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Ten years have passed since the lauching of "Operation Peace for Galilee," otherwise known as the Lebanon War, and residents of the North once again live in nervous anticipation of Katyusha rocket attacks from across the border. The problems of maintaining "routine security,"
as it's officially termed, haven't eased as dramatically as the late Menachem Begin hoped when he gave the order for the troops to move on June 6, 1982.
Some 30,000 Syrian troops are still in Lebanon. The main PLO military force was uprooted, together with the organization's political headquarters. But sundry Palestinian groups, including Yasir Arafat's Fatah, are still capable of sending raiding parties to the Israeli border to try to attack communities on the other side, and can still launch longrange artillery attacks on Israel. Daytoday military activity against the Israeli security zone in southern Lebanon is carried out by the Iranianbacke d Hizballah, a Lebanese Shi'ite organization that is no less daring than the Palestinians. In May, it attacked a position of Israel's proxy, the South Lebanese Army, inside the security zone and shelled the territory for days.
All the prewar elements are still there, but the IsraeliPalestinian faceoff gave way to an IsraeliShi'ite confrontation. As a result, there's military friction between Israel and Iranian Revolutionary Guards stationed in Baalbek, in the Biqa valley, under the command of Brigadier General Ahmad Askari. In late May, the Israel Air Force twice attacked the Nabisheet base in the Biqa, where Iranian instructors were training Hizballah fighters.
The declared goal of the 1982 war - eliminating the threat of bombardment and raids on the Galilee - wasn't attained. A second, undeclared goal was to win the war against the PLO in the territories by a flanking movement against the organization's power base in Lebanon.
That failed too; the effort ultimately helped spark the Intifada, for Palestinians in the territories concluded they had no one to rely on but themselves.
And there was a third goal: forging a "new order" in the Middle East through an Israeli alliance with a new regime in Beirut, to be set up by the Maronite Christian Phalange Party and its Lebanese Forces militia.
The idea was to create peace in Lebanon by dealing with supposed friends there,...