In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [77]
So with Washington defying Damascus and Tehran and vice versa, the conflict dragged on for weeks. As the United States and France argued over ceasefire texts in the Security Council, Syrians (and later Lebanese) said to me over and over again that Washington was simply giving Israel more time to finish the job, at the expense of more Lebanese civilian lives.
Those specialists of “positive pressure,” the Europeans, then stepped in to give diplomacy a chance. On August 3, 2006, Spanish foreign minister Miguel Ángel Moratinos arrived in Damascus for talks with Assad. His arrival seemed promising, as his last trip to Damascus on February 14, 2005—the day of Hariri’s murder—marked the last time a European official had set foot in Syria. Moratinos told reporters after the meeting that Assad was willing to use his influence to rein in Hezbollah—a statement that was quickly denied by the state news agency. European newspapers reported that certain EU countries—led by Germany, the primary supporter of Syrian reform—were preparing a package of incentives for Syria to cut off arms supplies to Hezbollah. Among these “carrots” was reportedly a German-led effort to push the member countries of the European Union to sign its long-delayed “association agreement” with Syria. Once ratified, the agreement would lock Syria into a schedule of reform steps aimed at liberalizing trade, promoting investment, and bolstering respect for human rights.
Finally, on August 11—one month to the day after the conflict began—the Security Council passed Resolution 1701, which called for a ceasefire and the deployment of an international force in south Lebanon. The ceasefire, to which Hezbollah and Israel consented, was to take effect forty-eight hours from the resolution’s passage.
In a clumsy attempt at a public relations coup de grâce, Israel quickly launched its “largest airborne operation since the 1973 war” throughout south Lebanon. They were hoping to capture what would be the war’s great surprise: Hezbollah’s extensive network of tunnels and concrete-reinforced bunkers—some only one hundred meters from the Israeli frontier—from where daily rocket barrages were launched during the conflict. Their construction in hard limestone had gone completely undetected by Israel, the UNIFIL force (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) in southern Lebanon, and the Lebanese government. One UN commander told a friend that Hezbollah “must have been bringing the cement in by the spoonful.”
Eager to talk with Lebanese about the war, I passed through the only crossing point from Syria to Lebanon that had not been destroyed by Israeli bombing the minute the ceasefire took effect on the morning of August 14. The usual two-hour journey from Damascus to Beirut took a little more than six due to Israeli strikes on roads and bridges. When I arrived, I quickly rented a car and went for a drive around Beirut, including the Hezbollah headquarters in the southern neighborhood of Haret Hreik.
Israel’s “precision bombing” was impressive, as Israelis were able to destroy a sole building with very little if any damage to adjacent structures. Their intelligence information on targets seemed to have been less successful, however: nearly one thousand Lebanese civilians died from Israeli strikes during the war. In the south, Israel used so many cluster bombs that unexploded ordnance has since claimed the lives of almost fifty children and wounded more than one hundred.
Hezbollah hung huge banners off buildings in the southern suburbs to make their point. One banner hanging in Haret Harek read extremely accurate targets and was adorned with a photo of a bandaged child missing a limb. It was footnoted by the slogan “The Divine Victory.”
That afternoon, The New Yorker magazine posted an article on its website by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, which stated that Washington had indeed