Israel and Hezbollah Fight a 34-Day War Across Lebanon, Iraq Descends into Sectarian Civil War and Darfur’s Genocide Continues Without Effective International Response

Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review | Published 3 October 2006 | Reporting Period: 3 July – 2 October 2006

Quarterly Briefing

• Hezbollah guerrillas cross the Israeli border on July 12, kill three soldiers and capture two; Israel responds with a campaign of air strikes across Lebanon and a ground invasion; the 34-day war kills approximately 1,200 Lebanese, the majority civilians, and 158 Israelis; a ceasefire brokered by the UN and accepted by both sides takes effect on August 14; UN Resolution 1701 deploys an expanded UNIFIL force; the war’s outcome is disputed but Hezbollah claims a strategic victory for having survived intact.
• Iraq’s sectarian conflict deepens following the February bombing of the Shia al-Askari mosque in Samarra; the summer months record some of the highest monthly civilian death tolls of the occupation, with Baghdad experiencing mass sectarian killings, execution-style murders and car bomb attacks; the Iraqi government and US military are unable to restore order; the conflict meets most definitions of civil war.
• Darfur’s humanitarian crisis, now in its fourth year, has killed an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 people and displaced 2.5 million; a peace agreement signed in Abuja in May between the Sudanese government and one rebel faction has not been accepted by others; the African Union peacekeeping force lacks both mandate and resources; the UN Security Council’s calls to deploy a UN force are rejected by Sudan and blocked by Chinese and Russian vetoes.
• Hurricane season 2006 has been substantially quieter than 2005’s record-setting year, which produced Katrina, Rita and Wilma; as of our publication date the season has produced no major Caribbean landfall storms, offering the region a welcome respite after back-to-back devastating years.
• The United States’ military presence in Iraq stands at approximately 130,000 troops; the US death toll has passed 2,700; Iraqi security forces are being trained but are infiltrated by sectarian militias; private estimates within the US military and intelligence community suggest the situation is considerably worse than public statements acknowledge.
• Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez delivers a barnstorming address to the UN General Assembly on September 20, calling President Bush “the devil” from the podium the day after Bush’s address; the speech receives a standing ovation from a significant portion of the assembled delegates; it illustrates the deep global resentment of US unilateralism that the Iraq War has generated.

Prologue: Lebanon and the Middle East’s New Wars

The Israel-Hezbollah war of summer 2006 represented a new model of Middle Eastern conflict: not a state-versus-state war, but an asymmetric struggle between a sophisticated modern military and a non-state armed group so deeply embedded in a civilian population that distinguishing between combatants and civilians became, at times, impossible. Israel’s air campaign destroyed Lebanese civilian infrastructure — airports, bridges, power stations, apartment blocks — on the theory that it would turn the Lebanese population against Hezbollah; the theory proved incorrect. Hezbollah fired thousands of Katyusha rockets into northern Israel, demonstrating that a non-state actor could hold an advanced state’s civilian population at risk indefinitely. The ceasefire left Hezbollah in place, armed and claiming moral victory. For the Caribbean, the war mattered both as a humanitarian catastrophe and as a further demonstration that Middle Eastern instability would continue to drive oil price volatility with direct consequences for the region’s energy-dependent economies.

Iraq’s Civil War and its Caribbean Consequences

Iraq’s transformation from an occupation into a civil war had been forecast by the February 2006 Samarra mosque bombing and confirmed by the months that followed. The daily death toll from sectarian violence in Baghdad — bodies found with hands bound and execution shots to the head, car bombs in markets, suicide vests in mosques — was exceeding 100 civilians per day by mid-2006. The Iraqi national police, infiltrated by Shia militias, were in many cases perpetrating the violence they were nominally tasked to prevent. American forces were unable to stop a conflict whose parties — Sunni insurgents, al-Qaeda in Iraq, the Mahdi Army, the Badr Organisation — were pursuing objectives that military force could not resolve.

For Caribbean economies dependent on global oil prices, Iraq’s continued instability contributed to the supply anxiety premium that was keeping oil above $70 per barrel. Venezuela’s Chávez, whose Petrocaribe scheme supplied oil to Jamaica and other Caribbean states on concessional terms, derived his political and economic leverage from those same oil prices. The Middle East’s disorder was, indirectly, Venezuela’s opportunity and the Caribbean’s partial financial cushion.

Chávez, Venezuela and Caribbean Energy Politics

Chávez’s UN General Assembly speech crystallised the role he had carved out for himself as the most vocal critic of American foreign policy in the Western Hemisphere. His description of Bush as “the devil” — with the theatrical touch of sniffing the podium for sulphur the following day — was theatre, but effective theatre: it summarised, in a phrase that would be quoted globally, the sentiment of hundreds of millions of people for whom the Iraq War represented American arrogance and impunity. For Caribbean governments that received Venezuelan assistance through Petrocaribe, the ALBA alliance and Cuban-Venezuelan medical cooperation programmes, Chávez’s activism created a complex diplomatic challenge: benefiting from his generosity while managing the diplomatic costs of being associated with his confrontational foreign policy.

Looking Ahead

North Korea’s threat to conduct a nuclear test — announced in public statements over the past weeks — hangs over the coming quarter; if the test proceeds, it will fundamentally alter the security calculus in Northeast Asia and deliver a severe blow to the non-proliferation regime. Lebanon’s reconstruction will require years and international funding that has been pledged but is slow to materialise; Hezbollah’s political and military position within the Lebanese state is stronger than before the war. Iraq’s November prospects are bleak; the US midterm elections, in which Democrats are widely expected to make significant gains, may produce a change of Congressional mood on the war that forces the Bush administration to reconsider its strategy. And Darfur continues to die while the world’s major powers debate mandates.

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Jamaica Homes Global Conflict & Caribbean Impact Review is published quarterly, examining how wars, geopolitical tensions and major international crises have shaped Jamaica, the Caribbean and their economies.

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