His town looked like Dresden. For Westerners who think that the only acceptable reaction to such a scene is horror and regret, the proper emotion upon arriving in the center of Bint Jbeil would have been to recoil in dismay, to be taken aback by the sheer magnitude of violence that had been delivered, to solemnly reflect on the senselessness of it all. But despite sorrow at the loss of innocent life, I did not feel fear or repulsion. It was something much closer to awe: At the devastation, and at the feeling that the piles of rubble and crumbling Party of God buildings were in large part monuments to Israel’s refusal to let Hezbollah’s July provocation go unanswered. I understood that every day since the war, and for many months to come, Hezbollah’s prideful warriors would be surrounded by this destruction, would hear the rubble crunching under their feet as they walked, would taste the dust that filled their mouths as they breathed. I wished that every Israeli could experience the feeling that had come over me; from Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, it looked as if the war had ended ambiguously. Not in Bint Jbeil.

 

Southern Lebanon is not uniformly Shia. It is scattered with a few enduring Christian villages, one of which, named Ain Ebel, sits near Bint Jbeil, and is a Hezbollah-free zone. This town is spread across the northern-facing slope of one of the area’s many smooth, undulating hillsides, and from the top of this hill, where a few houses stand, the Israeli border is easily visible in the distance below. Many of the houses in the town, especially the ones closest to the hilltop, were badly damaged by Israeli bombardment during the war, seemingly confirming the charge that Israel had targeted civilians, or at least that the Israel Defense Forces attacked Lebanon indiscriminately. But that is not the reality of Ain Ebel: Israel did not lay siege to the town—Hezbollah did, and the manner in which it went about doing so should clarify the true cynical brilliance of Hezbollah’s asymmetric tactics.

The residents of Ain Ebel, in several different interviews, explained to us that at the outset of the war, Hezbollah transported a number of rocket launchers into the village and set them up for use as close to civilian houses as possible. Meanwhile, Israel was dropping leaflets over most of southern Lebanon urging civilians to evacuate (many of these leaflets were still visible, blown into countryside ditches and brambles). When the air campaign started, Hezbollah blocked the roads leading out of Ain Ebel, preventing civilians from fleeing, and on one occasion even opened fire on a caravan of evacuees, forcing them to return to their homes. With many of its residents trapped in the town, Hezbollah ignored the abundant open spaces in Ain Ebel, and fired rockets instead from within meters of civilian houses, drawing Israeli fire onto the village. As we surveyed Ain Ebel’s houses, many in varying states of reconstruction, I had to grudgingly admire this clever way of waging war against modern Western armies, when the combination of our precision munitions, a media that treats Western militaries with skepticism, and the expectation of morally perfect warfare have made civilian casualties one of the most dominant points of contention in warfare.

From Hezbollah’s perspective, premeditating the creation of civilian casualties makes perfect sense: It ensures the highest possible rate of return for the Katyusha rocket, insofar as it is turned into a weapon that can be used to kill both Lebanese and Israelis. More importantly, I realized, it accomplished something stunning in that it allowed an inferior power to use its adversary’s superior weaponry to carry out its own battlefield strategy. In Ain Ebel and elsewhere, Hezbollah was in effect aiming Israeli firepower, directing its missiles and artillery onto Hezbollah’s preferred targets—houses, hospitals, apartment buildings, anywhere civilians could be found—knowing that Israel would be punished by the ensuing international outrage. Scenes of civilian death and destruction are irresistible for the Western image media, and the course of the summer war was affected perhaps like none before it by the manner in which the spectacle of dead Lebanese galvanized anti-Israel actors. Many people refer to Hezbollah’s tactic as the use of “human shields,” but this gets it exactly backward: It implies that Hezbollah was trying to protect its assets by using civilians to deter an Israeli attack. In fact, Hezbollah was trying to provoke Israeli bombardment so that both human lives and infrastructure would be destroyed, and the Party of God could enjoy the resulting moral absolution. In this way, Hezbollah achieved its greatest victory in the war, which was its ability to transform the narrative of the conflict from one in which Israel was defending itself from attack by a terrorist organization to one in which Israel was barbarically laying waste to civilian Lebanon. During the war, a Lebanese Shia unfriendly to Hezbollah wrote a letter to the editor of a German newspaper that was circulated widely. It should eliminate any doubt about the self-consciousness of Hezbollah’s civilian-casualties strategy:

How can a country like Israel defend itself under these circumstances?

 

It is easy enough to be dispirited by Lebanon, to see a bleak future. It is a country that in recent history has never been in control of itself. There has not been a government with anything approaching a monopoly on the use of force, or a government whose power geographically extended throughout Lebanon, and there has never been the kind of consensus on fundamental questions that Western nations more or less take for granted as the foundational characteristics of their societies. Lebanon suffers from so much diversity that consensus seems impossible, and the result is the perpetual struggle for power that occurs among its rival ethnic and religious groups. How can a state cohere when one of the largest factions seeks to impose sharia law, and another wouldn’t mind topless beaches?

Three decades of civil war and Syrian dominance have diminished and marginalized Lebanon, as compared to its halcyon days as the most prosperous and elegant Middle Eastern nation. Lebanon’s sects have always had their foreign patrons—for the Christians, France, the Sunnis, Saudi Arabia, the Shia, first the Soviet Union (by way of Syria) and today Iran—but today, Lebanon’s problem is that many of its foreign patrons regard its existence as symbolically important, whereas Iran views it as strategically vital. For Iran, controlling Lebanon is a means of pursuing four major ambitions: Creating ideological and strategic momentum, deterring an Israeli or American attack, extending the geographic contiguity of its alliances in Iraq and Syria, and delivering a defeat to the American democratization project that upholds the Cedar Revolution as an exemplary success. But this central problem—an expansionist Iran—may also contain the glimmer of a solution.

Because Iran functions as a matrix from which money, arms, and ideology flow to other parts of the Middle East, the Western forces allied in clear opposition to Iran—so far, America and Israel—must be willing to challenge it on every new front that it opens, with the understanding that in this ideological war, every battle is symbolic and every bit of symbolism represents a battle that is either won or lost. If the West wishes to show Iran that its nuclear program, its fomenting of the insurgency in Iraq, and its patronage of Hamas will not be tolerated (Iran recently surpassed the European Union as the Palestinian Authority’s biggest donor), it must engage every one of Iran’s proxy wars with strategic clarity. One place to start—a place in which an organic and longstanding pro-Western sentiment is widespread—is in a muscular defense of Lebanese sovereignty. Almost twenty-five years ago, Michael Ledeen wrote a long analysis in Commentary about the 1982 Israeli invasion entitled “The Lesson of Lebanon.” In explaining the final disposition of American involvement in post-invasion Lebanon, Ledeen concluded that “In the end, as so often happens, the one country in the area that knew what it wanted—Syria–prevailed.” Today, Syria still knows what it wants, and unlike in the era that Ledeen documents, it enjoys an alliance with an Iran that also has unambiguous ambitions. To prevent them from realizing these ambitions, Lebanon’s Western allies must act with a similar clarity—or Lebanon will be subject to the same fate that befell it in the 1980s.

Before visiting Lebanon, I never quite understood the phenomenon in which so many people I know and like visited the country and quickly formed intense bonds of affection for it. But when it came time to return to its southern neighbor, I found myself in sympathy with this infatuation; for me, it involved an admiration for the patriotism, determination, and physical bravery of the Lebanese who obdurately refuse to be ruled by foreign powers and Islamists. I met many Lebanese whose talent and ambition could have brought them to the United States or any number of other safe and prosperous countries. But in Lebanon, they are members of a remnant that prefers to stay and fight—and they deserve recognition and support from every country that identifies with the cause of the West.

When I left the Beirut throng to set out for Rafik Al-Hariri International Airport, the taxi driver took me through the Hezbollah-saturated southern suburbs, and along the main north-south highway. Beirut was still simmering with protesters, and their downtown ranks were being enlarged with freshly imported agitators. The northbound side of the highway was congested with buses and pickup trucks overflowing with Hezbollah sympathizers, most of them the ignorant, paid-off dupes of cynical men who act as local marionettes and cash distributors for Iran. It will be a wonderful day when this menace is gone and an Israeli passport is no barrier to Lebanon’s sunny shores.