From Beirut to Baghdad, lessons in misadventure, by G and L Irani aljazeerah.info

aljazeerah.info Opinion Editorials

From Beirut to Baghdad: lessons in misadventure

George E. Irani and Laurie King-Irani, the Daily Star, 3/27/03

The US-led Operation Iraqi Freedom is starting to resemble the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982. We are beginning to witness similar patterns in both the conduct of the war and the resistance it is eliciting from the Iraqis. On the brink of invading and laying siege to Baghdad, US and British military strategists should have consulted their history books, or simply chatted up their good friend, that “man of peace,” Ariel Sharon, to learn how the Israeli Army’s invasion spun out of control and exacerbated conflicts over twenty years ago.
Operation Peace for Galilee began in earnest in June 1982. At that time, Ariel Sharon, the Israeli minister of defense in Menachem Begin’s Likud government, led Israeli troops in an invasion that was supposed to stop 40 kilometers inside Lebanese territory. The purpose of Sharon’s invasion was threefold:
l Destroy the PLO and its infrastructure in South Lebanon.
l Undermine and force Syrian troops out of Lebanon.
l Install a right-wing Christian Lebanese leader ready to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish state.
Sharon misled his prime minister and the Israeli public and rapidly took his invading troops all the way to the outskirts of Beirut where the they laid siege to a hapless population for three months. That “summer of hell” unfolded under heavy bombing, and without water or electricity. In September 1982, following the Sharon-inspired massacres of Lebanese and Palestinians in Sabra and Shatila, the Israeli Army was forced to withdraw its troops and allow a multinational force led by the US to protect the civilians in Beirut.
Sharon’s bold adventure, which had the tacit support of the Reagan Administration, many of whose officials are now, curiously, in power again in Washington, sputtered out in military and political disaster. As a result of its invasion of Lebanon, the Israelis lost more than 1,000 soldiers the highest number of casualties in Israeli military history to date. Moreover, Israel’s actions in Lebanon unleashed a powerful genie: Hizbullah and the Lebanese Resistance. For twenty years, Israeli occupation troops and their Lebanese proxy in the South Lebanon Army (SLA) suffered heavy losses and led to the collapse of the SLA and the withdrawal of Israeli troops from most of Lebanon with the exception of the Shebaa Farms.
There are eerie parallels between the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the current US-British invasion of Iraq. Both US-led and Israeli military operations are pre-emptive in nature. Most Israeli wars against Arab armies were pre-emptive or preventive wars. The invasion of Lebanon, while offensive in its objectives, aimed at preventing and undermining any resistance against the Jewish state. The other similarity is the impact upon innocent civilians.
In both Lebanon and Iraq the invading armies stated that their aim was not to harm the population. In the case of Lebanon more than 17,000 lost their lives. In Iraq, the jury is still out, but given the stated goals of the “shock and awe” campaign, it is hard to believe that human casualties will not be higher than those advertised by US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. A few months ago, the UN estimated that as a result of war there could be more than 500,000 casualties in Iraq.
Another telling similarity between the wars in Lebanon and Iraq is the baptism of fire experienced by supposedly “invincible” armies. In 1982, a fierce resistance sustained by a rag-tag army of Lebanese and Palestinian guerrillas confronted the Israelis considered the fourth most-powerful army in the world. This was an important psychological breakthrough on the Arab street, and a blow to Israel’s image of an army heralded for its rapid defeat of regular Arab armies in 1948, 1967, and in 1973.
In the recent battles for the conquest of the Iraqi cities of Nasiriya, Umm Qasr, and Basra we see an apparently popular will to fight and confront the most powerful army on the planet. Of course, one can wager that those resisting the advance of coalition troops are probably Iraqis who have the most to lose from the defeat of the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein. Even those who are against Saddam’s rule are undoubtedly in no hurry to welcome the invading troops, recalling the bitter fate of those who answered George Bush Senior’s call to “rise up against Saddam” in 1991, only to be abandoned to the tender mercies of Saddam’s loyal troops.
The people of Basra and Nasiriyya can hardly be faulted for not welcoming US and UK Marines with open arms. Nor can they be blamed for any cynicism in appraising the goals of this campaign. The quick war trumpeted by the Pentagon is looking more and more like a military quagmire.
One last lesson from the Israeli invasion of Lebanon is that occupying forces should avoid manipulating ethnic, tribal, and sectarian divisions.
In Lebanon, the Israeli government played Maronites against Druzes by providing them with weapons. This led to massacres and population displacements in the Chouf mountains, a deep wound from which Lebanon has yet to recover.
The same tactic of stirring sectarian and religious divisions was used by the Israeli Army in south Lebanon between Shia and Christians.
Iraq is a complex mosaic of sectarian, ethnic, and tribal groups. The temptation will be great to “divide and rule” and play one against the other.
Given the interests and explosive tensions surrounding Iraq’s now brittle borders, this course of action would be the height of folly. Given that the war to date is a frightening folly, one cannot but dread what is coming.
The last lesson from Lebanon is to beware of playing on past wounds and hatreds. Unlike Lebanon, Iraqis have developed a stronger sense of national identity. The longer the US-led occupation lasts, the more it will become the focus of guerrilla warfare and other types of violence.
Any attempt to redesign the future of Iraq ought to be historically sensitive to and respectful of the will of the long-suffering Iraqi people, rather than reflective of the interests of exiled Iraqis with troubling ties to Western powers and corporate interests.
After all, the right of peoples to self-determination was declared by one of the most enlightened occupants of the White House, Woodrow Wilson.

George E. Irani is a professor in conflict analysis and management at Royal Roads University in Canada. Laurie King-Irani is a lecturer in social anthropology at the University of Victoria, British Columbia and co-founder of the Electronic Iraq news site.

http://www.aljazeerah.info

Opinions expressed in various sections are the sole responsibility of their authors and they may not represent Al-Jazeerah's.