Letting sleeping dogs lie

Matthew Yglesias writes that Hizbullah's actions in Lebanon over the past few days demonstrate that it is primarily focused on gaining power within Lebanon, rather than attacking Israel or the West. Of course, such sentiments trigger a flood of "Are you kidding me?????" sentiment, based on Hizbullah's repeated declarations about how much it hates teh Jewz.

But Yglesias is completely correct in his assessment, and here's why: if Hizbullah really were interested in attacking Israel, it would never begin by taking over the government of Lebanon. Israel, for all of its faults (of which it has many), is a very, very powerful military force, one that has proven itself capable of defending itself against, oh, the entire Arab world (cf. the Six-Day War). The IDF is extremely well-equipped, possessing state-of-the-art weaponry on land and in the skies, along with the world's only operational anti-ballistic missile system. On top of that, the Shin Bet (Israel's internal security service) and the Mossad (foreign intelligence) are among the most feared and respected such organizations in the world.

The thing is, though, that Israel has shown itself to have the same problem as America: it's good at conventional warfare, but bad at fighting asymmetrical wars. So, if you were Hizbullah and intended to put yourself in the best position to strike at Israel, why in God's name would you start by taking over the Lebanese government? All that that would do is expose you to being targeted by the IDF! Remember what happened to America in Iraq: we were great at taking down Saddam's regime, but terrible at rooting out the insurgency afterwards. Governments are easy to attack, seeing as how they tend to have very obvious and vulnerable institutions (such as Parliament buildings, courts, and other such things). They have to be visible to their people, and in doing so they make themselves visible to the enemy.

What Israel learned in 2006 was that all Olmert's horses and all Olmert's men couldn't root out a determined, battle-tested, and (most importantly) agile insurgent group. If Hizbullah were to succeed in carrying out a coup d'etat in Lebanon, it would sacrifice a critical piece of that agility. I don't mean to imply that Hizbullah would necessarily be destroyed by Israel if it tried to launch an attack after establishing itself as the ruling party in Lebanon: its bases of support in the countryside are likely too strong, and Israel may prove to be more wary now than it was back in 2006. But Hizbullah would certainly be inviting a serious body blow, and courting disaster is not something that any successful resistance organization wants to do. Hizbullah may want power in Lebanon. It may want to attack Israel. But I seriously doubt that it wants to do them in that order.