One Hundred Days of War

The debate over whether to link or separate the various files and tracks is in full swing. Reality shows that political dossiers are by nature interconnected, reflecting the complexity of economic and political life, yet their respective weights differ and their mutual influences are far from equal. Treating any one dossier in isolation is a matter of choice, governed by priorities, the gravity of the stakes, and their sensitivity.

In this respect, Barack Obama held that the strength of American foreign policy lay in the art of ordering priorities — an art that allows one to manage how quickly solutions advance in the most complex affairs, with the ability to revise that ordering daily in light of desired outcomes.

Having failed to secure the funds needed to sell the agreement with Washington domestically, the Iranian leadership fell back on its familiar refrain: linking the Lebanese dossier to the ongoing negotiations, and firing missiles towards northern Israel to signal its resolve in imposing the unity of tracks against the Lebanese-Israeli negotiations. Tehran had meanwhile understood that the White House was managing, with relative equanimity, the coexistence of a continuing truce, a maintained calm, and a sustained naval blockade — an equation that drains the Iranian economy for as long as the relative quiet holds and the blockade endures.

This is the deeper reason behind the belated solicitude Tehran displayed for Hezbollah and its constituency, at the very moment when it had obtained no tangible result from its aggression against Kuwait, Bahrain, and the Emirates — having failed to compel those states to revise their containment policies or relinquish their rights, including the right to retaliate and seek compensation.

The situation can be summarized as follows: the fundamental demands — the nuclear file and the rest — are not the heart of the dispute; the disagreement bears on the declared financial claims, and it is this disagreement that provoked the escalation and the return to coupling the Lebanese dossier with the comprehensive agreement, without this necessarily presaging any capitulation on Washington's part.

It is also worth noting that the White House's continued restraint of the Israeli response reflects its desire to prolong the truce and the blockade until the Iranian leadership yields to American financial conditions.

As for the Israeli reaction, if it begins by sealing off the Gaza Strip under a declaration of a state of war — as Netanyahu has done today, while negotiations between Hamas and its affiliated factions intensify in Cairo — this Palestinian dossier is unlikely to trouble Washington, provided the Israeli Prime Minister maintains discipline on the Lebanese front, which seems the most plausible scenario for the days ahead.

A War Fought for Nothing

Yahya Sinwar launched the October 7 operation without a declared political objective, beyond what the name of the operation itself — "Al-Aqsa Flood" — suggests of religious zeal for the Al-Aqsa Mosque. He waited long days for Tehran to mobilize in support against the "lesser Satan," just as he awaited the backing of the axis operations room in Damascus — the Assad regime and Beirut's southern suburb — along with the Iraqi Hachd al-Shaabi and the Houthis in Yemen.

When the support war for the "Flood" got underway according to the Revolutionary Guards' criteria, the military effort deployed did not convince the leaders and cadres of Hamas and the Qassam Brigades in the thick of the fiercest fighting — it was plain that this effort fell short of what had been agreed.

The declarations of the Qassam commanders were thus not free of formulas and appeals that supported this assessment, until disillusionment with the axis reached the point where it could no longer be left unspoken.

Once the American-Israeli command had finished annihilating Gaza and its population, we witnessed the disastrous and lightning-swift effects of the Israeli offensive on Hezbollah's fighting capabilities in Lebanon, striking the movement at its Achilles' heel — its offensive as well as its defensive power. And since the declared support war had assigned itself no political objective beyond backing the "Al-Aqsa Flood," the military effort of Hamas and Hezbollah found itself swallowed by a political vacuum, while Israel proclaimed its successive objectives, articulated to multiple agendas — local, regional, and international — not to mention the personal agenda of Netanyahu and his government allies.

Thus the confrontation between the resistance and moumanaa (rejectionist) axis on one side, and Israel on the other, laid bare a twofold deficiency: political first, operational second, from the moment each party was isolated and neutralised separately.

Anyone familiar with the nature of relations between states and the organizations allied to them understands that the equation runs in one direction only: the vocation of vassals does not extend beyond serving the centre, whatever indulgence the centre displays and however carefully it tends the narrative of the alliance.

There is therefore no justification for framing a war waged to avenge the death of Iran's Supreme Leader Khamenei as a defence of Lebanese sovereignty or resistance to aggression against the lands and people of South Lebanon. The massive human losses and destruction suffered in Lebanon and Palestine alike cannot be linked to any political objective bearing on the interests of either people. The fighting of extremists deserves no other name than a war fought for nothing.

The First Litani Operation

Tel Aviv awoke on March 11, 1978, to fighting in its streets for control of a bus in which a group of fedayeen — led by the young Dalal Mughrabi — and several Israeli civilians had become trapped. The fighting continued until all the occupants were eliminated, in accordance with orders issued to General Ehud Barak.

This event was the direct cause of the invasion of South Lebanon up to the Litani River. At the same time, President Elias Sarkis succeeded in internationalizing the question of South Lebanon, and Lebanese diplomacy wrested Resolutions 425 and 426 from the UN Security Council, intended to guarantee the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces and enable the establishment of UNIFIL.

But one must look beyond the immediate event to read the impasse in the Egyptian-Israeli negotiations and their stalling, after the conclusion of the first and second disengagements, and the refusal of Menahem Begin's government to meet President Anwar Sadat's demands — despite his peace initiatives, his speech before the Knesset, and his proclamation of the fall of the psychological barrier. The Israeli military leadership wanted to test Egyptian behaviour in the event of a confrontation with the Syrian army and with PLO forces in Lebanon. Buoyed by the success of this trial by fire following the first Litani Operation, American President Jimmy Carter was able to bring the Camp David negotiations to a successful conclusion, six months after the Lebanese event.

Those negotiations led to the signing of the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in March 1979. Within the span of a single year, the politico-military dynamic in Lebanon had been transformed by the direct results of this test, with South Lebanon now established as an international cause in its own right.

The Israeli military "rehearsal" thus provided the operational reference that would guide the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, aimed at finishing off the PLO forces and clipping then controlling the Syrian political, military, and security role in Lebanon. Israel had become a direct actor, through its own forces and through the South Lebanon Army it had created, alongside the Hafez el-Assad regime as a second actor, and the local actors positioned on the fault line between the Lebanese National Movement and its ally the PLO on one side, and the Lebanese Front with its ties to the West and Israel on the other.

It was in this soil that something new began to germinate in the depths of Lebanon, carrying within it an organic bond with the Islamic Revolution in Tehran — and which would take shape after the Israeli invasion.

Prova d'orchestra

In those days, more than half a century ago, the Clemenceau cinema in West Beirut was showing a film hard to forget, by the Italian director Federico Fellini: Orchestra Rehearsal or Prova d'orchestra — at the time of the Italian left's rise and the proliferation of armed groups of every stripe, when gunshots were a daily and familiar sound in Rome and across Italy's cities. The film laid bare the relationship between the maestro and his musicians, building to the moment when a heavy steel wrecking ball appeared on screen to strike the building and threaten it with collapse.

In those days, the conversation turned around a single question: where was Lebanon heading? What were the prospects? What hammer would rouse the bearers of the competing projects?

In those days I was waiting for the fall of imperialism and the destruction of the State of Israel, and my answer was ready: it was the Vietnamese hammer, not the Russian or the Chinese, that would accomplish the tasks of national liberation and bring about historical determinism.

It never crossed my mind that President Elias Sarkis was right. Yet there he was, confined to his gilded cell in the Baabda Palace, awaiting the day he would leave it with great serenity and dignity.

Fellini had known how to pose his discomfiting questions in this Prova that continues to this day, to the rhythm of the steel ball's blows levelling men and stone across the expanse of Lebanon and Palestine, spilling over to the far reaches of the Greater Middle East.

Yesterday, for the first time in the history of contemporary Lebanon, the legitimate authorities took the helm, broke through the prevailing consciousness and through years of waiting and irresolution, to carry forward a rescue initiative for Lebanon and its people — an initiative capable of stopping the steel ball in its furious course and preventing the collapse of the Lebanese edifice in all that it holds of the human, the political, the cultural, and the historical.

The missions that call for such commitment in the service of rescue do not require decisions designed to please everyone, nor do they need the blessing of those who are enamored of death, destruction, and self-immolation. Their one and only condition is the courage to defend, against all odds, the wellbeing and interests of the people.