War is Politics by Other Means

[Although a bit dated, I find this piece on Hizbullah and the aftermath of the ’06 war very relevant.]

Excerpt: It was this culture of resistance that led to Hizballah’s surprise victory in what is now being called in Lebanon “the Sixth War” with Israel . (A note on my usage of “surprise victory”: If war is politics by other means, then Israel failed to achieve its stated political goals of disarming Hizballah and pushing it north of the Litani River; so too did it fail to achieve its unstated goals of cleansing the south of all Shias and intimidating Lebanese and Palestinian resistance— two failures that even Israel’s own generals are beginning to admit. Hizballah, on the other hand, not only survived the war intact, and with relatively few casualties, but it inflicted relatively heavy casualties on the Israeli military and achieved greater popularity than it ever had—winning the hearts of Muslims around the world, and many non-Muslims in Lebanon.)