And Then All Hell Broke Loose: Two Decades in the Middle East

by Engel, Richard

  On July 16, a mere four days after the soldiers were kidnapped, I said on the Nightly News that parts of Lebanon were beginning to look like Baghdad. Israeli airstrikes were becoming increasingly indiscriminate, often with no apparent military purpose. I managed to get an interview with Lebanese prime minister Fouad Siniora, whose dismay at Hezbollah at the start of the war had turned to anger at Israel: “They talk about terror? They do terror every day.” Siniora proposed a cease-fire, followed by a prisoner exchange, with Lebanese and UN troops replacing Hezbollah along the border. Nasrallah wasn’t buying. The war, he said, was “just beginning.”

  With Hezbollah firing 150 to 180 short-range Katyusha rockets a day, Israel knew that its bombing campaign would not be enough to win the war and that ground action, perhaps even a full-scale invasion, would be needed to subdue the militants. But the Israelis were in for a rude shock. On July 19, eighteen men from the elite Maglan reconnaissance unit ventured less than a mile into Lebanon near a small village called Maroun al-Ras. They suspected that Hezbollah was using underground bunkers, but had no idea how sophisticated or numerous they were.

  As they reached a summit next to the village, the Israelis found themselves surrounded by Hezbollah fighters. Two Maglan soldiers were killed and nine wounded, and after fierce fighting the Israelis killed five militants. An elite unit of paratroopers arrived in tanks to evacuate the Maglan soldiers only to get snared in another ambush. Surrounded and outnumbered, the Israelis got lucky: they captured a personal communication system from a Hezbollah fighter and, by listening to the militants’ moves inside the village, were able to ambush and kill a number of Hezbollah fighters, sometimes at point-blank range. “We expected a tent and three Kalashnikovs—that was the intelligence we were given,” said one soldier. “Instead, we found a hydraulic steel door leading to a well-equipped network of tunnels.”

  By the end of the first week, fifty-five thousand Lebanese had taken refuge in schools and one hundred thousand had crossed into Syria. British and French nationals, along with twenty-five thousand Americans, were being evacuated from Beirut by sea.

  After reporting from Beirut for a week, I wanted to get to the southern part of the country to see the damage. Twice we turned back because the Israelis were targeting any vehicle on the roads, and we were virtually the only people driving. Bridges were out, highways were cut, and even a lot of side roads were impassable.

  We finally made it to southern Lebanon on July 23. Our goal was to reach a town called Nabataea. Relentless Israeli airstrikes and shelling had turned it into a ghost town. Six square blocks had been reduced to rubble. Once there had been pharmacies and clothing stores, but only broken mannequins remained. At Nabataea’s hospital, 115 residents had been treated for burns and shrapnel wounds.

  The next day, following a trail of destruction toward the front line, we reached Tyre, the ancient Phoenician city a dozen or so miles up the coast from the Israeli border. Tyre was relatively safe, never carpet-bombed like south Beirut or the four-mile strip along the border, but dangerous enough that eighty thousand of its one hundred thousand inhabitants had fled. Along with other television journalists, we placed our camera at the Rest House hotel, which offered unobstructed views of the coastline.

  I reported from there that US intelligence officials had told me that Israel had flown fifteen hundred combat sorties since the beginning of the war and fired more than twenty thousand rounds of artillery into south Lebanon. It was now estimated that seven hundred thousand people had fled their homes.

  That same day, twenty miles to the southeast, Israel Special Forces launched an attack on Bint Jbeil, a town of twenty thousand. After a massive artillery barrage, Israeli troops made an inauspicious advance from the east. Five soldiers were wounded by friendly fire, and the two tanks sent to evacuate them were disabled by Hezbollah defenders—the first when struck by a missile, the second when it went over a remote-controlled mine. Then an armor-plated bulldozer attempting to rescue the tank casualties was repulsed after being hit by a missile. Two Israeli soldiers were killed and eighteen were wounded, and another two died when their attack helicopter, assigned to fly support for the ground forces, crashed on the Israeli side of the border.

  The Israelis continued to get their noses bloodied in four days of fierce fighting at Bint Jbeil. They inflicted heavy casualties on Hezbollah, but the militiamen reportedly held four IDF divisions at bay with a company-size force of 100 to 140 men. The Winograd Commission, which at the behest of the Israeli government analyzed Israel’s poor showing and the resilience of Hezbollah, said the failure to capture Bint Jbeil was “a symbol of the unsuccessful action of the Israel Defense Forces throughout the fighting.”

  The battles of  Maroun al-Ras and Bint Jbiel revealed the massive failure of Israeli intelligence before the war. The IDF was unaware that southern Lebanon was catacombed with fortified bunkers and rocket launchers, “nature reserves” in the slang of Israeli soldiers. The Israeli air force needed only ninety seconds to pinpoint the spot from which an incoming missile was launched, but well-trained Hezbollah firing teams needed less than a minute to fire rockets, lower the launching platforms back into the ground, and cover them with fire-retardant blankets to conceal their heat signatures.

  All in all, it was a dismaying performance by the IDF, one of the world’s most respected militaries: squabbling generals, senior officers who hunkered down in bunkers while their troops fought in Lebanon, lack of discipline even among well-trained regulars, reservists so unprepared for battle that commanders chose to hold them back. In a footnote of venality, Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, who was briefly hospitalized during the war, apparently due to stress, later admitted to selling $28,000 worth of his equities three hours after Hezbollah kidnapped the two Israeli soldiers.

  Then came Qana. This small village in southern Lebanon is psychologically located at the intersection of Palestinian dreams and Israeli power. During the IDF’s “Grapes of Wrath” offensive in 1996—a sixteen-day campaign aimed at stopping Hezbollah’s shelling of northern Israel—the Israelis fired artillery shells at a UN compound in Qana, killing 106 Lebanese civilians and wounding 116 more.

  On July 30, 2006, I was in Tyre with a bunch of other journalists when word came of another incident in Qana. My NBC crew was packed up and ready to leave, so we quickly headed for Qana, only eight miles away as the crow flies, arriving within a half hour.

  We found a scene of anguish unlike any other I had seen in a war zone. Usually the victims of a bombing attack are mangled, too grisly to show on television. But in Qana, the victims were apparently killed by the percussive force of Israel’s three-thousand-pound bombs or after suffocating in the wreckage. Twenty-eight people were killed, including sixteen children. I described the grim aftermath on Meet the Press:

  “When we arrived, we saw this destroyed building. It was a three-story home under construction. There’d been dozens of people in the basement of this house, mostly women and children it appears. I counted eleven bodies of small boys, perhaps aged eight to ten. They were being carried out, some on stretchers; some being carried out wrapped in blankets, one body on top of the other. The bodies were intact, but had bled from their ears and from their noses. Then we went to the morgue and saw about twenty-two bodies lined up on the floor. They were wrapped in plastic, tied shut in packaging tape.”

  On the Nightly News, I reported that the “conflict may have reached a turning point with this single deadly attack.” The war dragged on but international public opinion had turned sharply against the Israelis, shortening the time they had to achieve their war objectives. Siniora, the Lebanese prime minister, accused the Israelis of war crimes and asked, “Why, we wonder, did they choose Qana yet again?” The UN Security Council, following an emergency session, expressed “extreme shock and distress” at the bombing. Violent protests took place at UN offices in Beirut and Gaza, and thousands demonstrated in Israel, most of them in the Arab town of Umm al-Fahm but also in Tel Aviv and Ha
ifa. The international reaction was harshly critical.

  At first, Israel said it hit the building in Qana because Hezbollah was using it to fire Katyusha rockets across the border less than eight miles to the south, with villagers acting as “human shields,” in the words of IDF chief Dan Halutz. Journalists and international observers emphatically disputed the claim, saying that Hezbollah was firing rockets from unpopulated areas off-limits to civilians.

  The international outcry prompted Israel on July 31 to suspend airstrikes over southern Lebanon for forty-eight hours. Pressure was building for a permanent cease-fire and an end to the hostilities.

  While the airstrikes were suspended, Israel sent thousands more troops into southern Lebanon to recapture the so-called security belt it had occupied between 1982 and 2000; this buffer, which reached several miles into Lebanese territory, was designed to create some space between Israeli civilians and militant groups north of the border.

  By August 5, the IDF had ten thousand soldiers operating inside Lebanon, but they were mostly reservists who were under-trained, having spent the past few years on police duty in the West Bank and Gaza. They were poorly equipped and often lacked water, food, and ammunition. This was a far cry from the seemingly invincible IDF that had cowed Arabs in the past. Even so, the IDF announced on August 7 that it had completed plans for a full-scale ground invasion.

  At the same time, the UN was feverishly working on the framework for a cease-fire. On August 11, Olmert reviewed the draft of the UN plan, which called for an international force of fifteen thousand peacekeepers to be deployed along the border and for an arms embargo to be imposed in order to prevent Hezbollah from acquiring more weapons. Significantly, however, the cease-fire was not conditioned upon the return of the two kidnapped Israeli soldiers, whose kidnapping had triggered the bloody conflict. The agreement was accepted by Hezbollah and the Lebanese government on August 12 and by the Israeli government on August 13.

  By then, Olmert had launched the ground invasion, a last gasp to assert military superiority on the ground. Once again, the IDF got its nose bloodied by Hezbollah guerrillas. Two dozen tanks were sent to join paratroopers supposedly holding the high ground at a village called Ghandoriyah. The column ran smack into a Hezbollah tank trap and came under a barrage of Russian-made Kornet antitank missiles. The paratroopers, meanwhile, were getting an awful surprise of their own. They suddenly found themselves pinned down by Hezbollah fighters who had been lying low, waiting for an opportune moment to strike.

  By the time the misbegotten incursion ended, twelve Israeli soldiers had been killed and fifty wounded. Eleven of Israel’s supposedly indestructible Merkava Mark IV tanks had been hit. All told, thirty-three Israeli soldiers died in the war’s last sixty hours, one-fourth of the IDF’s fatalities in the conflict. At least five hundred Hezbollah militants were killed.

  Critics would say Israel did itself no honor in another attempt to get in last licks before the cease-fire took effect at 8:00 a.m. on August 14, 2006. Both sides fired cluster bombs, but Israel was by far the greatest offender, showering Lebanon with nearly 4.2 million submunitions in the last seventy-two hours of the war, more than 90 percent of the total it fired during the whole thirty-four-day conflict. Some of the bomblets were newly manufactured, others were US munitions dating to the Vietnam War. Driving around south Lebanon after the cease-fire, I saw unexploded cluster bombs and other ordnance almost everywhere I looked.

  The Lebanon war had been a debacle for the Israelis. The vaunted IDF destroyed towns but did not manage to actually capture one. It was even worse from a public-relations standpoint. For decades, Israel had claimed the moral high ground over its Arab enemies, taking pride in its “purity of arms.”

  In most countries, the performance of Israel’s military would have been a disgrace, but in Israel it became a doctrine, named after the Hezbollah stronghold that was flattened in south Beirut. As articulated by Israeli general Gadi Eizenkot, the Dahiya Doctrine pertains to asymmetric warfare in an urban setting, in which the army targets civilian infrastructure to prevent the enemy from using it for military purposes. That’s military-speak and doesn’t reflect what Israel did in Lebanon in 2006. The object of the Dahiya Doctrine was to hit the enemy, and the civilians living nearby, so hard that the enemy dare not try to hit back, at least for some time. The idea is if you can’t beat your enemy in urban battles, inflict so much suffering on the civilian population of the city, or the country, that the people turn on the enemy and demand that it not attack again.

  The Dahiya Doctrine recalled the bombing of civilians in World War II to try to break the enemy’s morale, a strategy whose efficacy is still debated. But when Israelis are asked how they can justify destroying more than a quarter of Lebanon—125,000 houses and apartments, 91 bridges, highways, and roads the length and breadth of the country—they have a ready answer: after 2006, Israel enjoyed years of peace and quiet from its northern neighbor. The doctrine of pain seemed to have bought peace for Israel, at least in the short term.

  A big question is what will happen to the Dahiya Doctrine when Israel meets a foe that can match its military technology at least in terms of inflicting an equal or greater number of civilian deaths and infrastructure damage on the Israeli side.

  For me, the Lebanon war was a milestone. It was a war that ended without even an attempt to resolve the core grievances. It was a war designed to be painful to dissuade a hostile group, in this case Hezbollah, from attacking again. It assumed that when conflicts are complicated—and hostilities ingrained—that they can only be resolved by the fear of more pain and death. It assumes a perpetual state of unresolvable hostilities in the Middle East.

  SIX

  I TURNED THIRTY-THREE SHORTLY AFTER I began settling down in Beirut after the month-long Lebanon war. I was fulfilling my ambition, covering the biggest story of my generation, and I was being rewarded with praise and promotions from my bosses at NBC. But I sure wasn’t living a normal life.

  For years I had frenetically covered the fighting in Iraq, spending six or eight weeks in the war zone, then pulling out for a couple of weeks of R & R at a hotel in Thailand or Italy, then returning to the nerve-jangling violence of Baghdad. Then when I finally got the go-ahead to set up a bureau in Beirut—which I thought would bring a modicum of stability to my life—the Israelis and Hezbollah started killing each other.

  The shooting finally stopped on August 14, 2006, and I found the apartment of my dreams in Beirut on a small, historic street near the Albergo Hotel. Ironically the apartment had been vacated by an Italian diplomat during the fighting. Israel was bombing Hezbollah strongholds in south Beirut both from the air and from the sea and at times the fighting was getting close to the center of the city.

  So now I had a place to call home. I started dating again and had a lively social life, unremarkable for a single guy my age unless you’re a single guy who had spent the past few years putting your mattress against hotel windows as a defense against car bombs.

  I had a broader journalistic portfolio now, but Iraq was still at the center of the action. The triumphant US invasion had become a sectarian struggle that was far more savage and sinister and seemed to go on forever. To understand why, you have to go back to the debate over the American invasion. President Bush seemed obsessed with Iraq. He believed that if the United States got rid of Saddam Hussein and instituted democratic reforms, the Middle East—and the world—would be a safer and better place. He seemed to have no idea, however, how it would happen. The administration often used the analogy of planting the “seeds of democracy” in the Middle East, as if they’d sprout into democratic regimes as nature took its course. Democracy doesn’t sprout like apple trees. Scattering the seeds isn’t enough, no matter how many soldiers do it. To continue with the gardening analogy the Bush administration seemed to love (there were also many “seeds of terror” and “seeds of hope”), democracy is more like a fragile flower that requires constant attention and the right soil. Dicta
torships and fascist regimes are hardy weeds that sprout on their own.

  The casus belli, of course, was Iraq’s purported arsenal of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). A secondary rationale was an alleged link between Saddam and al-Qaeda. “We’ve learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases,” Bush said on October 7, 2002, five months before the invasion.

  I thought this was preposterous, as did most people familiar with the Middle East, but the supposed presence of WMDs made it a secondary concern. Saddam sometimes pretended he was a true-blue Muslim by commissioning a copy of the Koran purportedly written with twenty-eight liters of his own blood. In 2001, he burnished his Islamic-warrior image with the completion of the Mother of All Battles mosque in western Baghdad. It had minarets shaped like Scud missiles.

  But Saddam was no Islamist and saw Islam mostly as a propaganda tool. He drank whiskey. He smoked cigars. He liked nice suits. He did not dream about the seventh century. He lived very much in the twenty-first century. A brutal dictator, he did not tolerate dissent, much less a bunch of extremists who wanted to topple him and restore the caliphate. Al-Qaeda was his enemy, not his friend.

  Another factor in the decision to invade Iraq was that the war in Afghanistan, which began less than a month after 9/11, had been too easy. To use a phrase military leaders love, the US “overlearned” the lesson of Afghanistan. In just three months after 9/11, at a cost of only a billion dollars and one American life, US airstrikes, 110 CIA operatives, and 300 Special Forces scored a decisive victory. Working in concert with Afghan tribesmen, who were paid according to the amount of lethal force they used against the enemy, the United States toppled the Taliban and prompted a hasty retreat by al-Qaeda, which at the time only had several hundred fighters. The small American force in Afghanistan would likely have captured Osama bin Laden after the battle at Tora Bora in December 2001, but the Defense Department, pointing to its early success, rejected the request for eight hundred additional soldiers to chase down al-Qaeda in the rough mountainous terrain.