Kurtzer questions Iran role in Israel-Lebanon conflict

Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. ambassador to Israel and Egypt, refuted the popular theory that Iran was involved in Hezbollah's actions against Israel earlier this year as "unpersuasive" in a lecture yesterday and repeated his call for the United States to withdraw troops from Iraq.

Kurtzer was in Israel when fighting broke out in July. He remained for much of the conflict's duration and met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in an effort to end the hostilities.

But Kurtzer spoke little about his personal experiences during the conflict, offering analysis instead.

He rebuffed the theory that Iran — in an attempt to distract the international community from its fledgling nuclear weapons program — orchestrated Hezbollah's incursion into Israeli territory. The incursion, during which two Israeli soldiers were kidnapped and several others killed, was "not an unusual activity" for Hezbollah to undertake, Kurtzer said.

"It was not [an action] that needed to be stimulated by an outside party ... and it would have done no good for Iran's case in the United Nations Security Council," he said. "It would have only hardened some European nations that were at the time sitting on the fence against Iran. [Attacking Israel] is just what Hezbollah does."

Kurtzer also addressed the question several foreign policy experts have mulled in the weeks after the conflict: Why did Israel respond so severely to the kidnappings?

He argued that the reaction was probably in part due to the national security inexperience of many Israeli officials. It was imperative that Israel show its "backbone to fight" as its enemies questioned its resiliency, he said.

"Unless there is a demonstrative response to attacks, power becomes latent," Kurtzer said.

Kurtzer said that, militarily speaking, he thought Israel came out better than Hezbollah on the post-conflict "scorecard": Hezbollah sustained greater casualties and their missile-strike capability was severely handicapped.

But politically, he said, Hezbollah scored some major victories.

"[Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah was able to continue to mobilize support from within Lebanon and from an Arab world that was initially very divided about supporting Hezbollah," he said. "By the end, opposition from these corners was muted."

Despite the Israeli government's statement to the contrary, Kurtzer speculated that there would soon be prisoner exchange negotiations between Israel and Hezbollah, an explicit goal of Hezbollah's incursion.

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Kurtzer closed on an optimistic note — "as all diplomats must," he said — arguing there are "a menu of possibilities" for solving the region's problems.

The options Kurtzer described included sticking with the 2002 "Road Map for Peace" or convening a new multilateral conference similar to the Madrid Conference of 1991.

Kurtzer did briefly tackle the foreign policy issue perhaps weighing most heavily on Americans' minds these days: the war in Iraq.

The war is "bleeding us in terms of lives and national resources," Kurtzer said, and advocated that the United States withdraw its troops, as he did in a recent op-ed in The Daily Princetonian.

"Pursuing every other conceivable option for continuing in ways that may bring success only holds out the prospect of more bleeding."

The event was sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson School, where Kurtzer is the first S. Daniel Abraham visiting professor in Middle East Policy Studies.