targeted assassinations against any opponents who get in your way. In Lebanon, Syria is widely suspected to have been behind the spate of killings of anti-Syrian journalists and parliamentarians. One suicide attack on a major official in Iraq can neutralize superior U.S. power.

Principle No. 4: Use the Internet as a free command and control system for raising money, recruiting and operations.

Principle No. 5: Cast yourself as the “resistance” to Israel and America, so any opposition to you is equal to support for Israel and America and so no matter how badly you are defeated the mere fact that you “resisted” means you didn’t really lose.

These are all good descriptions of the way the extremists in the Middle East have managed to achieve power and control. However, one question he doesn’t address is how it was possible for Iran, Syria and proxies to achieve all this.

The reason he doesn’t go too far back, is because policies that he advocated have served to empower Hezbollah and Hamas and teach Syria and Iran that they will not suffer for their mischief making.

In a hypothetical column written in 1999, Thomas Friedman described how PM Binyamin Netanyahu would be re-elected.

Now that Israeli troops are out of Lebanon, noted Mr. Netanyahu, everything is reversed: Politically, if the Iranian-directed Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas try to come across the border, they will be invading Israel, and Israel will be justified in massively retaliating against Lebanese, Syrian and Iranian troops that abet such an invasion. And if Israel does retaliate, it won’t be with guerrilla warfare, but with the Israeli Air Force massively striking Lebanese, Iranian and Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and maybe inside Syria.The Israeli move has totally unnerved the Syrians, the Hezbollah guerrillas and Iran. ”They are all now in a quandary,” said the Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen. ”The Hezbollah guerrillas are saying to themselves: ‘Now that we have liberated Lebanon, do we want to use that as leverage to rule Lebanon? Or do we want to use that as a springboard to move on to Jerusalem?’ If they want to do the latter, now they’re really going to have to pay for it.”

When it became clear that Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon hadn’t defanged Hezbollah and that Syria did not pay for continuing to sponsor Hezbollah, Friedman still declared the withdrawal a success and recommended that it serves as the model for withdrawing from Gaza.

Hezbollah knows it can’t launch any serious attack on Israel from Lebanon now without triggering a massive retaliation in which Israel’s air force would destroy all the power plants of Beirut. This would bring down the wrath of all of Lebanon on Hezbollah — because the Lebanese public would not consider an unprovoked Hezbollah attack on Israel as legitimate, or worth sacrificing for, now that Israel is out of Lebanon and Lebanon’s sovereignty is restored.”In every conflict, the extent to which a party can muster domestic support and international support, and the extent to which its public will withstand higher thresholds of pain, is very much a function of the degree of international legitimacy for that cause,” argues Shibley Telhami, Middle East studies professor at the University of Maryland. ”As soon as Israel withdrew from Lebanon to the internationally recognized border, the legitimacy factor shifted from Hezbollah to Israel. This may seem abstract, but it’s not.”

This was written some two years before the Israel/Hezbollah war, so as you can see Hezbollah was not deterred and given the complaints about Israel’s attacks in Lebanon, Israel acquired little if any goodwill for its withdrawal. In the meantime Friedman reduced the benefits Israel received to “…few Israelis have been killed there in four years.” He said nothing of the efforts Hezbollah was making to re-arm and fortify its positions. Either he didn’t know about them, in which case he isn’t nearly as well informed about the Middle East as he would pretend, or he didn’t wish to divulge that information because it contradicted his thesis.

So he recommended:

The lesson for Israel is clear: If you are going to get out of Gaza unilaterally, get out all the way to the U.N.-blessed international border. Do not do it halfway; otherwise you end up with the worst of all worlds: still embroiled in a guerrilla war, still taking casualties, unable to use your superior firepower and getting blamed for everything. Gaza may be easier than Lebanon, too, because unlike Syria and Hezbollah, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt would not have an interest — after an Israeli pullout — in keeping Gaza boiling. Because that would empower Hamas.

Israel pulled out of Gaza, it still took casualties and got blamed for everything. (How many times has the UN taken a vote that concluded that Israel’s treatment of Gaza is understandable given the terror emanating for that territory?) Egypt hasn’t behaved as Friedman predicted allowing Hamas to smuggle rockets and other munitions into Gaza.

In short, Israel did in Gaza exactly as Friedman suggested and the results contradicted his rosy vision of the future. Of course, he based his “prediction” on the faulty assumption that Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon had shifted the onus of “occupation” from Israel to Hezbollah. In fact it had shown Hezbollah that it could get away with ignoring the international consensus with no adverse effects. Resolution 425 wasn’t just about Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon, it also stipulated that the government of Lebanon was to extend its presence and authority there. Of course the Lebanese government never fulfilled its obligation and took on Hezbollah, allowing the terrorist organization to build its infrastructure in preparation for an eventual war with Israel.

In fact Friedman would demonstrate that he really didn’t care whether or not Hezbollah abided by the terms of 425. During the Israel-Hezbollah war he wrote:

Israeli soldiers were napping when this war started — that’s why they got ambushed — for the very best reasons: They have so much more to do with their lives, and they live in a society that empowers and enables them to do it. (Unfortunately, the Buffett company is in northern Israel and had to be temporarily closed because of rocket attacks.)Young Israelis dream of being inventors, and their role models are the Israeli innovators who made it to the Nasdaq. Hezbollah youth dream of being martyrs, and their role models are Islamic militants who made it to the Next World. Israel spent the last six years preparing for Warren Buffett, while Hezbollah spent the last six years preparing for this war.

If you’re “caught napping” when an enemy is preparing for war against you, that’s not the “best reasons,” it’s a sign that the Israeli government wasn’t taking threats against it seriously. Neither did Friedman much care.

In fact, later in the essay he wrote:

Israel mustn’t get sucked into that same grave. Israel needs to get a cease-fire and an international force into south Lebanon — and get out. Israel can’t defeat Hezbollah, it can only hurt it enough to make it think twice about ever doing this again — and it has pretty much done that. It must not destroy any more of Lebanon, which is going to still be its neighbor when the guns fall silent.

And of course destroying significant amount of Hezbollah’s infrastructure and hundreds of its fighter combined with the watchful eye of the UN would ensure that Hezbollah would never be able to rebuild. Did Friedman really believe that?

Iran and Syria have restocked Hezbollah’s arsenal. The UN has done nothing and now Hezbollah has effectively managed veto power of Lebanon’s government. This is what’s happened as Israel has (unwittingly) followed every bit of advice Middle East sage, Thomas Friedman has had to offer.

Israel could have destroyed Hezbollah but chose not to determining that the collateral damage and the likely international disappoval were not worth it. Hezbollah boasted that it won the war and, thus emboldened, acted accordingly. For Friedman to lament now that the good guys have no leverage is to ignore that they’ve been following every bit of advice he’s offered. If Hezbollah had to fear destruction, not a setback, then the West would have some leverage. But it doesn’t.

Friedman is either exceedingly naive or he’s an absolute fool.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.