Why StrongArm Tactics Fail

The situation in Lebanon, along with the United States' occupation of Iraq are an object lesson in why military violence achieves little or nothing when there is no political strategy involved that engages the other party.

As Israel switches to a ground maneuvers approach to attacking Lebanon {a change intended to ease the sting of international criticism of Israeli arial attacks that have killed far to many non-combatants, I'm sure}, I went digging into the background of Hezbollah.

More or less as I expected, Hezbollah came into being during Israel's occupation of Lebanon that ran from 1982 to 2000.

In 1985, when Hezbollah officially came into being, their mission statement was to fight the Israeli occupation. One of the references from the Wikipedia article is to this page on the al Jazeera website. It's very interesting as a counterpoint perspective to most of the news I've read about Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon. While much of the "western" media has portrayed it as a "stand-down after meeting military objectives", the al Jazeera article talks in terms of it being a "defeat" for the Israelis.

So, just sit back and think about it for a moment. Superficially, Israel occupied part of Lebanon for nearly 20 years, ostensibly to render Israel more "secure". When Israel pulled out, the Arab population saw it as a defeat of Israel, and correspondingly rewarded Hezbollah for their victory. In this case, it appears that the Beirut government has ceded a certain legitimacy to Hezbollah operations against "occupation" of Lebanese territory.

It's not hard to see how Hezbollah could - and would - build up its armed capability along the Israeli border. Twenty year occupations do not "win friends" - they tend to harden opinions against the occupiers.

Lebanon is interesting from this perspective because it's quite clear that Hezbollah quite successfully used the Israeli occupation not only to organize itself, but was able to grow under that occupation into both a military force in Lebanon as well as a significant political player in the nation.

When Israel withdrew from Lebanon, they did little to ameliorate the hard feelings that would have evolved over 18 years of military occupation. Can we really be all that surprised that Hezbollah continued to arm itself along Israel's borders, and eventually became bold enough to directly antagonize Israel? {especially not when Hezbollah is seen as a victor following Israel's withdrawal.