Juan Cole on the Israeli-Lebanese war

Juan Cole has an article in Salon on the current Israeli-Lebanese war. Israel has now has ground troops in Lebanon Cole's article is Israel's maximal option: Part of Israel's war strategy may be to push the Shiites out of Lebanon's south. That would be a humanitarian disaster - and it won't work Salon 07/19/06. He writes:

The current Israeli plan for Lebanon appears to seek to repeat Israel's success in Jordan in 1970-71. Palestinian refugees in Jordan, their ranks swelled by those who fled in 1967, had turned to guerrilla actions against Israel under the Palestine Liberation Organization. By bombarding and menacing Jordan, Israel forced King Hussein and his Bedouin tank corps to attempt to curb the PLO. When it fought back, the struggle turned into a civil war with Palestinian Jordanians, in which the PLO was crushed and thousands of Palestinians were massacred.

Lebanon, however, is far more fragile than Jordan. It is a multicultural society, sometimes called a country of minorities. In East Beirut, Jounieh and points north, into Mount Lebanon, Maronite Catholics are the majority. Sunnis are important in the port cities - Tripoli, West Beirut and Sidon - as well as in the Bekaa Valley and in the far north. In the Shouf mountains live the Druze, hardy adherents of an esoteric offshoot of Ismaili Islam. The deep south down near the Israeli border is orthodox (or a "Twelver") Shiite territory, though they are also a majority in the Bekaa Valley to the east, with Baalbak a major center, and decades of immigration to the capital have created a southern ring of Shiite slums around Beirut. Poor Shiites are the constituency for the fundamentalist Hezbollah Party, though in opinion polls most of them do not report their main political commitment as Muslim fundamentalism. ...

There are two most likely outcomes of the war. One is the collapse of the Lebanese government and the creation of another failed state on Israel's border, where desperation will breed terrorism for decades. The other is a strengthened Hezbollah, which will become the leading force in Lebanese nationalism, weakening the reformists. The maximalist option would likely turn Beirut into a poor Shiite city, reinforcing Shiite political power at the center. Destroying a few Katyusha emplacements in the south will not affect either outcome, and in both cases Hezbollah will probably be able to rebuild its arsenal.

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