The Arab leader stood on the rubble and declared victory. He’d won, praise Allah, he’d won! The infidels had shocked and awed with their finest weapons. But not only had he survived, his missiles – his glorious missiles – were hitting the Zionist entity right up to the last moment. Could anyone question that he’d won?
The leader was Saddam Hussein. The year was 1991.
The missiles in those days were SCUDs, not Katyushas. The point, of course, is that once the bar is not so much lowered as dropped into a bomb crater anything becomes a victory. Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah recently declared just such a “victory.” Perhaps one day he too will stand on the rubble firing a gun into the air. In the meantime, he won’t step out in public because he’s afraid for his life.
Did Hizbullah really win?
Let’s start from the beginning. When Nasrallah attacked Israel on July 12, he did so on the basis of two fundamental assumptions. First, Israel would never launch a full scale reprisal out of fear of Hizbullah’s missiles; and second, even if it did, the United States and the international community would force Jerusalem to back down after just a few days of fighting.
Wrong and wrong again. For years, Nasrallah mocked Israeli society as a “spider’s web,” intricate, elaborate, but weak and easily swept away. Now it was Nasrallah’s turn to be swept away. The Israeli public united in a way unseen since 1973. In summer heat, people sat in bomb shelters, sweltering but defiant. At last – a war even Peace Now could support.
As for Hizbullah’s much vaunted missiles, they too were swept away. As reported by Ben Caspit in Maariv, on the first night of the war Hizbullah rolled out 54 heavy missile launchers. The Israeli Air Force wiped out every one in exactly 39 minutes. It was an astonishing feat that shocked Hizbullah and its Iranian backers and drew comparisons to the opening hours of the ’67 war.
Yes, the smaller Katyushas were still intact. But the heavy missiles that could cause hundreds of casualties (and reach Tel Aviv) were gone. These were the weapons that Nasrallah counted on to deter Israel.
But the real shock came days later. In the opening hours of the war, the oft-repeated question on everyone’s mind was “how much time does Israel have?” How long would the United States let Israel fight before imposing a cease-fire? In 1996 during the Grapes of Wrath operation, that period proved exceedingly short. Surely, Nasrallah reasoned, the international community would ride to the rescue once again.
Maybe it’s because of who sits in the White House. Or maybe it’s because the Sunni Arab World is concerned with the rise of Shiite terrorism. Whatever the reason, the pendulum of world opinion swung in Israel’s favor in ways no one could have imagined.
Washington made it clear that it wouldn’t intervene. For the first time since 1947, the United Nations supported Israel. And for the first time ever, Saudi Arabia supported Israel. We’ve all heard the old Arab saying about “me and my cousin against my neighbor.” This time Isaac and Ishmael united against Nasrallah. Nothing like this happened before.
Freed from what columnist Charles Krauthammer called its “Orellian moral universe,” Israel struck back with unprecedented ferocity. More bombs were dropped on Lebanon, a nation about the size of Connecticut, than were dropped in 1973 on Egypt and Syria combined. And almost all of the fire was directed at the Shiite sections of the country.
Think of it as Fairfield County and Hartford absorbing 165,000 artillery shells, 2,500 naval shells and 7,000 strikes from the air. Almost a quarter of Lebanon’s population became refugees, over 20,000 homes were destroyed, and a generation of economic progress was obliterated in less than a month.
