Jo-Ann

What you say seem both reasonable and necessary. However, there is no suggestion what the Arabs need to do now. For example Michael Young in the "New York Time Sunday Magazine" says that Hezbollah goal might have been to split Lebanon all along.

I find it endlessly fascinating that in all the proposals for peace in the Middle East there is virtually never a burden for any Arab nation.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

Good luck getting an answer on this point, which I have made several times in the last few days. 

What cracks me up is the idea that Israel's actions in Lebanon represent some sort of neocon fantasy trip.  Lest we forget, at the beginning of the campaign, the entire Israeli public as well as much of world opinion, even Arab opinon, was on Israel's side.  To have lost that international support was indeed a strategic blunder, but it wasn't because of neoconservatives.  It was a failure of tactics, not strategy.

If there is a parallel between Israel's war in Lebanon and the US's war in Iraq, it is the failure of the Rumsfeld vision that mobility, technology and airpower can take the place of heavy armored divisions.  That has certainly been proven to be a disastrous illusion. 

What Israel should have done when its soldiers were kidnapped was mobilize its reserves and mass troops on the border.  It should have issued an ultimatum that unless the soldiers were returned, there would be a full-scale invasion of Lebanon with the complete destruction of Hezbollah positions in South Lebanon as its aims.  Had Israel gone in with half a dozen full brigades right from the beginning, I think the results, both military and political, would have been very different.

One final point: at no point was it ever Israel's intention to create a "New Middle East".  The term itself is as far from the neoconservative vision as its possible to be, having been coined by Shimon Peres and like-minded folks in the early 90s during the first heady days of the Oslo peace process, when Peres and others talked about the end of the conflict and the flowering of economic and cultural ties.  In the current war, Israel was under no illusions - unlike the real neoconservatives back in Washington - that it was going to democratize the Middle East.  It was concerned about an Iranian beachhead on its northern border and it wanted to demonstrate some resolve.  In this it clearly failed.  But it says nothing at all about neoconservatism.

A fair statement. But

 One would think that the first demands to be made would be for

worries me because of first which veers down the same old cul de sac of who's to blame.

Who should go first is whomever can be persuaded to go first. If peace comes both jumpers* win and if peace doesn't  they both lose.

*Jumper refers to the discussion seven years ago about who should go first when someone- maybe Peres - said why don't we both jump at the same time? If only. 

"Hunky dory" is overstating things. In the 2002-2003 coup, they cut down some of the worst factions in the civil war. I see the major powers -- and, in the context of other than South Africa, France is a major power -- not coming in and perfecting a situatio, but taking the lead in hard-hitting peace enforcement. The Ivorian unity government is unstable, but it probably would not have gotten to a theoretical unity state, or even clear sides in a civil war, without external intervention.

Chad, by contrast, is peaceful if barren. There are raids from the Sudanese side, and it's not completely clear who is making them. There is no question that the logistics for French troops, or French-led troops, from Chad into western Darfur have a much better chance than anything from the east or south.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Had Israel gone in with half a dozen full brigades right from the beginning, I think the results, both military and political, would have been very different.

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

thanks for these comments-I think that the time is way past who jumps first, as one poster wrote-but I don't think that Israel or any of the neighboring Arab states can 'jump' either first or together; that's why I think the world community is so important in forcing the jump, if you will-the U.S., France and the other European allies...

Yes, killing more Hezbollah fighters is good.  So glad we agree.

'mobilize its reserves and mass troops on the border. It should have issued an ultimatum.... (or), there would be a full-scale invasion of Lebanon'

Isn't that just what Commander Codpiece did in Iraq? And the results were....?? 2600+ dead and no exit strategy. Israel knew Hezbollah was having a turkey shoot on it's tanks with their Russian made anti-tank missiles. It's 4th generation warfare, not the Battle of the Bulge.

and yet, is anyone safer??:

"America is safer than it has been, yet it is not yet safe," the Shrub.

Ditto for Israel, in spite of 100+ dead soldiers. It was best they did end it, seems the Israeli's don't want to bleed the IDF in a pointless conflict. Same can't be said for Dubya or his supporters. BradtheDad seems ready to go Jihad himself.

As emails from Israel, that were forwarded to me, point out this was not just about the two kidnapped soldiers and 8 others who were murdered. Israelis in the north have been experiencing missile attacks from Lebanon for at least the last two years.

Part of the problem is that Americans only woke up to this problem when Israelis decided they had enough.

Judging from all the internal debate in Israel the arguement is going to be why the IDF relied too much on the IAF and did not go into Lebanon with a much larger ground force. There seems to be a willingness to endure casualties in exchange for doing a lot more damage to Hezbollah. That is just from reading Haaretz.
Daniel A. Greenbaum

No.

Also they targeted the means for Hezbollah to rearm, to fuel their launchers, to light their tunnels and the like. Israel fought the war like any nation with air superiority. Hezbollah fired 150 to 200 missiles aimed only at civilian cities.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

ROTFL Fire Bad! Kill Good!

I'm glad to see there's a sense of humour in ye somewhere, laddy.

Well, ya don't have to be a combat veteran to legtiimately call for a hawkish position.

But, mind boggling stupidity is often found in people who hold mind bogglingly stupid positions.

So... lets see. I think we can all agree that the aerial war was brutal, counterproductive and ultimately ineffectual.

On the other hand, the support for a massive ground invasion doesn't hold up all that well. Most of the Israeli military casualties derived from the ground effort.

To put it simply, Hezbollahs forces proved all too effective at shooting Israeli's on the ground and blowing up Israeli armour. Indeed, I've heard that they took out as many as 20 Merkava tanks.

The evidence is that Hezbollahs RPG's were an effective counter to Merkava tanks, so much so that the consensus of military opinion is that the balance on the battlefield has shifted back to RPG wielding infantry. It's believed that Hezbollahs surface to air missiles, while not effective against high flying fighter jets, would have made mincemeat of the close air helicopter gunship platforms. Which means that apart from numbers and air power, the technological superiority of Israel's forces were not going to be a factor.

Things get worse. See, the thing with modern warfare, is that you have this idea of a 'kill zone'. An area where you can strike the enemy, but they can't strike back at you. Your weapons have more range than theirs, you can move closer to kill them, and still be outside their range. They have to enter your killing field and spend time there before they're close enough to hit at you.

But here's the trouble: That sort of warfare only operates in big open areas, or aerial warfare, where there's nothing to get in the way of your killzone.

Completely different story when you are in rough hill country, or in villages and towns. Then your line of sight is restricted by the geography and architecture. So your free pass kill zone no longer exists. The enemy can shoot at you as easily as you shoot at them.

The advantage goes to defense. If your enemy is home town, they've had time to build bunkers, tunnels, set up ambushes, establish their own killing fields, stock up on reserves. They know the countryside and are able to take advantage of the local geography. And of course, they've got the local population backing them up.

Y'know, in WWII, the Nazi's were the most extraordinarily efficient, the toughest, the most ruthless bunch of bastards around. Cruelty and mass murder were not something they shied away from. Yugoslavia was right on their doorstep... Hitler threw *entire armies* in there Tito simply chewed them up. Think about that.

So anyway, your dramatic proposal was to send Israelis into a hostile environment where their every technological and organizational advantage was stripped away, and where all the practical advantages were with the enemy... that's such a great plan. I'm so impressed. Really, if you could see my face, you'd see how impressed I am.

Of course, there's ways to load the dice. If Israel had really really good intelligence on Hezbollah positions, deployments, stockpiles, etc., they might be able to hit hard, hit fast and roll them all up...

Except it turns out that Israel's intelligence was for monkeys. They had no idea where the missiles were, after 30 days of bombing, Hezbollah was running 250 missiles a day? 4000 in total? Yeah sherlock, they're really on top of it. Moreover, its clear that the Israeli's really had no idea how well dug in Hezbollah was. They bypassed Hezbollah positions constantly and were ambushed from behind over and over. Like I said, intelligence for monkeys. So, scratch that.

So... what else we got? Just one thing. Your solution. Numbers. That's right, you just roll out that great jewish tide and fight a war of attrition, see how that works out.

Howard can set me straight, but I believe that conventional military theory calls for the invader to have a 10 to 1 military advantage. So, assuming about 6,000 hezbollah, that translates into 60,000 Israeli's necessary to really roll over those Shiites but good.

It took the United States several months and something like seventy or a hundred billion dollars to organize 150,000 to invade Iraq. Assuming that the Israeli's do it on the quick and cheap... one month,
ten or twenty billion? That's like a goodly proportion of the entire Israeli economy. Major hit, major expensive. Maybe they can do it, maybe they'd have to cancel the school lunch program... and everyone's lunch program. But maybe they could.

I suppose we could play with the numbers some. Could Israel sneak by with 45,000? 30,000? Still, the odds are big and expensive. And the more you shortchange your numbers, the more risk you run. Saddam a hollow shell, these guys had meat to them.

And then, what does that give you. You've overrun a hostile population. There won't be collaborators or sympathizers. They'll all hate you. The enemy will be hidden among them and thoroughly entrenched.

Intelligence failures so far give no hope that you'll be able to clean out Hezbollah without cleaning out the population. Call it genocide or ethnic cleansing. Even then, they'll still keep on shooting at you. Hell, the harder you are on the population, the more of the 'shooting' enemy you create.

What's the level of brutality you need to inflict in order to pacify the population? I dunno. But its unlikely that in this age of internet, cell phones, faxes, digital cameras and worldwide news services that you'll get away with it. Even if the US runs interference every which way, Europe starts up trade sanctions, the economy runs dry, and every angry young moslem the world over starts focusing on Israel or their local representatives. We can see a lot of Jihadis flocking into Lebanon. Pro-American arab governments going unstable. And a massive increase in worlwide terrorism, including a fair bit of it targeting innocent Jewish persons.

Now in the event of your hypothetical massive invasion, we can reasonably expect that Hezbollah would not have opted for a formal 'stand and fight', but would have employed insurgent and guerilla tactics to harass and make the occupation expensive.

So, lots of RPG's into Merkavas when no one is looking, lots of ambushes, sneak attacks, improvised explosive devices, etc. Think Iraq or Vietnam. Or maybe the Israeli's will have a magic want which will save them from that situation... Do you have a magic wand? Perhaps we shouldn't count on magic wands.

So, it becomes a war of attrition. Now, there's some key issues. Can an invading army win a war of attrition against a local resistance. Well, Napoleon did it in Spain... oh, no he didn't. The French did in Haiti... wait, that failed too. Napolean 3 in Mexico... uh uhn. The Nazi's in Yugoslavia... sorry. Back to the French in Vietnam... nope. Americans in Vietnam... deja vu. Russians in Afghanistan... you get the picture.

There aren't that many successful historical examples. The very few that there have been were not quick and easy, but were immensely long, immensely cruel bloodbaths.

For instance, the Phillipine Insurrection, went on for about 5 years, cost 500,000 Phillipino lives or about 10% of the population. And in the Philipino insurrection, the US had vastly better weapons, better training, and local allies and 'bought' supporters. It had vastly more resources than the small bands of Philpinos.

Now, arguably, Hezbollah was in a lot stronger position than the Philipino's. They had a proportionately larger and more advanced population to back them up, they had land connections to friendly societies that could smuggle them armaments, they had way better weapons, they had the internet, better communications. You name it.

But even the Philipines was a hard, brutal, near-genocidal slog. And just about every counterinsurgency war is like that.

So, forget about your big set piece battle, overwhelming Israeli ground forces blowing up a few Hezbollah tanks, and then cheering crowds throwing flowers and a videotape loop of a fat arab dancing... None of that was going to be happening.

No, it was going to be years long, and Israel was going to take heavy casualties, it was going to be hideously expensive and they were going to kill something like 10 to 20% of the Shiite population... and quite possibly lose anyway.

I suspect that Howard can fill us in a lot more on the Philipino insurrection.

Would Israel have succeeded with sheer weight of numbers? I dunno. Possible I suppose. It's possible that if Israel managed to pump enough soldiers in, the sheer numbers would suppress resistance activity. Basically, you'd have to have numbers of boots on the ground that amounted to a real fraction of the native population...

The example of Kosovo suggested that an occupying army needs a ratio of 1 soldier to 40 citizens to have any hope whatsoever of containing the population.

There were 1.5 million Shiites, so you'd have needed at least 40,000 Israeli's, give or take a few K, to keep a lid on the place.

That's assuming that the rest of Lebanon didn't become a hostile territory supporting Hezbollah... which, if you were going to occupy the whole thing, would require a total of 100,000 soldiers.

So the occupation force, realistically, would have to be between 40,000 to 100,000. LONG TERM.

Maintaining 150,000 troops in Iraq is just about breaking America's budget and America's army. You figure that Israel had the budget or the bodies to sustain an indefinite occupation on those levels.

But what's the alternative. The minute they leave, Hezbollah is back at full force, with lots of new martyrs and lots of eager angry beavers.

In short, Israel simply doesn't have the political, or military or economic resources to stay. But at the same time, its departure would simply provide Hezbollah an opportunity to regenerate, bigger and badder.

How long would it take Hezbollah to reach its old strength? To exceed it? Weaks? Months? A year or two? Then where you at?

So what do you do? Ethnic cleansing? Create even more refugees? Bomb all of Lebanon back to the stone age? Bomb Syria? Bomb Iran? Mass graves? Permanently interning the population in giant concentration camps? Start building ovens?

Maybe this stuff makes you cream your jeans, but I don't think the Israelis have genocide in them.

Bottom line is... the plan is mind bogglingly stupid. The 101st Fighting Keyboarders lose again.

The problem with the original comment was the emphasis on choosing between an armored invasion or aerial attack, Israel's only two real options. Neither would work in the environment in which the engagement would occur, as you successfully point out. If none of the tactics will work, then the strategy fails ab initio. It means the Israelis should not have launched the war in the first place.

Only if the Israelis felt they could justify the commitment of massive quantities of light infantry could they have procured for themselves a chance for success. They refused to accept that level of casualties. The strategy could therefore never work. Olmert was a coward and a fool.

The air campaign was not successful in getting rid of the kytusha launchers. However, you are wrong about it not being successful. It wipe out most if not all of Hezbollah's long range missiles. It also leveled Shiaa areas, home to the Hezbollah, while leaving Christian, Sunni and Druze areas largely intact. By hitting power facilities, bridges and the like it made it harder for Hezbollah to get rearmed.

I believe you only partially right about Israeli intelligence. Perhaps given the coming enquiries this will become clearer but they seem to have known a great deal about Hezbollah's capabilites it was just difficult to hit the moving launchers. Hezbollah having received from Iran Russian RPG's that could pierce their tanks they were adjusting accordingly.

The Israel public was willing, desirous even, to continue and expand the ground campaign. The biggest problem for Israel was that Condolezza Rice and the U.S. State Department could not take the international heat.

The end your piece is the typical refrain. Israel couldn't defend itself, oh it could but it would just result in bad things for its enemies. Zeev Schiff and many of Israel's military commentators believe that Israel should have launched its ground campaign a lot earlier and that they would be successful. I do not know if that is correct but they are hardly they are hardly like the folks here who suggest Israelis live with missiles coming at them on a regular basis. From their bunkers they were urging a stronger response, not less.

Daniel A. Greenbaum

flavius,

But you would be more effective if you asked why the Palestinian peace movement is so small relative to the Isreali one , or how Isreal could lift its control of the West Bank when leaving South Lebanon turned it into a launch pad for Hezbo missiles.

Abu El Banat actually raises good points that your scolding unfortunately fails to address.  It can ba argued that South Lebanon/Hizbollah is a different story than Gaza/W.Bank/Izzadin al-Qassam, etc.  But what all these circumstances have in common is the situation whereby the international community remains paralyzed in dealing with a poisonous regional dynamic based on isolating one nation -- economically, politically and culturally -- because it is not an Arab state (ie, incurably unqualified for Arab League member nation status). 

The pattern is evident, whereby the more confident the Israeli electorate is in its security situation the more likely it has been to advance conciliatory leadership -- Rabins, Baraks; while the more insecure the Israeli electorate is the more likely it has been to advance hardline leadership -- Shamirs, Netanyahus, Sharons.  Surely, the Arab establishment has noticed this pattern as well.  The electoral foundation of Israeli politics makes its policies more predictable, which can be a disadvantage in a regional dynamic dominated by despotic authoritarian regimes. 

In a world where short-term benefit consistently outweighs concern for longterm consequences, what does any party -- whether principal, or interested third party; or governmental or NGO -- really have to gain from challenging the status quo?