Word: battlefield
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...actually being won, while Hizballah's survival as a fighting force and its ability to exact a price from Israel has boosted its standing not only in Lebanon, but throughout the Arab world. Indeed, if international demands for a truce are heeded on the basis of the present battlefield reality, the outcome would look more like a hard-fought tie than a decisive victory for Israel. And that would be bad news both for the domestic political prospects of the current Israeli government and for the Bush administration's "new Middle East" agenda...
...that reason, the U.S. and Israel need to transform both the reality on the battlefield and the view of the outcome before any kind of truce takes effect. Israeli commando forces staged a raid in Baalbek, deep inside Hizballah's heartland, overnight Wednesday, capturing five of the organization's fighters in an operation that may have been designed to boost Israel's morale by recalling the bold audacity of raids deep inside enemy territory on which Israelis' confidence in their military is founded - from the lightning preemptive air strikes of June 1967, to the 1976 commando raid that rescued more...
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is confident that both a cease-fire and a lasting settlement that prevents a resumption of fighting in Lebanon can be achieved this week. But events on the battlefield may be diminishing Washington's ability to shape the terms of the truce that will emerge - whether this week or at some point in the future...
...Despite the civilian toll, Israel has not yet achieved the battlefield objectives sought by the Bush Administration: After two weeks of bombardment, Hizballah has lost neither its ability nor its will to fight on. It continues to rain down rockets on Israel, and the tenacity of its guerrilla fighters in engagement with elite Israeli infantry units has made clear that neutralizing it as a fighting force in southern Lebanon would require the sort of massive ground invasion that Israel wants to avoid, because bitter experience has taught it that getting out is infinitely more difficult than going...
...defined victory as simply surviving the Israeli onslaught. Israel and the U.S., by contrast, have defined victory as the elimination of Hizballah's capacity to inflict harm, and it will press for a truce that achieves that goal. Still, the limits of what has been achieved on the battlefield may now begin to set limits on what the U.S. and Israel are able to achieve via diplomacy...