There are many ways to read the latest war in Lebanon.

Many Lebanese remain puzzled by the strategic thinking behind a month-long aerial campaign ... One goal was nearly achieved by the last days of fighting. The bombing did succeed in displacing some nine tenths of Lebanon's estimated 1.2 million Shias.

This Israeli campaign appears to have had two purposes. One was psychological: underlining the fact that Hezbollah had failed to fulfill its role as a protector of even its own people, the Shia, let alone of Lebanon as a whole. The other was military: to clear the south Lebanon "fighting box" of civilians, so as to allow the Israeli army to make use of its heaviest antipersonnel weaponry without fear of bad publicity.

Hezbollah's offensive weapons were not especially effective. The four thousand or so rockets it fired killed just forty-one civilians, a third of them "Israeli Arabs." But the guerrillas' skillful use of light field weapons ... appears to have rendered Israel's lumbering Merkava ("Chariot") tanks pretty useless.

At this writing, most Lebanese who do not share Hezbollah's triumphalism, and they are many, remain pessimistic about the chances of taming the party. "Lebanon is finished" is a refrain often heard in private.

I disagree with the author's claim that Katyusha rockets were ineffective. If the purpose was terror, rather than mass casualties, then one could conclude they were reasonably effective, as the north of Israel was essentially shut down for the duration of the conflict, with Israelis trapped in their secure bunkers.

War Within War

For Israel, the war has been a rude awakening. This was not just another tit-for-tat. It was a tipping point.

For Israel, as well as Hamas and Hezbollah, the most costly blow is the one to which they will be seen as having surrendered. The conflict is no longer about achieving a specific objective—releasing a soldier, say, or capturing defined territory. It is about something more intangible, and so more serious: establishing one's power of deterrence, defining the rules of the game, showing who is boss. Such confrontations may subside, and they may even pause. They will not end.

A New Middle East

ACCORDING to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the United States has engaged in more multinational operations since the end of the cold war than it did in the preceding 90 years. Relying on one’s partners to fight wars makes sense. After all, it is better to fight with your friends at your side than alone, right?

Wrong.

The High Price of Friendship

A defiant Iran faced the prospect of economic sanctions after U.N. inspectors reported that the country ignored yesterday's deadline to halt its nuclear program and has been hindering efforts to determine whether it seeks to secretly develop nuclear weapons.

President Bush, invoking the same language that he used to describe Iraq before the March 2003 invasion, called Iran a "grave threat" and said "there must be consequences" for Tehran's actions. "It is time for Iran to make a choice," Bush said in a speech to the American Legion's national convention in Salt Lake City.

Iran Defies Deadline On Nuclear Program

Busily monitoring our well-known tendency to strident self-importance, earnest American practitioners of personal diplomacy can risk missing the genuinely humbling lesson of being abroad: an awareness of how bewildering another country’s own blend of boorishness and fervent belief, of openness and defiance, of backwardness and progress and of internal dissensions can be. In the end, it’s as narcissistic to assume we’re the overbearing cause of everybody else’s national identity crises in a dizzying world as it is to imagine that we can orchestrate the solutions to them. The sobering, and liberating, truth is that our britches are not that big.

The I’m-Not-Ugly American

Pick up the latest issue of Foreign Affairs at your local newsstand, and check out this article by the author of "The Codebreakers."

Modern militaries' obsession with intelligence gathering and evaluation would have bemused Caesar and Napoleon, since such behavior was rarely engaged in until recently. In the war on terrorism, intelligence is playing its greatest role yet, but even today, espionage and intelligence analysis will not be the decisive factors.

If you think that GWOT rarely requires "boots on the ground", think again.

For previous David Kahn threads, check out:

The Reader of Gentlemen's Mail
How Good Intelligence Falls on Deaf Ears
When Navajos Fought Japanese for Ne-He-Mah
The Atlantic | February 2002 | Losing the Code War | Budiansky
The Literature of Secrets

The Rise of Intelligence - David Kahn | Foreign Affairs

Good news for Afghanistan?

It's been a bad year for Afghanistan. Insurgents are gaining ground and killing more coalition soldiers, Afghan officials and civilians than at any time since the fall of the Taliban government. Reconstruction is faltering. A disenchanted population appears to be pulling back the welcome mat for foreign forces.

But a recent turn of events could have a significant positive impact on Afghanistan’s future.

Judges can put people in jail; it's not clear how they can create legitimate business opportunities for most Afghans.

Order in the Courts

More than half a million people in Canada hold two or more passports, according to the 2001 census. More than half of them are European, with dual British Canadians alone accounting for 90,000. Canadian citizens, whether dual or not, are abroad in large numbers with 250,000 living in Hong Kong, while close to a million reside in the U.S.

What if they all needed to get out in a hurry?

O Canada, do we stand on guard for thee?

What is the significance of Aug. 22? This year, Aug. 22 corresponds, in the Islamic calendar, to the 27th day of the month of Rajab of the year 1427. This, by tradition, is the night when many Muslims commemorate the night flight of the prophet Muhammad on the winged horse Buraq, first to "the farthest mosque," usually identified with Jerusalem, and then to heaven and back (c.f., Koran XVII.1). This might well be deemed an appropriate date for the apocalyptic ending of Israel and if necessary of the world. It is far from certain that Mr. Ahmadinejad plans any such cataclysmic events precisely for Aug. 22. But it would be wise to bear the possibility in mind.

A passage from the Ayatollah Khomeini, quoted in an 11th-grade Iranian schoolbook, is revealing. "I am decisively announcing to the whole world that if the world-devourers [i.e., the infidel powers] wish to stand against our religion, we will stand against their whole world and will not cease until the annihilation of all them. Either we all become free, or we will go to the greater freedom which is martyrdom. Either we shake one another's hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours."

In this context, mutual assured destruction, the deterrent that worked so well during the Cold War, would have no meaning. At the end of time, there will be general destruction anyway. What will matter will be the final destination of the dead--hell for the infidels, and heaven for the believers. For people with this mindset, MAD is not a constraint; it is an inducement.

How then can one confront such an enemy, with such a view of life and death? Some immediate precautions are obviously possible and necessary. In the long term, it would seem that the best, perhaps the only hope is to appeal to those Muslims, Iranians, Arabs and others who do not share these apocalyptic perceptions and aspirations, and feel as much threatened, indeed even more threatened, than we are. There must be many such, probably even a majority in the lands of Islam. Now is the time for them to save their countries, their societies and their religion from the madness of MAD.

Does Iran have something in store? | Bernard Lewis

Hezbollah wants an Islamic world and believes such a world to be worth killing and dying for. Recently, that way of organizing society has crept into another corner of the globe. After a 29-year separatist struggle, the Indonesian province of Aceh won the right to adopt Shariah criminal law, becoming the first region of that country (a theoretically secular state) with that privilege. The radicals have beaten the moderates, and now the moderates face a dreadful future.

What Hezbollah wants