Sometimes I need a mental vacation from all the nastiness engulfing Iraq.  That's when I close my eyes and think of Lebanon.

From a blogging standpoint Iraq is more than enough to keep me busy.  But I spent the afternoon and early evening writing a piece on Iraq for Time, so I'm a little sick of the subject.  I will say that I was shocked by (but don't doubt) the UN report that nearly 6,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in May and June.  A lot of people are waiting for "civil war to break out."  I'm not really interested in the semantics of what constitutes a "civil war," but certainly 100 civilians dying every day for two months constitutes "something awful."  Things could easily get a whole lot worse and right now they’re headed south fast.  But it's bad enough already and arguing over what to call it—or what we'll be calling it if 150 or 200 or 300 civilians die every day in August—is beside the point.

What's more relevant, I think, is what I wrote about yesterday and touched on in the Time piece:  there's no reason to believe a plan exists for getting this under control, or that there can be a plan for getting this under control.  The current plan may actually be stoking the sectarian conflict.  If you want an impeccably reported summary of the security situation read this story by Tom Lasseter.  If they awarded a Pulitzer for Best BS Detector then Lasseter would be weighed down like Mark Spitz.

With Iraq as my daily example of how wars can unfold, it was a little dismaying to read that President Bush believes Israel's campaign in Lebanon "would complete the work of building a functioning democracy in Lebanon and send a strong message to the Syrian and Iranian backers of Hezbollah."

On the one hand, Israel can’t just sit back and take it while Hezbollah stages cross-border raids and fires rockets into Israeli cities.  And Hezbollah is allied with (or directed by) Iran, so as the Iranians gain power and influence in the region and move closer to getting a nuclear weapon Hezbollah’s presence on Israel’s border becomes a lot more dangerous—maybe catastrophically dangerous.  But there is a massive gap between the damage Israel is inflicting and the damage Hezbollah is inflicting—hundreds of dead civilians and entire neighborhoods flattened in Lebanon, versus 15 dead civilians and a few buildings damaged in Israel.  There’s a reason—beyond simple prejudice—that the average Arab is baffled by Israel’s view of itself as the underdog.

I have no problem at all with Israeli strikes against Hezbollah.  But I think some of what the Israelis are doing has little to do with going after Hezbollah and a lot to do with making the point that if you aid or shelter guerillas who attack Israel then the Israeli military will stomp on you.  That would be fair play if the Lebanese government had the power to control Hezbollah, or was directing Hezbollah.  But it doesn’t, and it isn’t.  So there’s a cruelty to this even though there’s also a cold political logic that goes beyond sheer bloody-mindedness.

This is realpolitik—about as far as you can get from grand theories about making the Middle Eat a better place.  Certainly the Israelis are sending a signal to the Syrians and the Iranians—the signal is, “we can make things very painful for you, and don’t think you can get away with using proxies to do your dirty work.”  But I have a hard time imagining that they’re interested in “complet[ing] the work of building a functional democracy in Lebanon.”  The Israelis, spurred on by the Bush Administration and others, recently completed the work of building a democracy in Gaza—how’s that working out for everyone?  Yes, the Hamas-led government is no one’s idea of a stable liberal democracy.  But why anyone still assumes that “stable and liberal” proceed inevitably from “democracy” is beyond me.

Israel wants two things from Lebanon.  First, a government more scared of Israel than it is of anti-Israeli guerillas, Syria and Iran.  Second, a government capable of taking on whatever remains of Hezbollah after Israel leaves in a few weeks or a few months.  They’ll probably get the former; they may not get the latter.  Israel’s invasion in 1982 chased out the PLO, but it also wrecked the country (even more than it already was wrecked), led to the rise of Hezbollah and mired Israel in a long counter-insurgency in southern Lebanon.

With that precedent available I’m not inclined to view this new violence as a turning point that will bring the benefits of liberal democracy to Lebanon and the rest of the Middle East, ushering in the era of perpetual peace.  I don’t think the Israelis view it that way, either.  I think they’re about smashing Hezbollah, intimidating Lebanon, and warning Syria and Iran.  Beyond that I don’t think they much care how it makes anyone feel, or what it makes anyone do.  Call that what you want, but don’t call it naïve.