[ANALYSIS] Israel wants to change the balance of power in the Middle East. History Has a Warning, by Ben Wedeman

The killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was a step toward changing “the balance of power in the region for years to come,” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Saturday.

The Israeli leader sees the opening of an opportunity for a fundamental reconfiguration of power in the Middle East and may assume that Hezbollah is mortally wounded. Total victory, however, is elusive, and those who get what they desire often live to regret it.

Since September 17, Israel has dealt the Iranian-backed militant group blow after blow in Lebanon: first with pagers and walkie-talkies, then with a massive airstrike over southern Beirut that killed senior commander Ibrahim Aqil ( along with at least two dozen people). civilians), followed three days later by the start of a brutal bombing campaign. By Friday evening – when Nasrallah was killed in a bombing that leveled several buildings – Hezbollah’s senior leaders had been almost totally eliminated.

Yet recent history offers only bitter lessons for Israeli leaders – and others – who harbor grand ambitions for tectonic shifts in Lebanon and the Middle East at large.

In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon with the aim of crushing the Palestine Liberation Organization. Beyond that, he hoped to establish a malleable, Christian-dominated government in Beirut and drive Syrian forces out of the country.

He failed in all three cases. Yes, Palestinian armed groups in Lebanon were forced to leave the country under an American-brokered deal that sent them into exile in Tunisia, Yemen and elsewhere. But the goal of suppressing Palestinian national aspirations together with the PLO failed. Five years later, the First Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, broke out in Gaza and spread to the West Bank. Today, Palestinians are as adamant and adamant as they have ever been in their rejection of the Israeli occupation.

Israel’s main ally in Lebanon at the time of the invasion was Bashir Al-Gemayel, a Maronite Christian militia leader elected by parliament, but before taking office he was assassinated in a massive explosion in east Beirut. His brother Amin replaced him and, under his leadership and with active American involvement and encouragement, Lebanon and Israel signed an agreement on the establishment of normal bilateral relations in May 1983. Despite strong opposition, the government fell the following February and the agreement was soon abrogated.

The United States, which had deployed troops to Beirut after the Sabra-Shatila massacres of September 1982, withdrew after its embassy was bombed twice, along with US Marines and French Army barracks in October 1983.

The Lebanese civil war broke out again and raged for more than six years.

Syrian forces, who entered Lebanon in 1976 as a “deterrence force” under an Arab League mandate, did not leave until 2005, after the assassination of former prime minister Rafiq Al-Hariri.

Perhaps the most significant outcome of Israel’s 1982 invasion was the birth of Hezbollah, which began a relentless guerrilla war that forced Israel to unilaterally withdraw from southern Lebanon – significantly the first and only time an Arab military force successfully forced Israel to retreat. . from the Arab land. This new group, with Iran’s help, proved far more lethal and effective than the Palestinian militants that Israel had managed to drive out.

Hezbollah continued to fight Israel until pinning it down in the 2006 war, and has grown increasingly stronger in the years since, with significant help from Iran.

Today Hezbollah is paralyzed and in disarray, and clearly infiltrated by Israeli intelligence – but it would still be premature to write its epitaph.

Beyond Lebanon and Israel, there is the example of the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, a lesson in the wages of unbridled arrogance. As the Iraqi army crumbled and American troops raced toward Baghdad, the George W. Bush administration fantasized that the fall of Saddam Hussein would lead to the overthrow of the regimes in Tehran and Damascus and spark a blossoming of liberal democracies across the country. region.

Instead, the American occupation of Iraq turned into a bloodbath of sectarian violence, in which the United States paid dearly in blood and treasure, the Iraqi people even more so. The killing of Saddam Hussein allowed Iran to expand its influence into the heart of Baghdad’s political establishment. Al-Qaeda, destroyed by the US-led invasion of Afghanistan, was reborn in Iraq’s Sunni triangle and eventually morphed into the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq.

As I write this, I see smoke rising from Beirut’s battered southern suburbs and recall the words of then-US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice who, during the 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, said that all the bloodshed and destruction in what we were witnessing at the time were “the birth pangs of the new Middle East”.

Beware of those who promise a new dawn, the birth of a new Middle East, a new balance of power in the region. Lebanon is a microcosm of everything that can go wrong. It is the land of unintended consequences. [CNN]

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