Winners and Losers

Alan Arkin sums up the Israel-Hezboullah conflict with total accuracy:

Two dominant narratives emerge in the comments on this site: One is anti-Israel and holds to the view that Israel planned and prepared aggressive war against Lebanon well before the July kidnappings. Hezbollah, in this narrative, was small and ineffective, and the true Israel target was the Muslim world, which was devastated intentionally: for harboring Hezbollah, for fronting Iran, and because Lebanon represented modernity and accommodation and needed to be set back. In this conspiratorial narrative, factories in Lebanon were bombed because they had the potential to compete with Israeli companies or because the United States asked they be bombed because they had the potential to compete with American ones.

As the Israel-haters get lost in their denunciations and conspiracies, they further conclude that no reason is possible in dealing with the Israelis. Their view is that they have always been shown to be aggressive and indifferent to human life; they need to be eliminated.

On the other end of the spectrum is the Israeli smoting section. Israel may have erred by failing to fight more aggressively, go in on the ground sooner, train its reservists to super-status, get hot meals to the front, react earlier. When it comes to the anti-terror narrative about the enemy, there is no consideration for what could have been different or how the enemy could be better or more compassionately understood. There is one story: Hezbollah abused the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon to build up offensive arms and create a state within a state, all done under the watchful eye of Lebanon, and with the support of Syria and Iran, for the purpose not of filling a political vacuum, nor for defense against Israel, nor for recovery of territory or of Lebanese prisoners. Hezbollah, in this narrative only exists to destroy Israel. What it wants is Jerusalem and elimination of the Jewish state. These are terrorists with whom one cannot reason; they prey upon civilians; they only understand military force and must be eliminated.

Israeli military types and political leaders hail their success in eliminating Hezbollah’s long-range missile threat, killing more than 500 Hezbollah fighters, setting back Hezbollah’s military capabilities and infrastructure “two years,” dislodging Hezbollah from southern Lebanon, demonstrating that the country is no longer hesitant to respond to individual provocations, creating a high “price tag” for anyone who attacks Israel.

Meanwhile, Israel did not achieve some of top objectives: the return of the captive soldiers, “annihilation” or elimination of Hezbollah; or destruction of Hezbollah's rockets. U.S. intelligence now believes that Hezbollah possesses about 9,000 rockets, even after the fight.

Hezbollah did not defeat Israel on the battlefield, but they won the hearts and minds of many. Hezbollah’s own narrative as it moves forward will be that it survived the best that Israel could throw at it, that only a few of its fighters were killed, that only civilians were hit, that only it stood up to Israel and was victorious.

Oh, there are facts, and they poke holes in both the Israeli and Hezbollah lines, and demolish most of the unwashed presumptions about the war. It just doesn’t seem that many engaged in the debate are too interested in facts getting in the way.

Yup.

One of the things I noticed about the conflict is that both sides were ultimately engaged in telling their narratives, or propounding their pet theories about the way the world is.

The trouble with theories are that they are there to be disproven, often in the most unexpected ways. One of the greatest failures of the neocon movement in all its manifestations - through Britain, the US and Israel - is that the theories don't get changed when the facts conflict with them. The mental energy invested in pretending the facts don't exist or, worse, invested in spinning the facts so that it can be claimed they support the theory, could so easily be used to actually change the theories and consequent actions to fit the situation on the ground. "Stay the course" is never a strategy and is a tactic for defeat. The world changes, will it or no. Only planning from theories that change with it can succeed.