Gwynne Dyer: Olmert's fall best hope

Can good come from evil? Is it possible that out of the carnage in Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and northern Israel could come a sober recognition on all sides that victory is impossible and that compromise is necessary? It would be nice.

It's clear by now how this outbreak of organised destruction is going to end. Israel has already had almost two weeks to pound Hizbollah into smithereens from the air, and it hasn't accomplished even 10 per cent of the task.

Hundreds of innocent Lebanese civilians have died, together with many Lebanese Army soldiers who were asleep in their barracks - the very soldiers Israel says it wants to replace Hizbollah's militia in the border areas.

But few of Hizbollah's fighters have been killed and its rockets continue to rain on northern Israeli cities.

For two weeks, President George W. Bush and his faithful British sidekick, Prime Minister Tony Blair, have staved off demands from practically everywhere else for a ceasefire. And they can probably manage to stall the issue for at least another week.

Israel's only option, in that remaining week, is to commit its soldiers to a full ground invasion of southern Lebanon - which would send Israeli casualties soaring.

By restricting itself to air attacks and keeping its own soldiers out of combat - except for brief "pinprick" incursions across the frontier - Israel has maintained the illusion of the traditional 10-to-one kill ratio familiar from earlier Arab-Israeli wars.

But almost all the Arab dead are civilians. In terms of combatants, Israel is probably not achieving much better than a two-to-one ratio.

Hizbollah has between 2000 and 5000 well-trained fighters dug into the bunkers of southern Lebanon and they cannot be eliminated by air strikes. The daily number of rockets landing on northern Israeli towns and cities has scarcely diminished since the start of the fighting.

If Israel commits its ground troops to dig those fighters out of their fortifications, its fatalities could soar into the high hundreds. And it is not certain that Israel's American and British backers can hold off a ceasefire long enough to let it accomplish that goal, even if it is willing to take the casualties of a ground invasion.

It wouldn't make much long-term difference even if Israel did win the ground battle, for the only way to make southern Lebanon Hizbollah-free is to depopulate the region permanently. Almost every Shiite family in the south has Hizbollah members or sympathisers, which is hardly surprising after 18 years of harsh Israeli military occupation from 1982 to 2000.

So, one way or another, Israel will fail to achieve its war aims - but this could be a good thing, for it will bring the fall of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's Government and his project, inherited from the stricken Ariel Sharon, to impose a "final peace settlement" on the Palestinians that incorporates East Jerusalem and large chunks of the West Bank into Israel.

In reality, that "settlement" would deliver neither finality nor peace, and the fact that this whole project may well be discredited in the eyes of the Israeli electorate with Olmert's Government is cause for at least modest rejoicing.

Hizbollah isn't going to win either, but it can succeed without winning.

Its leader, Sheikh Nasrallah, may not have foreseen the scale and ferocity of Israeli strikes against Lebanon when he ordered the attack that killed three Israeli soldiers and made two others prisoners - he may just have been seeking hostages for a prisoner exchange - but Hizbollah only has to survive in order to triumph. And it is almost certain to triumph, since Israel cannot destroy it. That won't help the cause of peace, but it may not doom it either.

Within a week or so, when Washington and London realise that the Israelis cannot achieve their purposes, they will allow a ceasefire so Olmert can save face, and it probably will not leave any Israeli troops inside the Lebanese frontier.

Olmert's Government will probably fall within months anyway, and the whole project of unilaterally imposing unjust borders on the Palestinians that has dominated Israeli politics for the past five years may vanish with it.

That will leave, quite unexpectedly, a clean slate for the next Israeli government to write on.

Israel will carry out prisoner exchanges with Hizbollah and with the Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip - the German intelligence service that brokers these exchanges has already been contacted by Olmert's Government.

A wise and bold new Israeli leader, if such a paragon exists, will have a few months to try to change the dynamic and get back to the negotiated two-state solution that is the only hope for lasting peace in the region.

Is this really likely to happen? Israeli politics has few candidates for the role of a mould-breaker who is willing to talk to Hamas and abandon Israel's territorial ambitions, and the window of opportunity will not stay open long.

By this time next year, a calamitous civil war in Iraq is likely to distract everybody's attention away from the tedious old Palestinian-Israeli confrontation, which would then be allowed to subside back into its sulky, vicious normality.

But Olmert's stupidity has at least created this unexpected opportunity. Wouldn't it be nice if they actually used it?

* Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist.