Center for a New American Security

In September 1997, Hezbollah fighters ambushed a 16-strong unit of elite Israeli naval commandos near the coastal village of Ansarieh, midway between Sidon and Tyre. Eleven members of the squad were killed in the ambush and another died in the rescue attempt. The ambush is cited by Hezbollah as one of its top three most successful military operations between 1982 and 2000.

Shortly after the last Israeli helicopter clattered into the distance, Hezbollah fighters and local villagers were picking up the bloody remains of Israeli soldiers killed by Hezbollah’s roadside bombs. The remains included part of the head and other body parts of Sergeant Itamar Ilya, who was blown to pieces when a bomb he was carrying detonated in the fire fight.

Negotiations brokered by German and then French intelligence resulted in a swap 10 months later in which Ilya was exchanged for 60 Lebanese detainees and the corpses of 40 resistance fighters. The sergeant’s remains were handed to the International Committee for the Red Cross in a simple cold box.

But by the time the Israeli military transport plane touched down in Tel Aviv, Ilya’s remains had been transferred to a coffin draped in the Star of David flag. His coffin was carried solemnly off the plane by Israeli soldiers and was buried. The story could have ended there. But Hezbollah had another trick up its sleeve.

Using the internet, Hezbollah began posing questions on its website addressed to the Israeli public. The first queried the findings of the two Israeli inquiries into the Ansarieh debacle, which found that there had been no intelligence breach by Hezbollah. Hezbollah’s teasing questions on its website about how it could have known the Israeli commandos were coming led to public pressure on the Israeli government to convene a third commission of inquiry.

Then Hezbollah posed questions about the body parts it had returned to Israel. Hezbollah always said that the remains included body parts from two other soldiers apart from Ilya, adding it had DNA evidence. But the Israelis had kept it quiet, creating the impression to the Israeli public that the only missing soldier from Ansarieh was Ilya and that the other 11 soldiers had been buried intact.

Hezbollah posted photographs of the body parts which included five feet. “How can one man have five feet?” taunted the website. “Your army is concealing the facts. They not only disrespect your sons when they are alive by sending them to certain death, they also disrespect them after they are dead. The bodies of your sons are incomplete and mixed up with pieces of others,” the Hezbollah website said.

The propaganda ploy sparked an uproar in Israel, as a deeply embarrassed Israeli army was forced to admit that it had opened up the graves of two soldiers killed at Ansarieh to add the new body parts.

Suddenly, families of the dead soldiers were demanding autopsies and DNA tests to check that the remains in the graves were really their relatives and not a mish-mash of separate bodies.

The Ansarieh episode was a prime example of Hezbollah’s ability to blend battlefield prowess with skilful propaganda, and underlined to Israel more than any other incident that its days occupying south Lebanon were numbered.

“DUMB and Dumber”, one of the modern classics of American comedy, tells the story of an affable idiot, Lloyd Christmas, who falls in love with a classy beauty, Mary Swanson. In one scene he asks her the chances of “a guy like you and a girl like me” ending up together. The answer is “Not good”. “Not good like one out of a hundred?” asks Lloyd. “More like one out of a million,” Mary replies. Lloyd pauses for a moment, then shoots back, “So you're telling me there's a chance?”

Anthony Cordesman, a military specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who regularly visits Iraq, put it this way: “You have to grade all the candidates between a D-minus and an F-plus. The Republicans are talking about this as if we have won and as if Iraq is the center of the war on terrorism, rather than Afghanistan and Pakistan and a host of movements in 50 other countries.

“The Democrats talk about this as if the only problem is to withdraw and the difference is over how quickly to do it.”

When the surge began last summer, there was lots of talk about the Washington clock and the Baghdad clock. We don't hear much about either anymore, but rest assured both are still ticking. And of the many paradoxes of modern counter-insurgency, the competing timelines of each civilian population remains the hardest to resolve:

But counterinsurgency is inherently a long-term proposition, and that assumption has driven much of the military thinking about the future, even as it heightens the political debate at home.

“Unless you are suppressing insurgents the way the Romans did — creating a desert and calling it peace — it typically can take the better part of a decade or more,” said Andrew Krepinevich, a military expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.

“The paradox,” he added, “is that counterinsurgency requires convincing the Iraqis of our staying power. At the same time, the American people view success in terms of how quickly we can pull out.”

This paradox is at the heart of our strategy in the Long War, and suggests to Charlie that the only real viable option is something resembling a small footprint, indirect approach. But either way, serious effort is going to be required both to prepare the US military for future conflicts and to condition the American public for them. These aren't (all) wars of choice. The military and the public are both going to have to get used to fighting them; and the politicians are going to have to learn how to campaign about them. It's called leadership. Let's hope someone in the 2008 campaign looks into it.

The disgraced diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli could never have dreamt that the short treatise on statecraft he wrote in 1513 would have such a long, notorious afterlife.

Having fallen from favour when the Medici returned to power in Florence the previous year, he wished to curry favour with the new ruler, Lorenzo de' Medici. He was singularly unsuccessful. It is hard to see how it could have been otherwise: few rulers could have tolerated an adviser so clear-eyed.

The Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responded by sending four small boats toward us at high speed, the largest being a fast Swedish-built Boghammer, which resembles a cigarette boat, outfitted with a twin-barrel machine gun on its bow. With rooster-tails of white water, the boats came barreling over to the Iraqi side of the Shatt al Arab, surrounded us, and took the tarp off of at least one multiple-rocket launcher and pointed it directly at our lead boat.

Our captain tried to defuse the situation by telling the Iranians over the normal commercial radio channel that we were simply exercising our right to navigate Iraqi waters, had no intention of entering Iranian territory and did not seek a confrontation. The Iranians responded by a string of obscenities in heavily accented, broken English. After several tense minutes, we were ordered by our superiors to withdraw; the Iranian boats followed us a considerable distance before breaking off and heading back to their side of the waterway.

Retired U.S. Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, was paid $100,000 to endorse a veterans charity that watchdog groups say is ripping off donors and wounded veterans by using only a small portion of the money raised for veterans services, according to testimony in Congress today.

Gen. Franks' involvement was revealed as members of Congress questioned Roger Chapin, who operates Help Hospitalized Veterans and the Coalition to Salute America's Heroes Foundation, charities that congressional investigators say spend only 25 percent of the money they raise on projects for wounded veterans.

The charities were graded "F" by the American Institute of Philanthropy because so little of the money is used for actual charity projects or services.

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The Palestinians have been used once again by sectarian interests, and they have suffered the most. The situation will not change, says Rougier, unless refugees are allowed to work in Lebanese society and able to live under new and different influences rather than socialized only by religious clerics. He believes, though, that nothing should be done to naturalize them, because it could upset the Lebanese balance of power and leave Palestinian refugees, once again, caught in Lebanon’s inner contradictions. (Such naturalization would also dissolve negotiations about the right of return.) “So what needs to be done is to distinguish between the issues, between what is social (the right to work), what is political (and should be discussed at the regional level), and what is linked to the legal situation of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon,” says Rougier. “In order to do that, Lebanese parties would have to stop frightening the Lebanese society about the risk of tawtin.”

Until that happens, Palestinians and all of Lebanon are at great risk. As Iraq becomes a less hospitable place for jihadists and foreign fighters, and as there are fewer American targets to go after, these veterans, experienced at fighting the most advanced army in the world, will look for new battles. Andrew Exum, a former U.S. army officer who led a platoon of light infantry in Afghanistan in 2002 and Army Rangers in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been studying militant Islamist groups. “The fighting in Nahr al Barid is, unfortunately, just the first round in what I fear will be a series of battles fought in the aftermath of the Iraq War,” he says. “On Internet chat rooms, we’re seeing militants turn away volunteers to go fight in Iraq and promising the next fight will be in Lebanon and the Gulf. Lebanon, especially, is a magnet for Sunni extremists,” he says. “You not only have a haven for these groups in the Palestinian camps, with security services from rival Arab states competing for their loyalty and attention, you also have two tempting targets: both the pro-Western ruling coalition in Beirut, as well as the opposition, led by a powerful block of Shia parties. How can we not expect these Sunni militants, who have spent the past four years waging war on the Shia of Iraq, to try and carry that fight on to the large, politically active Shia population in Lebanon? Or on to the pro-Western regime that precariously hangs onto power?”