Israel, Lebanon & the ‘new Middle East’

The crisis which began in Gaza in June, and dramatically escalated on the Israeli-Lebanese border in July, represents much more than a flare-up of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It signals that the region’s three main problems – Iraq, Iran and Palestine – are now entangled in a new and dangerous manner, making each of them harder to resolve.

One way to view the crisis is through the prism of US policy-making over the last three years. The American-led invasion of Iraq turned the United States into a Middle East power and produced a number of unforeseen, and in some cases unintended, consequences. It shook up the regional balance of power, strengthening Iran and alarming Iraq’s Arab and Turkish neighbours. It also made Iraq the place where America’s enemies could confront it – foreign jihadists of the Al-Qaida type by going there to kill American soldiers, Syria by allowing militants （whether nationalist or jihadist） to cross its border to join the Iraqi insurgency, and Iran by building up an impressive network of political, economic and religious links with Iraq – links designed with a possible anti-American purpose in mind.

Unprepared

Two other tendencies have been apparent in the Bush administration’s approach to the region – an obsession with Iran’s nuclear programme, and a fundamental neglect of the Arab-Israeli issue. Hence Washington was in several respects ill prepared for a new regional crisis. The storm over Lebanon built up with extraordinary speed – beginning, in a localised way, with the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers by Hamas and Hizbullah, but quickly morphing into a new Arab-Israeli war – and, beyond that, into a proxy war between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran. It is clear that, regardless of whether Iran triggered the current crisis, it is certainly exploiting it as a means of asserting itself as a Middle East power. US policy-makers were handicapped when the crisis erupted because they were largely preoccupied with Iraq and Iran, and, as countless commentators have pointed out, because they found themselves with no direct relations of any consequence with three of the key players in the crisis – Syria, Iran and Hizbullah.

Even if diplomatic means are eventually found, through two UN Security Council resolutions, to bring the conflict to a conclusion, the region – and American credibility in the region -- will be left badly battered. To concentrate only on the more obvious forms of damage:

•    Lebanon’s efforts to rebuild itself, in both economic and political terms, have been tragically set back.
•    The already wretched state of Arab-Israeli relations has been further poisoned.
•    Hizbullah and other Islamist groups have gained a new credibility on the Arab street and in the wider Muslim world.
•    Washington’s Arab allies, notably Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan, have been weakened by seeming to go against the current of Arab popular opinion.
•    Anti-Americanism, in the Middle East and also more widely, has increased, with those such as Tony Blair who have supported the US position paying a high domestic price for doing so.
•    The Iraqi Shi’a, who share the regional adulation for Hizbullah, now have a new reason for resenting American power.
•    Last but not least, the more recent problem of Iran and its nuclear programme has become entangled with the much older problem of the Arabs and Israel – to the detriment of both.

The “birth pangs of a new Middle East”?  Many will be tempted to retort that the old Middle East, with all its faults and vices, was preferable to the angry, fractured, volatile Middle East which will emerge from the rubble of Lebanon.