Thursday, August 17, 2006

Lebanon: the scorecard

Now that the conflict in Lebanon is pretty much over (and hopefully it will stay that way), I am trying to figure out who won. Or at least who came out on top. Here's what I've come up with so far:

Hezbollah's goal: get some prisoners freed in exchange for the kidnapped Israeli soldiers; damage and embarass Israel.

Israel's goal: get the soldiers back. Drive Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon, if not getting them disarmed completely.

What we ended up with:
- large portions of Lebanon in ruins;
- kidnapped soldiers still kidnapped;
- no prisoners released by Israelis;
- increased status across the Muslim and Arab world for Hezbollah and Nasrallah; but whether they remain popular may depend on how fast rebuilding goes;
- no significant physical damage to Israel
- Israeli population united in support of the war and against Hezbollah and its allies;
- Hezbollah not disarmed or pushed out of southern Lebanon
- increased UN peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon
- world attention focused on Lebanon

So who won? For now it seems to be Hezbollah, but whether it remains that way will probably depend on whether the international community thinks the current stalemate is good enough to call peace, or decides to really, actually disarm Hezbollah. But if there is a serious effort to disarm Hezbollah, what will Syria and Iran do? Guess we'll just have to wait and find out.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Becca, I like your blog - good thoughts. I think there's no way the international community makes a move to disarm Hezbollah considering they can't even take a hard line against Iran's nuclear activities, which is a much more black-and-white issue. They'll leave this one alone. Hezbollah looks like the winner here unless they totally botch the reconstruction.