Chicago Tribune : Clamor to claim victory replaces gunfire

Clamor to claim victory replaces gunfire

Joel Greenberg, Tribune foreign correspondent | August 15, 2006

JERUSALEM -- With Israel's war against Hezbollah halted by a cease-fire after more than a month of fighting, the two sides and their backers have begun to battle for the spoils.

The contest is over the narrative of the war and its results in an effort to shape perceptions of who won and which side has gained the upper hand in Lebanon and, by extension, in the wider Middle East.

Hezbollah and its backers, Syria and Iran, are portraying the outcome as a triumph not only over Israel's military might, but also against Washington's plan to shape what it calls a new, democratic Middle East in which militants are sidelined.

Israel and the Bush administration assert that the outcome of the war spells the end of Iranian and Syrian influence in Lebanon wielded through Hezbollah.

The mixed results of the fighting, with Hezbollah inflicting heavy casualties on the Israelis even as Israel's forces battered militant strongholds in southern Lebanon and Beirut, has left ample room for conflicting claims of success.

Speaking at a journalists' conference in Damascus on Tuesday, Syrian President Bashar Assad said that Hezbollah's "victory" in the war with Israel had destroyed U.S. plans to reshape the Middle East.

"Their 'New Middle East,' based on subjugation and humiliation and denial of rights and identity, has turned into an illusion," Assad said.

"Today after almost five weeks, Israel is struggling to occupy a few hundred meters here and there" in southern Lebanon, while in a 1982 invasion, Beirut was surrounded within seven days, Assad said.

"We tell them that after tasting humiliation in the latest battles, your weapons are not going to protect you—not your planes, or missiles or even your nuclear bombs," Assad said.

He warned Israel that the alternative to a negotiated peace was "resistance in all its forms."

"Israel should know that time is not on its side. On the contrary, a generation will come that is more strongly determined to strike Israel and will take revenge for all it has done in the past," Assad said. "Your children, Israel, will pay the price."

Assad's fighting words were echoed in Iran, where President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Hezbollah had "hoisted the banner of victory" and foiled plans by Washington and its allies "to create the so-called new Middle East."

"The people of the region also want a new Middle East, but a Middle East that is free from American and British domination," he said.

On Monday, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, said his group had achieved a "strategic, historic victory." The group's television station, Al-Manar, has been broadcasting pictures of destroyed Israeli tanks, blasted by the guerrillas' anti-tank rockets.

Nasrallah brushed off calls to disarm, saying that now was not the time to discuss such a step.

The United Nations cease-fire resolution that ended the fighting calls for disarming Hezbollah and banning its guerillas from areas of southern Lebanon near the border with Israel, replacing them with Lebanese troops and a beefed-up UN force. Arms shipments to the group would also be stopped under the plan.

Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said Tuesday that the terms of the resolution meant that Syria would no longer be able "to influence [Lebanon] through groups such as Hezbollah" and that Iran would also "lose its foothold" in Lebanon.

"I'm not naive. I don't think that tomorrow there will be a new Middle East. It's going to take time," Livni said. "But an opportunity has been created here, and I think we have to act so this opportunity is realized, and if it is realized, then we've really changed the face of Lebanon and the region."

In a speech to parliament on Monday, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that the steps outlined in the UN resolution meant that Hezbollah would no longer have "a state within a state" and that "no more will there be a terrorist organization allowed to operate from Lebanon as the long arm of the axis of evil extending from Tehran to Damascus."

President Bush said Monday that Hezbollah had been defeated because "there's going to be a new power in the south of Lebanon."

As for the victory claims by Assad and Ahmadinejad, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said Tuesday that carrying out the UN resolution would be "a strategic setback for Hezbollah, its patrons in Tehran and as well in Damascus." The resolution would ultimately lead to the disarming of Hezbollah, while making it impossible for the group to rearm, McCormack said.

On the ground Tuesday, Israeli troops and Hezbollah guerillas in southern Lebanon maintained a cease-fire for a second day, although the army said that in two separate incidents troops shot five guerrillas who approached them, killing at least three.

The army said that a day before the cease-fire, it had killed the commander of Hezbollah's special forces, Sajed Dawayer, but a Hezbollah official dismissed the report as "baseless," saying he knew of no commander by that name, The Associated Press reported.

Israel began thinning out its forces in southern Lebanon Tuesday, and the army chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, said that a withdrawal and handover to UN forces and Lebanese troops was expected to take a week to 10 days. Israeli officers met on Monday with counterparts from the UN and the Lebanese army to coordinate the pullout.

Under the cease-fire plan, the Israeli forces are supposed to be replaced by 15,000 Lebanese troops and up to 15,000 UN soldiers.

Throughout southern Lebanon, thousands of people displaced by the conflict continued to stream back over bombed-out roads to villages devastated during the fighting.

In northern Israel, towns that had been under Hezbollah rocket attack slowly came back to life as residents who had left the area began to return, surveying damaged homes and cleaning up wreckage. Stores and restaurants reopened, and traffic again filled the streets.

jogreenberg@tribune.com

Tribune national correspondent Cam Simpson contributed to this report from Washington.