November 2006No. 13The United States and the Israel-Hezbollah WarProf. Jeremy PressmanAlthough American soldiers were not involved in the fighting in Lebanon and Israel this past summer, the United States was nonetheless a central player in the war. U.S. policy was defined by staunch American support for Israel and repeated calls by U.S. officials to use the crisis as a means to get at the root causes of violence in the region. What were the American objectives in this war? Does a preliminary assessment suggest that Washington took steps toward achieving them? How does U.S. policy on the Arab-Israeli conflict look moving forward?American Objectives in the Israel-Hezbollah WarTwo global foreign policy commitments informed the United States view of the Israel-Hezbollah confrontation this past summer; the war on terror and the democratization of the Middle East. Since September 11, 2001, the American war on terror has been defined to include several different international actors. In his speech of September 20, 2001, President George W. Bush stated that the war would “not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated,” and that “any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.” In addition, he warned, terrorists could not be accommodated but instead must be met by force. This approach has most directly been applied to al-Qaeda and its satellites, the Taliban in Afghanistan, and Saddam Hussein’s regime. But it has also generated a general lack of U.S. sympathy for any terrorist groups that target American allies, even if the organization’s goals are more national than global in nature.1 At the same time, the Bush administration has laid out a broad vision for the democratization of the Middle East as a way to undermine support for terrorism. The implicit assumption has been that such radical change may lead to short-term upheaval; the United States is changing the rules and recognizes that dictators and terrorists will not go gently into the night. But whatever instability may result, the U.S. believes, is necessary to reform the region and will, ultimately, be a small price to pay for a democratic Middle East.2Jeremy Pressman is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Connecticut and is a research fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies.The opinions and findings expressed in this essay are those of the author exclusively, and do not reflect the official positions or policies of the Crown Center for Middle East Studies or Brandeis University.The United States and Hezbollah also have their own history, which established the backdrop for U.S. policy in the recent war. The United States lists Hezbollah as a foreign terrorist organization, and various sanctions apply.2 The U.S. State Department’s annual terrorism report takes note of Hezbollah’s involvement in attacks on the U.S. Embassy and a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983 and on the U.S. Embassy annex in Beirut in 1984. Hundreds of American personnel were killed in those attacks. The report also mentions the hijacking of TWA flight 847 in 1985, various kidnappings in Lebanon throughout the 1980s, and the attacks on the Israeli embassy (1992) and a Jewish cultural center in Argentina (1994). A member of Hezbollah was also indicted for his role in the bombing of the Khobar towers, a U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia, in 1996.3Taken together, both the historical context and these two broader ideas—the scope of the war on terror and the goal of a democratic Middle East—shaped United States policy in July 2006. Israel, a close American ally, was confronted by a terrorist group, Hezbollah. In keeping with its global stance, the United States was unsympathetic to calls to stop the fighting, because such a move, in effect, would protect Hezbollah. Instead, by letting Israel fight for weeks, the United States saw itself as weakening Hezbollah: Israel would weaken Hezbollah militarily, while the Israeli attack would force the Lebanese government to finally take control of southern Lebanon and thereby constrain Hezbollah politically.Simultaneously, it was thought, giving Israel time to defeat Hezbollah would help the spread of democratization. After Lebanon’s independence intifada (the Cedar Revolution) in 2005, the United States had pledged strong support for the fledgling democratic regime. But it was clear to Bush officials that Hezbollah, with its illiberal nature and pro-Syrian politics, was the major obstacle to a truly liberal and democratic Lebanon. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice remarked that she was “very concerned ... about Lebanon’s freedom and democracy.” She elaborated a few days later that “[t]he Government of [Prime Minister Fouad] Siniora is a good and young democratic government, but the extremists of Hezbollah have put that government at risk and have brought misery to the region. Any ceasefire cannot allow that condition to remain ...”4 By mid-2006, Hezbollah was no weaker in Lebanese politics, and it had not disarmed, as had been stipulated in UN Security Council Resolution 1559 of September 2, 2004. There was no move by the Lebanese government, of which Hezbollah was a part, to disarm Hezbollah or to deploy the Lebanese Army to southern Lebanon, Hezbollah’s stronghold.In essence, then, Israel would be doing Lebanese democrats a favor, it was believed, by defeating Hezbollah. Lebanon’s reformist forces lacked the strength to marginalize Hezbollah, but Israeli military might could reshape the internal Lebanese balance of military and political power in a way that would benefit the U.S. push for democracy. Lebanese democracy would be able to flourish, it was thought, if Washington allowed Israel to defeat Hezbollah.5The general message sent by the war was expected to accord with Bush administration rhetoric—and the neoconservative conviction—that America needed a muscular foreign policy after what was considered a decade of appeasement in the 1990s. We crush terrorists was to be the message—or, at least, we hit them very hard and degrade their capabilities. We stand up to terrorists. We fight back. We are not weak-kneed appeasers.Such an approach, however, created a major risk with respect to Lebanon’s