Nasrallah makes his case

If it seems like the pace of events has been accelerating since Hassan Nasrallah announced that he expects Hizballah members to be indicted in the Hariri Tribunal, it has.

Immediately, leaders from Saudi Arabia and Syria rushed to Beirut to calm the situation. Shortly after they left town, an Israeli commander was killed by the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) as his unit was cutting down a tree. And just yesterday, the political temperature continued to rise with Nasrallah’s highly anticipated speech introducing evidence that allegedly points to Israeli involvement in Hariri’s murder.

All of this occurring in the last twelve days.

It’s unclear where it’s all leading, if anywhere, but Nasrallah’s speech yesterday was significant for many reasons.

His case against Israel focuses on information extracted from alleged spies (Lebanese agents working for Israel) that were caught and interrogated, and information which came from telemetric data hacked from Israeli drones as they flew over Lebanon. Nasrallah reported that the spies had confessed that Israel was trying to convince Hariri that Hizballah had plans to assassinate him. The data from the drones showed photos taken of an area near the Beirut seaside that Hariri’s motorcade was known to pass through (where he was killed).

According to Nasrallah, the evidence suggests that Israel wanted to break Hariri away from its arch enemy Hizballah, and later, tried to create a violent divide between Lebanon’s Sunni and Shiite Muslims, as well as the Lebanese and their Syrian occupiers, by assassinating Hariri and getting Hizballah and Syria to take the blame.

The case, as Nasrallah himself admitted, does not conclusively prove Israel’s involvement in Hariri’s death (it actually didn’t prove anything), but it might be enough to introduce reasonable doubt and deflect the results of a Hizballah indictment. (Michael Young and Rami Khouri, both of Lebanon’s Daily Star, give their interesting opinions of the speech here and here, respectively.) It seems all Nasrallah was looking to gain from his efforts was plausible deniability.

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Despite Sayyed Nasrallah’s recent sensational presentation, the evidence still points to Syria as the prime suspect. From Michael Young’s piece, cited above, if we were to believe Nasrallah’s case against Israel:

“We would have to believe that Syria did not threaten Hariri in 2004, was untroubled by Resolution 1559, for which it held Hariri partly responsible, did not control Lebanese security in 2005, and did not appoint or approve all senior officials in the security and intelligence agencies. We would have to disregard that these agencies tried to cover up the scene of the assassination, that Hizballah sought to stifle the emancipation movement by organizing an intimidating demonstration on March 8, 2005, to defend Syria’s presence in Lebanon, and that virtually all of those assassinated after Hariri were critical of Syria.”

When a major political figure is assassinated, it is not as important to find out who carried out the hit as it is to find out who ordered it. It’s doubtful that Nasrallah would give such an order in the context of 2005 Lebanon, and it’s doubtful that Israel would either. What is not doubtful, and is actually probable is that Syria was behind it. Damascus had far more motive and opportunity than anyone else.  Hariri was becoming too popular and was seen as a major threat to Syrian dominance of Lebanon. And Syrian intelligence had a stranglehold over Beirut at the time, making it the faction most capable of carrying out such an operation.

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One of the more interesting bits coming from Nasrallah’s presentation was his revelation that Hizballah had intercepted telemetric transmissions from Israel’s drone aircraft in 1997. In that case, Hizballah accurately predicted an Israeli commando raid on Lebanese soil and set up an ambush that kill 12 IDF soldiers. At the time, the signals from the IDF’s drone were not encrypted, but the operation is still an impressive achievement for Hizballah, and is indicative of the group’s technical capabilities.

In a future large-scale conflict, cyber operations will be sure to play a large part. For example, Israel’s bombing raid on a Syrian nuclear installation was preceded by a massive cyber attack that disabled Syrian air defenses. And in the 2006 War, Israel tried in vain throughout the conflict to sever communication lines between Hizballah leaders and their commanders in the field, and to interrupt the satellite signal for Hizballah’s Al-Manar television station. It highly likely that cyber attacks will play a big role in a future conflict, and despite Israel’s seeming abundance of financial and technical resources, the two seem pretty evenly matched.

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As the summer enters its final stages, the situation in the inner Mediterranean is becoming untenable. It appears as if Hizballah is feeling the pressure and Israel is preparing the public for an attack. The killing of the IDF commander, in Israel, by the LAF has served to sow together the image that the Lebanese Armed Forces and Hizballah are one in the same, and the IDF will treat them that way. And with Hizballah now a larger part of the Lebanese government than ever before, the IDF will consider all areas and targets in Lebanon fair game. From Major General Eizencourt, head of Israel’s Northern Command:

“What happened to the Dahiya* neighborhood… will happen to each village from which Israel is fired on. We will apply disproportionate force and inflict huge damage and destruction …. The next war must be decided quickly, aggressively, and without seeking international approval …. Hizballah understands very well that firing from villages will lead to their destruction.”

*A densely populated residential area in South Beirut which was almost completely razed by the Israeli Air Force in the 2006 War.

That was from a report from the International Crisis Group, which also quoted Nasrallah about Hizballah’s new position vis a vis Israel:

“The Israelis always launched their wars with a safe domestic front. This situation is gone for good. After 2006, this will never be the case again. We have a domestic front, and they have a domestic front, and today we have inaugurated a new era in which we will be bombed and we will bomb, we will be killed and we will kill, we will be displaced and will displace, and this is their current strategic weakness.”

Israel will be far less discriminate with is sophisticated weaponry, and Hizballah will follow suit, eye for eye.  The result of the next major confrontation between Hizballah and Israel will likely see extensive damage and loss of life dwarfing what happened in the 2006 War. Logically, all parties involved should do whatever they can to avert this course of action, but it seems as though we are destined to watch Israel and Hizballah (and therefore Lebanon) square off again. It is a strange situation where no one wants it to happen, yet it seems that there can be no other outcome.