Israel boosting Hezbollah, uniting Lebanon, losing war
HAARETZ
Israel is losing World War III [excerpt]
... After years of Military Intelligence warnings of Hezbollah's missile arsenal and vaguely comforting news items about the mystery-shrouded Nautilus Katyusha-killer, we now know that we knew next to nothing.
We are losing it because our prime minister, defense minister, and army chief, who are new at their jobs and have proven it at every opportunity, made outlandish, grandiose, and boastful claims at the outset of the campaign, speaking of disarming Hezbollah, creating a new order in Lebanon, creating a reality in which the Lebanese people themselves would turn on the terrorists and diminish their influence.
Even before we ran aground in the north, the words had a perversely familiar ring. They are the sound track of debacle. They are as dated and as current as a 16 mm version of Apocalypse Now screened in IDF forts in Lebanon in the '80s.
We've gone after infrastructure, and in so doing, caused immeasurable suffering to as many as a million Lebanese, a thousand of them dead, thousands of them maimed, hundreds of thousands of them displaced.
And there are still those, and they are many, who argue for More of the Same. Much more. For a start, "Erasing villages where Hezbollah operates."
But more of them same is likely to yield only more of the same failure.
With thousands of thousands of soldiers already in Lebanon, seven brigades and counting, after 4,600 IAF bombing runs , 150 of them Sunday night alone, 80 to 90 percent of Hezbolah's 2,500 fighters are alive and shooting. They are still capable of firing 200 rockets a day into Israel.
We are losing the war, in part, because our actions have only gained sympathy for Hezbollah.
Polls are now showing that nearly 90 percent of Lebanese - including many who had serious doubts about Hezbollah in the past, now support the organization's war with Israel.
The war has so elevated Hezbollah in the eyes of the world, that terrorism authority Prof. Robert A. Pape, writing in The New York Times, could without flinching compare the group to "the multidimensional American civil-rights movement of the 1960s."
Oddly, one of the lessons of the war is that the government, fearing a backlash over the deaths of soldiers, has directed an offensive which has relied on remote control warfare, effectively causing the needless deaths of hundreds of civilians in Lebanon, and, in the process, putting a million Israelis in range of Katyushas and Fajrs. Link
Israel is losing World War III [excerpt]
... After years of Military Intelligence warnings of Hezbollah's missile arsenal and vaguely comforting news items about the mystery-shrouded Nautilus Katyusha-killer, we now know that we knew next to nothing.
We are losing it because our prime minister, defense minister, and army chief, who are new at their jobs and have proven it at every opportunity, made outlandish, grandiose, and boastful claims at the outset of the campaign, speaking of disarming Hezbollah, creating a new order in Lebanon, creating a reality in which the Lebanese people themselves would turn on the terrorists and diminish their influence.
Even before we ran aground in the north, the words had a perversely familiar ring. They are the sound track of debacle. They are as dated and as current as a 16 mm version of Apocalypse Now screened in IDF forts in Lebanon in the '80s.
We've gone after infrastructure, and in so doing, caused immeasurable suffering to as many as a million Lebanese, a thousand of them dead, thousands of them maimed, hundreds of thousands of them displaced.
And there are still those, and they are many, who argue for More of the Same. Much more. For a start, "Erasing villages where Hezbollah operates."
But more of them same is likely to yield only more of the same failure.
With thousands of thousands of soldiers already in Lebanon, seven brigades and counting, after 4,600 IAF bombing runs , 150 of them Sunday night alone, 80 to 90 percent of Hezbolah's 2,500 fighters are alive and shooting. They are still capable of firing 200 rockets a day into Israel.
We are losing the war, in part, because our actions have only gained sympathy for Hezbollah.
Polls are now showing that nearly 90 percent of Lebanese - including many who had serious doubts about Hezbollah in the past, now support the organization's war with Israel.
The war has so elevated Hezbollah in the eyes of the world, that terrorism authority Prof. Robert A. Pape, writing in The New York Times, could without flinching compare the group to "the multidimensional American civil-rights movement of the 1960s."
Oddly, one of the lessons of the war is that the government, fearing a backlash over the deaths of soldiers, has directed an offensive which has relied on remote control warfare, effectively causing the needless deaths of hundreds of civilians in Lebanon, and, in the process, putting a million Israelis in range of Katyushas and Fajrs. Link
posted by exoplanet at 1:51 PM
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