‘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. Like an early surgeon wondering at the machinery of the human body, I find myself admiring the wheels and gears of diplomacy at work. There is the same sense of intellectual excitement at identifying the evidence of morbidity in the system. And there is, inevitably, a measure of revulsion. Stories from the bodysnatching days tell of anatomists who suddenly realised that the body they were about to go to work on was that of a relative or friend; I cut my journalistic teeth in Lebanon 20 years ago, and I regard the place as a sort of friend.

Very few of those I spoke to tried to deny that an honest audit of the war produces a balance sheet covered in red — in terms of both human blood and political losses. The conflict began on 12 July last year, when Hezbollah launched a cross-border raid and captured two Israeli soldiers, and by the time the fighting ended almost exactly a month later some 1,200 people had been killed — the overwhelming majority of them civilians.