‘We will have to fight them again’

Edward Stourton has had unrivalled access to the protagonists in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. Here, on the eve of the Winograd Commission’s report, he reveals what really happened in this conflict that nobody won

Hogarth’s ‘Fourth Stage of Cruelty’ is a compelling evocation of what it must have been like to attend a public human dissection. Three medical men are busily dismembering a corpse on a wooden table; a group of their fellow surgeons, distinguished by their mortarboards, look on with suitably studious attention — although one of them has the hint of a prurient smirk playing about his lips. And the artist conveys his own revulsion at the scene with a piece of vivid foreground detail: there is a dog happily tucking into discarded human offal.

It is the best metaphor I can think of to explain the experience of the past months I have spent trying — through dozens of interviews — to strip back the layers of last summer’s crisis in Lebanon.