Free The Fourth Star by Greg Jaffe Page B

incursion into Lebanon. The study focused on the technology and tactics the Israelis had used during their lightning push to Beirut, but it ignored the bloody and largely unsuccessful occupation of the country. The oversight wasn’t surprising; ever since Vietnam, the Army had decided it could simply choose not to fight messy guerrilla wars. It instead planned on using overwhelming firepower and superior technology to defeat foes in short, sharp battles. The study was completed just before Abizaid headed out for Lebanon, where an entirely different kind of war was being waged.
    He and the four dozen or so other United Nations observers—Argentines, Canadians, Swedes, and fellow Americans—lived and patrolled unarmed out of a main base in the small city of Naqoura and from a half-dozensmaller cinder-block outposts perched along winding roads and barren hills.
    Though the UN was officially neutral, Abizaid’s time in the country summoned up a stew of conflicting emotions. More than once, he found himself watching from a distance as Shiite fighters set up launchers to fire Katyusha rockets into northern Israel, where his wife and children were living. He was appalled by the brutality of the Israelis’ allies, often hearing screams of tortured prisoners emanating from an old French fort used by the South Lebanon Army as an interrogation center. But he also came to understand the debilitating effect a long and unsuccessful occupation has on an army, even one as disciplined as the Israel Defense Forces. “War in southern Lebanon is difficult to imagine by common standards of reference,” he wrote in a report after completing his tour. “It was neither guerrilla war of the Vietnam style nor was it the urban battle of Beirut. It was low-intensity conflict where UN sources routinely recorded over 100 violent incidents per month, ranging from ambushes to kidnappings to suicide car bombs.”
    After one ambush, the Israelis and their allies emptied a Shiite village of its 2,000 residents at gunpoint. As Abizaid and his fellow observers watched from a nearby hill, the soldiers set fire to the town. UN observers couldn’t intervene to stop the destruction. Abizaid consoled himself with the thought that the forced evacuation might have degenerated into a massacre if he and his fellow observers hadn’t been there.
    Since Abizaid was one of the few UN soldiers who spoke fluent Arabic, he was made the observer force’s director of operations, overseeing the outposts and patrols. He and the unit’s commander, an American lieutenant colonel, regularly loaded their jeep with cartons of cigarettes to bribe the locals, removed the American flags from their uniforms, and ventured out into the Lebanese countryside. It was a rugged area with deep wadis and small villages inhabited mostly by poor farmers. Shopkeepers and mosques peddled martyr videotapes and posters, lionizing local suicide bombers who had killed Israelis. “There was no shortage of willing martyrs,” Abizaid later wrote. “The martyrs who volunteered to undertake the attacks became instant celebrities, invariably leaving behind a videotape describing why they felt it necessary to sacrifice themselves. As onemight imagine, these videos were given prominent display on the various militia-controlled television stations.”
    Town elders would scream at the UN officers that the Israelis and their Christian allies were killing civilians and preventing basic necessities from reaching their villages. The central government in Beirut was absent in southern Lebanon, and with the PLO also gone, Hezbollah and other Shiite militias filled the void, sweeping streets, fixing homes, and ferrying the elderly to medical appointments. With help from Tehran and Damascus, the militias learned how to meld violence, propaganda, and social aid programs to bring supporters to their side.
    Five years earlier, Abizaid had watched as the Iranian revolution had energized his fellow students at the