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Watching Lebanon
By Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker
21 August 2006 Issue
In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th,
to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale
war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. "It's a moment
of clarification," President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in
St. Petersburg, on July 16th. "It's now become clear why we don't
have peace in the Middle East." He described the relationship between
Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the "root causes
of instability," and subsequently said that it was up to those countries
to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for
the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until "the
conditions are conducive."
The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel's
retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced,
current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful
Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah's heavily fortified
underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease
Israel's security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential
American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran's nuclear installations,
some of which are also buried deep underground.
Israeli military and intelligence experts I spoke to emphasized that the country's
immediate security issues were reason enough to confront Hezbollah, regardless
of what the Bush Administration wanted. Shabtai Shavit, a national-security
adviser to the Knesset who headed the Mossad, Israel's foreign-intelligence
service, from 1989 to 1996, told me, "We do what we think is best for
us, and if it happens to meet America's requirements, that's just
part of a relationship between two friends. Hezbollah is armed to the teeth
and trained in the most advanced technology of guerrilla warfare. It was just
a matter of time. We had to address it."
Hezbollah is seen by Israelis as a profound threat - a terrorist organization,
operating on their border, with a military arsenal that, with help from Iran
and Syria, has grown stronger since the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon
ended, in 2000. Hezbollah's leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, has said
he does not believe that Israel is a "legal state." Israeli intelligence
estimated at the outset of the air war that Hezbollah had roughly five hundred
medium-range Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets and a few dozen long-range Zelzal rockets;
the Zelzals, with a range of about two hundred kilometres, could reach Tel Aviv.
(One rocket hit Haifa the day after the kidnappings.) It also has more than
twelve thousand shorter-range rockets. Since the conflict began, more than three
thousand of these have been fired at Israel.
According to a Middle East expert with knowledge of the current thinking of
both the Israeli and the U.S. governments, Israel had devised a plan for attacking
Hezbollah - and shared it with Bush Administration officials - well
before the July 12th kidnappings. "It's not that the Israelis had
a trap that Hezbollah walked into," he said, "but there was a strong
feeling in the White House that sooner or later the Israelis were going to do
it."
The Middle East expert said that the Administration had several reasons for
supporting the Israeli bombing campaign. Within the State Department, it was
seen as a way to strengthen the Lebanese government so that it could assert
its authority over the south of the country, much of which is controlled by
Hezbollah. He went on, "The White House was more focussed on stripping
Hezbollah of its missiles, because, if there was to be a military option against
Iran's nuclear facilities, it had to get rid of the weapons that Hezbollah
could use in a potential retaliation at Israel. Bush wanted both. Bush was going
after Iran, as part of the Axis of Evil, and its nuclear sites, and he was interested
in going after Hezbollah as part of his interest in democratization, with Lebanon
as one of the crown jewels of Middle East democracy."
Administration officials denied that they knew of Israel's plan for the
air war. The White House did not respond to a detailed list of questions. In
response to a separate request, a National Security Council spokesman said,
"Prior to Hezbollah's attack on Israel, the Israeli government gave
no official in Washington any reason to believe that Israel was planning to
attack. Even after the July 12th attack, we did not know what the Israeli plans
were." A Pentagon spokesman said, "The United States government
remains committed to a diplomatic solution to the problem of Iran's clandestine
nuclear weapons program," and denied the story, as did a State Department
spokesman.
The United States and Israel have shared intelligence and enjoyed close military
coöperation for decades, but early this spring, according to a former senior
intelligence official, high-level planners from the U.S. Air Force - under
pressure from the White House to develop a war plan for a decisive strike against
Iran's nuclear facilities - began consulting with their counterparts
in the Israeli Air Force.
"The big question for our Air Force was how to hit a series of hard targets
in Iran successfully," the former senior intelligence official said. "Who
is the closest ally of the U.S. Air Force in its planning? It's not Congo - it's
Israel. Everybody knows that Iranian engineers have been advising Hezbollah
on tunnels and underground gun emplacements. And so the Air Force went to the
Israelis with some new tactics and said to them, 'Let's concentrate
on the bombing and share what we have on Iran and what you have on Lebanon.'
" The discussions reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld, he said.
"The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,"
a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. "Why oppose
it? We'll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers
from the air. It would be a demo for Iran."
A Pentagon consultant said that the Bush White House "has been agitating
for some time to find a reason for a preëmptive blow against Hezbollah."
He added, "It was our intent to have Hezbollah diminished, and now we
have someone else doing it." (As this article went to press, the United
Nations Security Council passed a ceasefire resolution, although it was unclear
if it would change the situation on the ground.)
According to Richard Armitage, who served as Deputy Secretary of State in Bush's
first term - and who, in 2002, said that Hezbollah "may be the A team
of terrorists" - Israel's campaign in Lebanon, which has faced
unexpected difficulties and widespread criticism, may, in the end, serve as
a warning to the White House about Iran. "If the most dominant military
force in the region - the Israel Defense Forces - can't pacify
a country like Lebanon, with a population of four million, you should think
carefully about taking that template to Iran, with strategic depth and a population
of seventy million," Armitage said. "The only thing that the bombing
has achieved so far is to unite the population against the Israelis."
Several current and former officials involved in the Middle East told me that
Israel viewed the soldiers' kidnapping as the opportune moment to begin
its planned military campaign against Hezbollah. "Hezbollah, like clockwork,
was instigating something small every month or two," the U.S. government
consultant with ties to Israel said. Two weeks earlier, in late June, members
of Hamas, the Palestinian group, had tunnelled under the barrier separating
southern Gaza from Israel and captured an Israeli soldier. Hamas also had lobbed
a series of rockets at Israeli towns near the border with Gaza. In response,
Israel had initiated an extensive bombing campaign and reoccupied parts of Gaza.
The Pentagon consultant noted that there had also been cross-border incidents
involving Israel and Hezbollah, in both directions, for some time. "They've
been sniping at each other," he said. "Either side could have pointed
to some incident and said 'We have to go to war with these guys' - because
they were already at war."
David Siegel, the spokesman at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, said that
the Israeli Air Force had not been seeking a reason to attack Hezbollah. "We
did not plan the campaign. That decision was forced on us." There were
ongoing alerts that Hezbollah "was pressing to go on the attack,"
Siegel said. "Hezbollah attacks every two or three months," but
the kidnapping of the soldiers raised the stakes.
In interviews, several Israeli academics, journalists, and retired military
and intelligence officers all made one point: they believed that the Israeli
leadership, and not Washington, had decided that it would go to war with Hezbollah.
Opinion polls showed that a broad spectrum of Israelis supported that choice.
"The neocons in Washington may be happy, but Israel did not need to be
pushed, because Israel has been wanting to get rid of Hezbollah," Yossi
Melman, a journalist for the newspaper Ha'aretz, who has written several
books about the Israeli intelligence community, said. "By provoking Israel,
Hezbollah provided that opportunity."
"We were facing a dilemma," an Israeli official said. Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert "had to decide whether to go for a local response, which we
always do, or for a comprehensive response - to really take on Hezbollah
once and for all." Olmert made his decision, the official said, only after
a series of Israeli rescue efforts failed.
The U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel told me, however,
that, from Israel's perspective, the decision to take strong action had
become inevitable weeks earlier, after the Israeli Army's signals intelligence
group, known as Unit 8200, picked up bellicose intercepts in late spring and
early summer, involving Hamas, Hezbollah, and Khaled Meshal, the Hamas leader
now living in Damascus.
One intercept was of a meeting in late May of the Hamas political and military
leadership, with Meshal participating by telephone. "Hamas believed the
call from Damascus was scrambled, but Israel had broken the code," the
consultant said. For almost a year before its victory in the Palestinian elections
in January, Hamas had curtailed its terrorist activities. In the late May intercepted
conversation, the consultant told me, the Hamas leadership said that "they
got no benefit from it, and were losing standing among the Palestinian population."
The conclusion, he said, was " 'Let's go back into the terror
business and then try and wrestle concessions from the Israeli government.'
" The consultant told me that the U.S. and Israel agreed that if the Hamas
leadership did so, and if Nasrallah backed them up, there should be "a
full-scale response." In the next several weeks, when Hamas began digging
the tunnel into Israel, the consultant said, Unit 8200 "picked up signals
intelligence involving Hamas, Syria, and Hezbollah, saying, in essence, that
they wanted Hezbollah to 'warm up' the north." In one intercept,
the consultant said, Nasrallah referred to Olmert and Defense Minister Amir
Peretz "as seeming to be weak," in comparison with the former Prime
Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Barak, who had extensive military experience,
and said "he thought Israel would respond in a small-scale, local way,
as they had in the past."
Earlier this summer, before the Hezbollah kidnappings, the U.S. government
consultant said, several Israeli officials visited Washington, separately, "to
get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United
States would bear." The consultant added, "Israel began with Cheney.
It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and
the Middle East desk of the National Security Council." After that, "persuading
Bush was never a problem, and Condi Rice was on board," the consultant
said.
The initial plan, as outlined by the Israelis, called for a major bombing campaign
in response to the next Hezbollah provocation, according to the Middle East
expert with knowledge of U.S. and Israeli thinking. Israel believed that, by
targeting Lebanon's infrastructure, including highways, fuel depots, and
even the civilian runways at the main Beirut airport, it could persuade Lebanon's
large Christian and Sunni populations to turn against Hezbollah, according to
the former senior intelligence official. The airport, highways, and bridges,
among other things, have been hit in the bombing campaign. The Israeli Air Force
had flown almost nine thousand missions as of last week. (David Siegel, the
Israeli spokesman, said that Israel had targeted only sites connected to Hezbollah;
the bombing of bridges and roads was meant to prevent the transport of weapons.)
The Israeli plan, according to the former senior intelligence official, was
"the mirror image of what the United States has been planning for Iran."
(The initial U.S. Air Force proposals for an air attack to destroy Iran's
nuclear capacity, which included the option of intense bombing of civilian infrastructure
targets inside Iran, have been resisted by the top leadership of the Army, the
Navy, and the Marine Corps, according to current and former officials. They
argue that the Air Force plan will not work and will inevitably lead, as in
the Israeli war with Hezbollah, to the insertion of troops on the ground.)
Uzi Arad, who served for more than two decades in the Mossad, told me that
to the best of his knowledge the contacts between the Israeli and U.S. governments
were routine, and that, "in all my meetings and conversations with government
officials, never once did I hear anyone refer to prior coördination with
the United States." He was troubled by one issue - the speed with
which the Olmert government went to war. "For the life of me, I've
never seen a decision to go to war taken so speedily," he said. "We
usually go through long analyses."
The key military planner was Lieutenant General Dan Halutz, the I.D.F. chief
of staff, who, during a career in the Israeli Air Force, worked on contingency
planning for an air war with Iran. Olmert, a former mayor of Jerusalem, and
Peretz, a former labor leader, could not match his experience and expertise.
In the early discussions with American officials, I was told by the Middle
East expert and the government consultant, the Israelis repeatedly pointed to
the war in Kosovo as an example of what Israel would try to achieve. The NATO
forces commanded by U.S. Army General Wesley Clark methodically bombed and strafed
not only military targets but tunnels, bridges, and roads, in Kosovo and elsewhere
in Serbia, for seventy-eight days before forcing Serbian forces to withdraw
from Kosovo. "Israel studied the Kosovo war as its role model,"
the government consultant said. "The Israelis told Condi Rice, 'You
did it in about seventy days, but we need half of that - thirty-five days.'
"
There are, of course, vast differences between Lebanon and Kosovo. Clark, who
retired from the military in 2000 and unsuccessfully ran as a Democrat for the
Presidency in 2004, took issue with the analogy: "If it's true that
the Israeli campaign is based on the American approach in Kosovo, then it missed
the point. Ours was to use force to obtain a diplomatic objective - it was
not about killing people." Clark noted in a 2001 book, "Waging Modern
War," that it was the threat of a possible ground invasion as well as
the bombing that forced the Serbs to end the war. He told me, "In my experience,
air campaigns have to be backed, ultimately, by the will and capability to finish
the job on the ground."
Kosovo has been cited publicly by Israeli officials and journalists since the
war began. On August 6th, Prime Minister Olmert, responding to European condemnation
of the deaths of Lebanese civilians, said, "Where do they get the right
to preach to Israel? European countries attacked Kosovo and killed ten thousand
civilians. Ten thousand! And none of these countries had to suffer before that
from a single rocket. I'm not saying it was wrong to intervene in Kosovo.
But please: don't preach to us about the treatment of civilians."
(Human Rights Watch estimated the number of civilians killed in the NATO bombing
to be five hundred; the Yugoslav government put the number between twelve hundred
and five thousand.)
Cheney's office supported the Israeli plan, as did Elliott Abrams, a
deputy national-security adviser, according to several former and current officials.
(A spokesman for the N.S.C. denied that Abrams had done so.) They believed that
Israel should move quickly in its air war against Hezbollah. A former intelligence
officer said, "We told Israel, 'Look, if you guys have to go, we're
behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later - the
longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before
Bush gets out of office.' "
Cheney's point, the former senior intelligence official said, was "What
if the Israelis execute their part of this first, and it's really successful?
It'd be great. We can learn what to do in Iran by watching what the Israelis
do in Lebanon."
The Pentagon consultant told me that intelligence about Hezbollah and Iran
is being mishandled by the White House the same way intelligence had been when,
in 2002 and early 2003, the Administration was making the case that Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction. "The big complaint now in the intelligence
community is that all of the important stuff is being sent directly to the top - at
the insistence of the White House - and not being analyzed at all, or scarcely,"
he said. "It's an awful policy and violates all of the N.S.A.'s
strictures, and if you complain about it you're out," he said. "Cheney
had a strong hand in this."
The long-term Administration goal was to help set up a Sunni Arab coalition - including
countries like Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt - that would join the United
States and Europe to pressure the ruling Shiite mullahs in Iran. "But
the thought behind that plan was that Israel would defeat Hezbollah, not lose
to it," the consultant with close ties to Israel said. Some officials
in Cheney's office and at the N.S.C. had become convinced, on the basis
of private talks, that those nations would moderate their public criticism of
Israel and blame Hezbollah for creating the crisis that led to war. Although
they did so at first, they shifted their position in the wake of public protests
in their countries about the Israeli bombing. The White House was clearly disappointed
when, late last month, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, came
to Washington and, at a meeting with Bush, called for the President to intervene
immediately to end the war. The Washington Post reported that Washington had
hoped to enlist moderate Arab states "in an effort to pressure Syria and
Iran to rein in Hezbollah, but the Saudi move . . . seemed to cloud that initiative."
The surprising strength of Hezbollah's resistance, and its continuing
ability to fire rockets into northern Israel in the face of the constant Israeli
bombing, the Middle East expert told me, "is a massive setback for those
in the White House who want to use force in Iran. And those who argue that the
bombing will create internal dissent and revolt in Iran are also set back."
Nonetheless, some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff remain deeply
concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of
the air campaign than they should, the former senior intelligence official said.
"There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion
about this," he said. "When the smoke clears, they'll say
it was a success, and they'll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack
Iran."
In the White House, especially in the Vice-President's office, many officials
believe that the military campaign against Hezbollah is working and should be
carried forward. At the same time, the government consultant said, some policymakers
in the Administration have concluded that the cost of the bombing to Lebanese
society is too high. "They are telling Israel that it's time to
wind down the attacks on infrastructure."
Similar divisions are emerging in Israel. David Siegel, the Israeli spokesman,
said that his country's leadership believed, as of early August, that
the air war had been successful, and had destroyed more than seventy per cent
of Hezbollah's medium- and long-range-missile launching capacity. "The
problem is short-range missiles, without launchers, that can be shot from civilian
areas and homes," Siegel told me. "The only way to resolve this
is ground operations - which is why Israel would be forced to expand ground
operations if the latest round of diplomacy doesn't work." Last
week, however, there was evidence that the Israeli government was troubled by
the progress of the war. In an unusual move, Major General Moshe Kaplinsky,
Halutz's deputy, was put in charge of the operation, supplanting Major
General Udi Adam. The worry in Israel is that Nasrallah might escalate the crisis
by firing missiles at Tel Aviv. "There is a big debate over how much damage
Israel should inflict to prevent it," the consultant said. "If Nasrallah
hits Tel Aviv, what should Israel do? Its goal is to deter more attacks by telling
Nasrallah that it will destroy his country if he doesn't stop, and to
remind the Arab world that Israel can set it back twenty years. We're
no longer playing by the same rules."
A European intelligence officer told me, "The Israelis have been caught
in a psychological trap. In earlier years, they had the belief that they could
solve their problems with toughness. But now, with Islamic martyrdom, things
have changed, and they need different answers. How do you scare people who love
martyrdom?" The problem with trying to eliminate Hezbollah, the intelligence
officer said, is the group's ties to the Shiite population in southern
Lebanon, the Bekaa Valley, and Beirut's southern suburbs, where it operates
schools, hospitals, a radio station, and various charities.
A high-level American military planner told me, "We have a lot of vulnerability
in the region, and we've talked about some of the effects of an Iranian
or Hezbollah attack on the Saudi regime and on the oil infrastructure."
There is special concern inside the Pentagon, he added, about the oil-producing
nations north of the Strait of Hormuz. "We have to anticipate the unintended
consequences," he told me. "Will we be able to absorb a barrel of
oil at one hundred dollars? There is this almost comical thinking that you can
do it all from the air, even when you're up against an irregular enemy
with a dug-in capability. You're not going to be successful unless you
have a ground presence, but the political leadership never considers the worst
case. These guys only want to hear the best case."
There is evidence that the Iranians were expecting the war against Hezbollah.
Vali Nasr, an expert on Shiite Muslims and Iran, who is a fellow at the Council
on Foreign Relations and also teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School, in Monterey,
California, said, "Every negative American move against Hezbollah was
seen by Iran as part of a larger campaign against it. And Iran began to prepare
for the showdown by supplying more sophisticated weapons to Hezbollah - anti-ship
and anti-tank missiles - and training its fighters in their use. And now
Hezbollah is testing Iran's new weapons. Iran sees the Bush Administration
as trying to marginalize its regional role, so it fomented trouble."
Nasr, an Iranian-American who recently published a study of the Sunni-Shiite
divide, entitled "The Shia Revival," also said that the Iranian
leadership believes that Washington's ultimate political goal is to get
some international force to act as a buffer - to physically separate Syria
and Lebanon in an effort to isolate and disarm Hezbollah, whose main supply
route is through Syria. "Military action cannot bring about the desired
political result," Nasr said. The popularity of Iran's President,
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a virulent critic of Israel, is greatest in his own country.
If the U.S. were to attack Iran's nuclear facilities, Nasr said, "you
may end up turning Ahmadinejad into another Nasrallah - the rock star of
the Arab street."
Donald Rumsfeld, who is one of the Bush Administration's most outspoken,
and powerful, officials, has said very little publicly about the crisis in Lebanon.
His relative quiet, compared to his aggressive visibility in the run-up to the
Iraq war, has prompted a debate in Washington about where he stands on the issue.
Some current and former intelligence officials who were interviewed for this
article believe that Rumsfeld disagrees with Bush and Cheney about the American
role in the war between Israel and Hezbollah. The U.S. government consultant
with close ties to Israel said that "there was a feeling that Rumsfeld
was jaded in his approach to the Israeli war." He added, "Air power
and the use of a few Special Forces had worked in Afghanistan, and he tried
to do it again in Iraq. It was the same idea, but it didn't work. He thought
that Hezbollah was too dug in and the Israeli attack plan would not work, and
the last thing he wanted was another war on his shift that would put the American
forces in Iraq in greater jeopardy."
A Western diplomat said that he understood that Rumsfeld did not know all the
intricacies of the war plan. "He is angry and worried about his troops"
in Iraq, the diplomat said. Rumsfeld served in the White House during the last
year of the war in Vietnam, from which American troops withdrew in 1975, "and
he did not want to see something like this having an impact in Iraq."
Rumsfeld's concern, the diplomat added, was that an expansion of the war
into Iran could put the American troops in Iraq at greater risk of attacks by
pro-Iranian Shiite militias.
At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on August 3rd, Rumsfeld was less
than enthusiastic about the war's implications for the American troops
in Iraq. Asked whether the Administration was mindful of the war's impact
on Iraq, he testified that, in his meetings with Bush and Condoleezza Rice,
"there is a sensitivity to the desire to not have our country or our interests
or our forces put at greater risk as a result of what's taking place between
Israel and Hezbollah. . . . There are a variety of risks that we face in that
region, and it's a difficult and delicate situation."
The Pentagon consultant dismissed talk of a split at the top of the Administration,
however, and said simply, "Rummy is on the team. He'd love to see
Hezbollah degraded, but he also is a voice for less bombing and more innovative
Israeli ground operations." The former senior intelligence official similarly
depicted Rumsfeld as being "delighted that Israel is our stalking horse."
There are also questions about the status of Condoleezza Rice. Her initial
support for the Israeli air war against Hezbollah has reportedly been tempered
by dismay at the effects of the attacks on Lebanon. The Pentagon consultant
said that in early August she began privately "agitating" inside
the Administration for permission to begin direct diplomatic talks with Syria - so
far, without much success. Last week, the Times reported that Rice had directed
an Embassy official in Damascus to meet with the Syrian foreign minister, though
the meeting apparently yielded no results. The Times also reported that Rice
viewed herself as "trying to be not only a peacemaker abroad but also
a mediator among contending parties" within the Administration. The article
pointed to a divide between career diplomats in the State Department and "conservatives
in the government," including Cheney and Abrams, "who were pushing
for strong American support for Israel."
The Western diplomat told me his embassy believes that Abrams has emerged as
a key policymaker on Iran, and on the current Hezbollah-Israeli crisis, and
that Rice's role has been relatively diminished. Rice did not want to
make her most recent diplomatic trip to the Middle East, the diplomat said.
"She only wanted to go if she thought there was a real chance to get a
ceasefire."
Bush's strongest supporter in Europe continues to be British Prime Minister
Tony Blair, but many in Blair's own Foreign Office, as a former diplomat
said, believe that he has "gone out on a particular limb on this" - especially
by accepting Bush's refusal to seek an immediate and total ceasefire between
Israel and Hezbollah. "Blair stands alone on this," the former diplomat
said. "He knows he's a lame duck who's on the way out, but
he buys it" - the Bush policy. "He drinks the White House Kool-Aid
as much as anybody in Washington." The crisis will really start at the
end of August, the diplomat added, "when the Iranians" - under
a United Nations deadline to stop uranium enrichment - "will say no."
Even those who continue to support Israel's war against Hezbollah agree
that it is failing to achieve one of its main goals - to rally the Lebanese
against Hezbollah. "Strategic bombing has been a failed military concept
for ninety years, and yet air forces all over the world keep on doing it,"
John Arquilla, a defense analyst at the Naval Postgraduate School, told me.
Arquilla has been campaigning for more than a decade, with growing success,
to change the way America fights terrorism. "The warfare of today is not
mass on mass," he said. "You have to hunt like a network to defeat
a network. Israel focussed on bombing against Hezbollah, and, when that did
not work, it became more aggressive on the ground. The definition of insanity
is continuing to do the same thing and expecting a different result."
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