No Victors

So the Winograd Commission has released its final report. The big news in Israel is that Ehud Olmert will probably survive. For Lebanon, it does not really matter. Other than schaudenfreude, it's not likely that Lebanon would get anything out of a different Israeli Prime Minister, than out of Olmert. The real effects of the war -- loss of life, destruction of Lebanese economic and civilian infrastructure, billions of dollars in damages and lost profits, the strengthening of Hizbullah -- were evident over a year ago. Nobody needed a report to tell them.

Meanwhile, Hizbullah took the opportunity to declare victory. It makes you wonder about how they see the world. They don't care about the economic destruction, about the possibility of perpetual war in the region -- how, after all, would Hizbullah be able to justify their weapons without perpetual war? If Israel lost the war, they must have won. And there will not be any peace in the region before Hezbollah and its allies destroy Israel fully, or Israel destroys them fully. There are many in Israel who agree with them, too.

Iran took the occassion to brag that it had completed over 400 projects since the end of the war. Meanwhile, the government's response to reconstruction has been sluggish. Most of the Paris III funds remained tied up in bureaucratic red tape. I wonder how long it took Iran and Syria to get money in the hands of its proxies; I wonder how concerned they were with the "absorbative capacity" of Lebanese institutions. This is the political face of the economic destruction: power slipping from those who offered normalcy and prosperity, the undermining of democracy, and a destruction of national institutions that is nearing completion. And again, this was clear to anybody paying attention over a year ago.