Israel reaping what it has sown

Here's David Hirst in the Guardian offering an explanation as to why Hezbollah captured two Israeli soldiers.

There have been growing links between Hizbullah and its Palestinian-Islamist counterparts, for which it is a source of advice, arms, training and practical aid. Its latest exploit has long been coming. Of course, Nasrallah dutifully furnished a strictly Lebanese justification for it: a few Lebanese prisoners still in Israel's jails. But real motivation lay elsewhere, in the havoc Israel has been wreaking in Gaza, and the need for a display of solidarity with its suffering people. That furnished the clinching impulse, the opportunity for maximum political and emotional impact.

The other regional parties to this Hizbullah agenda are the Syrian and Iranian governments. Hizbullah didn't consult its own government, but it certainly wouldn't have done so daring and dangerous a deed without the encouragement or approval of the two governments to which it owes so much. Both have long been eyeing the ever-deteriorating Palestinian situation as a platform for the advancement of their own strategic or ideological agendas. For Iran, Palestine has been a top foreign-policy priority, not just for its own sake, but as an instrument in its drive for regional ascendancy. A long-standing sponsor of Hizbullah, it has more recently become one of Hamas too. It is said to exert its influence mainly through Khaled Meshaal, head of the Hamas leadership in Damascus. It is also said that Meshaal, with his hand over the military wing of Hamas, ordered last month's capture of the Israeli soldier to which the Hizbullah one was very likely the intended sequel.

All that the cynically pragmatic Syria Ba'athist regime wants, it seems, is to get out of Washington's doghouse and earn recognition that it is a key regional player that the US cannot ignore - and whose services, for a quid pro quo, it could usefully employ in places, such as Iraq, where it is in desperate trouble.

When Hizbullah did its deed it must have known that Israel's military response would out-Gaza Gaza. For if one such episode had constituted such a huge blow to what Israel calls its "deterrent power", which had at all costs to be restored, this second one surely multiplied it several-fold.

Hizbullah must also have known that it would exacerbate already very serious political and sectarian tensions inside Lebanon, putting itself and its basically Shia constituency at yet more dangerous cross-purposes with other communities who bitterly resent the way in which, with this single, sensational act on others' behalf, Hizbullah may have dragged the country into new miseries of death, destruction and woe. And, finally, it must have known that it has taken the whole of the Middle East another step towards the unprecedented region-wide tumult that very likely awaits it.

Lebanese apart, many Arabs, especially Islamists, are applauding Hizbullah's act, bring what it may - and none more so than its chief intended beneficiaries, the Palestinians, especially those doing battle in Gaza. As for its target, Israel, there could hardly be a more apt example of a nation reaping what it has sown. Israel took 18 years to extricate itself from the Lebanon morass - and only then at the price of leaving in place a triumphant Hizbullah of which, along with Iran and Syria, it justly ranks as a co-founder. Even as, on its new Gaza front, it is likewise turning Hamas and other Islamists into more formidable future foes than they already are, it suddenly finds itself confronted, in alarming and maddening fashion, with this monstrous legacy of an old one.

It all looks like pretty cynical stuff until we get to the "regional solidarity" bit. Meanwhile, in a surprise move, the thinker president, George Bush, supports Israel in all of this with the mantra "Israel has the right to defend itself." (NYT)