I just returned from a week touring Beirut and southern Lebanon, and from visiting northern Israel.

What struck me about the bombing, in both countries, was that you could see the destruction and completely misread what it meant. In Beirut, the destruction in reality is efficient and impressive. The destruction in Israel, on the other hand, is random and scattered. When Hezbollah rockets were fired on Israel, landing meant success.

So here is the truth: Israel did not do anything close to what it was capable of doing. Hezbollah did all it could.

Because Israel is hyper-modern and it has the technology to exact such a concentrated result, it is capable of creating visible and jarring images.

And, of course, Israel is Israel. That is why the non-aligned countries condemned "Israeli aggression in Lebanon" this weekend, befuddled about Lebanon and Hezbollah: Such an easy target.

I recognize that one can't analyze what happened in Lebanon in the 34-day, Israel-Hezbollah war without walking into a minefield.

Also, what happened can't be reduced to 1,000 words. There is complex history, the players are not necessarily as they represent themselves, there are intramural battles going on about military force and politics, there are secrets and there is even the difficulty of reading what one is looking at accurately.

One could reduce the conflict to shock and awe: Success on the one hand in what could be exacted in such a short period of time, failure on the other by Israeli political leaders and commanders' intent on doing the job on the cheap.

There is no question though that Israel seems in awe of its effort and its precision. Even though a national commission of inquiry begins a bruising and painful analysis today of government and military shortcomings, Israel's social and cultural demand is for offense and victory. Government officials speak of "annihilating" the enemy: Bush rhetoric that invokes those earlier images of total war and is so jarring to international ears. They will now be assessed on their performance to achieve the goal.

On the other hand, Lebanon is shocked. It is not just the destruction wrought but the powerlessness of the owners of the country. The Lebanese government complains of the destruction and the cluster bombs and the environmental devastation, exaggerating what happened to IT because it can not bear to say that most of what was destroyed was Hezbollah's assets, assets that indeed resided and flourished inside their own country under their own noses with their consent. By focusing outward, on the "other," Lebanon conveniently ignores its failures. Yet the government of Lebanon, a bickering alliance of non-war lords, is fully culpable. The shock seems play-it-again-Sam-style, shocked that there is gambling going on in the casino.

The international community meanwhile is also shocked. It equally complains about cluster bombs and levels of destruction, suggesting that there is an alternative military strategy that could have been pursued. One can't help but be a little cynical that they are really just interested in finding the best arguments to condemn the dominant belligerent. Somewhere in here is an effort to protect the civilian population and the environment from the scourge of war. I wonder though whether the right lessons can be learned to get there.

Hezbollah meanwhile touts its own "divine victory," bloodied and dislodged from its territory yet opaque enough that it can hide the real wounds. The Hezbollah military, because it is largely invisible, is neither accurately assessed nor is it not really held accountable for the war crimes it committed. Worse still is that Hezbollah believes, as do many on the "Arab street," that the attacks on Israel and its citizens were justified, justified and no worse than anything Israel did because Israel in its actions preys upon the civilian population.

No worse, of course, depends on the narrative of vengefulness and indiscriminate attack by Israel. Because of Israel's means, thousands of apartments are gone, selected and meticulously excised by a high-tech military force.

Only a very short drive from the neighborhoods of southern Beirut though, you are back to bustling boulevards; a few neighborhoods over and there are luxury stores and five star hotels. Beyond the "Hezbollah" neighborhoods, the city is normal. Electricity flows just as it did before the fighting. The Lebanese sophisticates are glued to their cell phones. Even an international airport that was bombed is reopened.

An accurate reading of what happened and what south Beirut means might produce a different picture. Israel had the means to impart greater destruction, but that does not mean intrinsically that it is more brutal. If Hezbollah had bigger rockets or more accurate ones, it would have done not only the same, but undoubtedly more.

Israel may have made a grave error in attacking Hezbollah as it did, it may have used the wrong weapons and hit the wrong targets, it may have completely misread the enemy, it may have made its security worse for years to come.

But the fact that one can drive a short distance from Dresden-like south Beirut and return to modern life itself should signal that this is something very different: Israeli bombers did not fly over Beirut and unleash loads of bombs. Each individual building was the quarry; the intent was there, and the technology existed, to spare the rest.

So Israel "won" -- literally a technical knock-out -- and Hezbollah "won" as well.

Hezbollah is weakened and strengthened at the same time.

Israel achieved its military objectives and yet worsened its strategic outlook.

Welcome to post-post-modern warfare.

The three are Hussein Suleiman, 22, Mohammad Srour, 20, and Maher Hourani, 30, Rosenfeld said.

Suleiman was involved in planning the July 12 cross-border raid, in which Hizbullah fighters infiltrated Israel to attack a border patrol, killing three soldiers and capturing two, Rosenfeld said, adding that Suleiman was involved in other deadly attacks on soldiers.

Srour and Hourani also participated in attacks against soldiers along the border, Rosenfeld said.

The three have confessed to participation in the attacks and to receiving military training in Iran, Rosenfeld said.

A Hizbullah spokesperson said Hizbullah does not have access yet to many places where its fighters were based because they are still occupied by the Israeli forces, hence they don't know the exact numbers of the captured fighters.

"We don't have the exact number because there are places still occupied by the Israeli enemy which we did not access yet," the spokesperson told The Daily Star.

Asked whether Hizbullah might ask the Lebanese government to take similar judiciary measures like those taken in Israel against the two Israeli soldiers they captured, the spokesperson said: "Hizbullah does not operate in this way."

Lebanese State Prosecutor Said Mirza declined to comment on the issue of whether Lebanon might initiate any similar procedures.

United Nations chief Kofi Annan announced earlier this month that Israel and Hizbullah have accepted UN mediation on the issue of the prisoners.

Annan has appointed his former special adviser Lakhdar Ibrahimi to mediate a possible agreement for swapping Leb-anese prisoners in return for freeing the reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser.

Free Patriotic Movement leader Michel Aoun had met last week with Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and proposed to play a role in the swap.

Verhofstadt conveyed the message to Annan who reportedly said that "Aoun's help in the prisoners' exchange deal is not needed as he has already appointed a mediator."
http://www.dailystar.com.lb

Aoun flew to Belgium last Wednesday on board a Belgian military plane accompanied by Monsignor Jean Abboud and met with Belgian officials including Verhofstadt.

In another development, the Israeli daily Haaretz reported Monday that Israeli Military Intelligence (MI) had clear information on an impending capture attempt by Hizbullah shortly before the group carried out its cross-border raid on July 12.

But the paper said the information was not analyzed and passed on to the troops in time, according to an internal inquiry conducted by the Israel Army.

Over the past three days, the Israeli Army press office has refused to either confirm or deny the report, saying that the issue is still being investigated by MI and the Northern Command.

The inquiry into the intelligence aspects of the abduction is being conducted by Brigadier General Avi Ashkenazi.

But even though his investigation, which could alter the entire picture of the abduction, is not yet completed, he will present his report to Chief of Staff Dan Halutz and other senior army officers this week.

The report will apparently focus solely on the events of July 12, and will not deal with previous, similar operations that were foiled.

Another senior Israeli military official said on Monday that old maps and faulty intelligence hampered the army's campaign against Hizbullah in the recent Israeli offensive against Lebanon.

The remarks were the latest to expose what critics of the government and army have said were serious lapses in the military's readiness for the 34-day war that ended August 14.

If the air force had more precise information about Hizbullah's deployment in South Lebanon, it could have better pinpointed the militia in air strikes, the official told journalists.

There was not enough coordination between ground and air forces largely because the branches had different intelligence, the official said. The maps used by the ground forces were from 2000, while the air force had maps from this year, he said.

The Israeli Cabinet authorized an inquiry Sunday into the handling of the war. Critics had called for a more sweeping probe by a state commission with powers to dismiss government and military officials.

Reservists, called up for duty in Lebanon, have complained of poor preparation, conflicting orders and a lack of food and supplies. - Agencies with additional reporting by Nada Bakri

Lebanese National News Agency reported that about 150 UN troops and dozens of military vehicles left Beirut on Tuesday for the south to reinforce the peacekeeping mission.

Also on Tuesday, three Spanish warships, within the framework of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), arrived in the southern Lebanese port city of Tyre and were unloaded of military vehicles and logistics.

The reinforcements will help maintain the Aug. 14 ceasefire which halted the war between Israel and Hizbollah guerrillas.

Israel has said it will complete its withdrawal from south Lebanon once there are at least 5,000 UNIFIL troops on the ground.

Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff Dan Halutz expected on Tuesday that all Israeli troops in south Lebanon would evacuate by Friday.

Fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, which broke out on July 12 following the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers by the Shiite group, came to an end on Aug. 14 thanks to UN Security Council Resolution 1701.

The resolution calls for Israel's withdrawal and authorizes an increase of the existing UNIFIL to 15,000 troops to help Lebanese troops take control of south Lebanon as Israel withdraws.

They also trained more than 100 Peshmerga or Kurdish fighters for "special assignments" that included how to use rifles and how to shoot militants in a crowd, he said.

The former soldier said he believed Kurdish officials knew the trainers were Israelis although the troops did not.

"My part of the contract was to train the Kurdish security people for a big airport project and for training, as well as the Peshmerga, and the actual soldiers, the army," the former IDF soldier told Newsnight.

"You know, day by day it's a bit tense because you know where you are and you know who you are. And there's always a chance that you'll get revealed," he added.

Iraqi newspapers have reported that Israeli soldiers have trained Kurdish troops but the Kurdish authorities deny allowing any Israelis into Iraq.

The Kurds' political enemies have long accused them of an alliance with Israel while Israel's critics suspect it wants to use the Kurdish region as a strategic base to get closer to its arch-enemy Iran.

Iraqi Kurdistan sits between Iran to the east and Turkey to the north-west. Both countries have significant Kurd minorities and are worried about a Kurdish state emerging in northern Iraq.

Newsnight also reported that an Israeli security firm called Interop and two Swiss-registered subsidiaries, Kudo and Colosium, were among the main contractors at Irbil airport, providing security fencing and communications equipment.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev told Newsnight Israel had not authorized any firms to do defense work in Iraq. Firms would be prosecuted if police found they had broken export laws, he said.

Khaled Salih, a spokesman for the Kurdistan Regional Government, dismissed the former IDF soldier's claims.

"These are not new allegations for us. Back in the Sixties and Seventies we were called 'the second Israel' in the region and we were supposed to be eliminated by Islamist nationalist and now Islamist groups," he told Newsnight.

The former IDF soldier said he trained Kurds in "anti-terror lessons ... how to shoot first, how to identify a terrorist in a crowd. That's clearly special assignments.

The point of Cohen's column, "Hunker Down With History," was that this was no time for Israel to try to use military power to regain control of territory it has already given up, the Gaza Strip and the buffer zone in southern Lebanon. It was pertinent analysis by a talented pro-Israel writer. But I'm sure that is not what is being blogged around. One e-mail I read said: "This is the first (current) case of a Jewish pundit desperately trying to feed Israeli Jews to the crocodile in the hope that he will be eaten last."

The man asking the question about 2020 was Peter Osnos, a former foreign correspondent and foreign editor of the Post, who has become an important publishing figure in New York. His tone was light, but he meant it.

"Nobody wants to talk about it, but nothing works anymore for Israel," Osnos said later. "The negotiated settlement narrative that began with Anwar Sadat's visit to Israel in 1977 has been shattered. You have to begin with the demographic facts. Even Israel will have a majority of Arabs within 15 years."

Osnos, who became a vice president of Random House and then founded his own publishing house, Public Affairs, writes his own column, focusing on media coverage of foreign affairs, distributed by the Century Foundation in New York. This is part of what he has written over the past month:

"What we must finally recognize is that the rage of the Middle East -- Arab and Jew, Sunni and Shiite, fundamentalist and pragmatist -- is intractable as other world conflicts are not. ... The historic and political case for Israel's place in the midst of a deeply volatile and insecure region where hundreds of millions are taught to despise it is no different now than it was at the time Israel was created in 1948. ...

"The optimistic view is that Arab pragmatists emboldened (and simultaneously intimidated) by their radical brethren's sense of victory may now be willing again to negotiate broader peace. The pessimists say that Israel is running out of time to secure long-term peace. ... Israel will mark its 60th anniversary in 2008. But it remains surrounded by countries and movements that at worst are sworn to its destruction and at best merely despise it. Nations are not immutable. The Soviet empire marked its 60th anniversary in 1977. Fourteen years later, it was gone, a parenthesis of time in Russian history. ...

"Much of the Western world seems no longer to believe, more than a half-century removed from the Holocaust in Europe, that civilization owes the Jews a homeland anymore. ... The image of Israel has gradually been corroded by the consequences of 40 years of occupation on the West Bank and Gaza. The country is a vibrant democracy with a deeply imbeddded dream of peaceful co-existence with its neighbors. Yet when security and dominance of its borders are at stake, Israel suspends the pleasantries. The image of Israel in the rest of the world focuses on that ferocity."

The bottom line is that, sadly, the survival of Israel depends not on its own valor and might or justice of cause, but on the friendship and support of one friend, the United States. And its friend has made all of these things worse by invading Iraq, spreading ever more chaos and hatred throughout the Muslim world.

Ironically, some of the American planners thought our weapons of shock and awe would make Israel more secure. In fact, our quick-strike aggression has done the opposite, and in many ways. As Osnos pointed out, Israel is richer and stronger, but in terms of security it is no better off than it was in 1948.