Lebanon: oh Israel, what a fuckup!

1. To failure's credit -- by Gideon Levy (from Israel’s Haaretz Daily)

The bad (and predictable) news: Israel is going to come out of this war with the lower hand. The good (and surprising) news: This ringing failure could spell good tidings. If Israel had won the battles in an easy, sweeping victory of the kind Israelis prayed so much for, it would have caused enormous damage to Israel's security policies. Another slam-bam win would have brought disaster upon us. Drugged with power, drunk with victory, we would have been tempted to implement our success in other arenas. Dangerous fire would have threatened the entire region and nobody knows what might have resulted.

On the other hand, the failure in this little war might teach us an important lesson for the future, and maybe influence us to change our ways and language, the language we speak to our neighbors with violence and force. The axiom that "Israel cannot allow itself a defeat on the battlefield" has already been exposed as a nonsensical cliche: Failure might not only help Israel greatly but, as a bonus, it might teach the Americans the important lesson that there is no point in pushing Israel into military adventures.

Since 1948's war, Israel has only achieved one sweeping military victory on its own, in the Six-Day War. There is no way of imagining an easier and sweeter victory. Israel's "deterrent capability" was restored - and in a big way - in a manner that was supposed to guarantee its security for many years. And what happened? Only six years went by and the most difficult war in Israeli history, the Yom Kippur War, took place. Hardly deterrence. On the contrary, the defeat in 1967 only pushed the Arab armies to try to restore their lost honor and they managed to do so in a very short time. Against an arrogant, complacent Israel enjoying the rotten fruits of that dizzying victory, the Syrian and Egyptian armies chalked up considerable achievements, and Israel understood the limits of its power. Maybe now, this war will also bring us back down to reality, where military force is only military force, and cannot guarantee everything. After all, we are constantly scoring "victories" and "achievements" against the Palestinians. And what comes of them? Deterrence? Have the Palestinians given up their dreams to be free people in their own country?

The IDF's failure against Hezbollah is not a fateful defeat. Israel killed and absorbed casualties, but its existence or any part of its territory were not endangered for a moment. Our favorite phrase, "an existential war" is nothing more than another expression of the ridiculous pathos of this war, which from the start was a cursed war of choice.

Hezbollah did not capture territory from Israel and its defeat is tolerable even though it could have easily been avoided if we had not undertaken our foolish Lebanese adventure. It is not difficult to imagine what would have happened if Hezbollah had been defeated within a few days from the air, as promised from the start by the bragging of the heads of the IDF. The success would have made us insane. The U.S. would have pushed us into a military clash with Syria and, drunk with victory, we might have been tempted. Iran might have been next. At the same time we would have dealt with the Palestinians: What went so easily in Lebanon, we would have been convinced, would be easily implemented from Jenin to Rafah. The result would have been an attempt to solve the Palestinian problem at its root by pounding, erasing, bombing and shelling.

Maybe all that won't happen now because we have discovered first-hand that the IDF's power is much more limited than we thought and were told. Our deterrent capacity might now work in the opposite direction. Israel, hopefully, will think twice before going into another dangerous military adventure. That is comforting news. On the other hand, it is true that there is the danger the IDF will want to restore its lost honor on the backs of the helpless Palestinians. It didn't work in Bint Jbail, so we'll show them in Nablus.

However, if we internalize the concept whereby what does not work by force will not work with more force, this war could bring us to the negotiating table. Seared by failure, maybe the IDF will be less enthusiastic to rush into battle. It is possible the political echelon will now understand that the response to the dangers facing Israel is not to be found in using more and more force; that the real response to the legitimate and just demands of the Palestinians is not another dozen Operation Defensive Shields, but in respecting their rights; that the real response to the Syrian threat is returning the Golan to its rightful owners, without delay; and that the response to the Iranian danger is dulling the hatred toward us in the Arab and Muslim world.

If indeed the war ends as it is ending, maybe more Israelis will ask themselves what we are killing and being killed for, what did we pound and get pounded for, and maybe they will understand that it was once again all for naught. Maybe the achievement of this war will be that the failure will be seared deeply into the consciousness, and Israel will take a new route, less violent and less bullying, because of the failure. In 1967, Ephraim Kishon wrote, "sorry we won." This time it is almost possible to say, it's good we did not win.


2. A War of Escalating Errors
Israelis and their foes are swinging wildly -- and missing their targets.
By Caleb Carr (from LA Times)

Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake," runs Napoleon's famous dictum, and were either the Israeli government or the groups that are leading the Palestinian people (Hamas and Fatah and international organizations such as Hezbollah) capable of assimilating this basic piece of military sense, we should have already seen a sudden outbreak of peace, or, at least, cautious inactivity, in the border areas of Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and Lebanon.

Both sides have made fundamentally foolish moves in recent weeks, yet each side has consistently been rescued from its mistakes by the errors of the other. And, following this pattern, they have worked themselves and the world to the edge of a crisis that is ominous even by Middle Eastern standards.

Who initiated this sequence of errors? As with all crises in the region, this question is almost impossible to answer. The specific trigger is often said to be the June incursion into Israel by Palestinians from Gaza, which resulted in the seizure of Cpl. Gilad Shalit of the Israel Defense Forces and the death of two other IDF soldiers. But the Palestinians have explained that their commandos were carrying out a reprisal raid after the IDF seized two Palestinian brothers, Osama and Mustafa Muamar, who, they claimed, are innocent of anything save being sons of a known Hamas activist, Ali Muamar.

Viewed in this light, the Palestinian action seems uncharacteristically legitimate, proportionate and even daring. For, unlike the Israeli seizure of the Muamars, the whole of the Palestinian operation was aimed at strictly military targets. Yet the Israelis answered with a sadly predictable full-scale military incursion into Gaza. The Palestinians, meanwhile, abandoned proportionality once again by stating that the release not simply of the Muamars but of hundreds of their people imprisoned in Israel would be the condition of Shalit's release.

More important, perhaps, the Israeli incursion into Gaza gave Hezbollah (or so it felt) the green light to launch its rocket attacks from southern Lebanon. President Bush and Israeli leaders might try to represent the two events — the action in Gaza and that in south Lebanon — as unconnected, but it is an assertion that has failed to gain traction in most of the Muslim world, as well as in many other countries.

Israel's reaction in Gaza had been especially foolish. Although the original Palestinian attack on the IDF post was carried out against a purely military target, the quick demand for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israel showed the Palestinians' true lack of diplomatic deftness. Had the Israelis limited themselves to the threat of an incursion, while carrying out the kind of special-forces search-and-rescue operations of which they are capable, the Palestinians would have lost their advantage.

Not to fear, however: The Palestinian mistake was indeed interrupted, and grotesquely, by the sight of massively armed IDF conventional forces crossing into one of the poorest and smallest regions on the planet, all to rescue what Israel claimed was a "kidnapped" soldier — an assertion that was absurd because a uniformed, front-line noncommissioned officer can no more be "kidnapped" by the enemy than an innocent, unarmed child can "die in battle." Already, the language of the conflict was taking on the dimensions of events occurring on the other side of Alice's looking glass, and things would only get worse.

The Palestinians' allies, in their turn, soon rescued Israel from this terrible error in judgment. After a border skirmish — the true origins of which may never be known — Hezbollah initiated a rocket offensive against Israeli towns and cities in the north of the country, causing a certain number of civilian casualties but far more widespread civilian panic. So great was the panic that Israel felt the need to once again take its turn at rescuing its enemies from error. It bombarded and finally invaded southern Lebanon in a barrage that would turn out to be, by orders of magnitude, the most savage step in the spiral of horror, miscalculation and interruption of miscalculation.

And now? Now, scarcely anyone on either side of the conflict knows or cares who was the first to break the "rules of war." Civilians on both sides only want relief from the constant anxiety of indiscriminate attacks and revenge for those noncombatants who — whether because they happened to live where a Katyusha rocket landed inside Israel, or because they lived too close to where Hezbollah had parked a launcher of such rockets inside southern Lebanon, or because they simply have nowhere to go to escape the narrow confines of the Gaza corridor or West Bank refugee camps — have met hideous deaths or suffered equally hideous wounds.

Is there an alternative to this pattern of mistakes and countermistakes? There is, but it involves a quality that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians have ever come close to mastering: tactical restraint in order to achieve strategic advantage. Simply put, this involves looking past immediate and all-out retaliation as the best method of countering threat. It is not a call for turning the other cheek; rather, it suggests that savagely swinging back every time one's cheek is dealt so much as a brushing blow does not amount to effective boxing, much less enlightened belligerent behavior.

Imagine, for example, that either Israel (in the case of the initial Palestinian and Hezbollah attacks) or the Palestinians and Hezbollah (in the case of the original Israeli reprisals) had decided: "Patience; we will absorb this assault, and wait to focus our attacks until we can strike at what we know to be — and can prove to the rest of the world are — the enemy military or paramilitary units responsible. That will get us our principal objective: the certain backing of global public opinion. We will refuse throughout to engage in disproportionate assaults on indiscriminate targets, and if for a period we risk suffering more losses than our opponent, we will nonetheless profit in the long run. When we have netted the world's sympathy, we will receive more backing, even as our enemies' support dwindles, and what had seemed to be tactical peril will in fact prove to be strategic advantage."

This notion — absorbing smaller blows in order to deliver decisive later strikes — has important historical precedents. It forms a central tenet of the philosophy of ancient China's Sun Tzu, arguably the world's greatest military thinker. But even during modern American history, we can find the idea at work: For it decisively influenced the pre-World War II steps taken by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In 1937, when imperial Japanese aircraft "mistakenly" attacked and sank the U.S. gunboat Panay and several other vessels on China's Yangtze River, some in the U.S. called for war; but FDR realized that the U.S. was in fact neither politically nor militarily ready for such a conflict. And so he (rather unhappily) bided his time, accepting what seemed to his enemies a craven reparations deal and awaiting an event that would allow the overwhelming majority of the American public to appreciate the dangers of Japanese medievalist militarism. The wait also gave the American Navy extra years to prepare.

Similarly, when Roosevelt later tried, after the outbreak of the European war in 1939, to engineer American entrance into the conflict through elaborate trickery centered on luring Nazi subs into attacking U.S. warships in the North Atlantic, he quickly found that, much as the Allies might match his own desire to get the U.S. into the war, his own people were still not ready. And so he did not act, convincing Adolf Hitler of his own degeneracy, as well as that of the people he led.

But Roosevelt was, of course, waiting for a precise set of conditions that would allow him not simply to be the just party in the war but to appear to be as much, at home and abroad. And, of course, by the time the U.S. entered the European and the Pacific wars, there was no doubt about our moral rectitude or our increased military and naval strength.

Lives had been lost, shipping endangered, prestige — personal and otherwise — sullied, but FDR had, by bending with the early blows and waiting for what turned out to be the disaster of Pearl Harbor, pulled off the stroke that would garner the United States, over the course of World War II, so much moral authority that even his less internationally adept successors — from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush — have not been able to drain it; not quite yet, at any rate.

Unlike FDR, however, the current Palestinian, Hezbollah and Israeli leaderships have been unable to embody anything like military or diplomatic restraint. They have instead displayed ever-increasing and more self-defeating impatience, a wholehearted willingness to bail each other out of their respective worst mistakes and a mutually callous attitude toward civilian death.

Nearly identical mistakes and miscues, interlocked in a sickeningly seamless and seemingly unstoppable pattern: In this as in so many things, these enemies have displayed what Freud called "the narcissism of small differences." Those differences seem far less small, however, when one realizes that the narcissism extends to the belief that their causes are worth not only the lives of the most innocent on both sides of every border, but the risk of a regional — or even a global — conflagration.

Clearly, the combatants can no longer be trusted to make sound judgments, and the time has come for the world to insert that rarest of phenomena, a multinational force with both bullets and a brief: to keep the sides apart, to allow humanitarian relief to be administered and to demonstrate that the rest of the world's patience with their repeated errors, and interruptions of each others' errors, will no longer be tolerated.

Will Friday's United Nations Resolution accomplish this? When one reads the fine print, it seems unlikely. And even if it can, it will not begin to go into effect for days — and days, in this conflict, can narrow possibilities for success dramatically by allowing the terrible error of reciprocal civilian death to go on.

(Caleb Carr is a visiting professor of military studies at Bard College and the author of " The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians”)


3. Bombs Not Enough -- by Eric Margolis (from the Toronto Sun)

For the past month, 3,000 lightly-armed Hezbollah fighters have managed to hold off the Israel Defence Forces (IDF), the world’s fourth most powerful military machine.

This wholly unexpected resistance to a major Israeli operation has amazed the world, electrified Muslim nations and stunned Israelis, who previously dismissed Hezbollah as “a bunch of terrorists.”

According to Israeli media, Israel had apparently been planning the Lebanon invasion for the past three years and conducted a mock invasion of Lebanon only a month ago.

Why have Hezbollah’s mujahedeen proven such fierce and skilled fighters? Many are well-educated university graduates, often around 30 to 40 years old. They are dedicated to driving Israeli troops from Lebanon and aiding the Palestinian cause.

Hezbollah is made up of Shia Muslims with deep traditions of self-sacrifice, fearlessness, and heroism in battle. Some believe death in a righteous battle leads one straight to paradise.

In recent days, the IDF suffered grave casualties in southern Lebanon, notably near the beautiful, strategic hilltop town of Marjayoun, losing 15 dead and 34 wounded. Hezbollah claims to have knocked out 13 Israeli armoured vehicles, including five of Israel’s superbly armoured Merkava tanks. Nearby Bint Jebil, which changed hands numerous times, is being hailed as “Hezbollagrad.”

I was with the Israeli army when it first stormed Marjayoun in 1982. Getting to the town means going up a narrow road carved from a cliff, filled with twists and turns providing perfect ambush sites. We crept up under moderate fire from three directions. It was very frightening and exhausting work. Israeli soldiers have been undergoing the same brutal fighting.

Hezbollah arose to resist Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon. Many of its officers are highly skilled and very experienced veterans of the 1980s war. By contrast, IDF ground forces seem to have forgotten almost all the bitter lessons previously learned in Lebanon. The 1980s occupation cost Israel nearly 800 soldiers, the equivalent in the U.S. of 48,000 dead.

Hezbollah is the first Arab fighting force to show real proficiency in small unit combat tactics. Its squads are experts in moving and firing, setting up interlocking fields of fire, ambushes, laying anti-tank mines, and pre-registered mortar fire plans. In fact, this is the first time the IDF has faced really professional soldiers who fight in the western military manner.

Hezbollah’s men wear modern body armour and helmets. They have supplies of munitions cached all over the area, and networks of bunkers, caves and trenches that partially neutralize Israel’s command of the air. Subjected to intensive, round-the-clock bombing by Israel’s air force, Hezbollah fighters have continued to resist with ferocity. No professional western troops could do better.

One of Hezbollah’s few advantages is intimate knowledge of southern Lebanon’s fractured terrain of steep hills, dry stream beds, twisting roads, and deep ravines. Israel’s vast number of tanks and armoured vehicles cannot be employed to full force in such terrain as it was in the deserts of Sinai and barren Golan Heights.

Equally important, Hezbollah’s infantry has acquired sizeable amounts of anti-tank systems. These weapons, some sourced from Iran or Syria, have caused the largest number of Israeli casualties.

Had Hezbollah any effective shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons, Israel’s enormous advantage from devastating close air support would be partially neutralized.

Far from being what Israel and the U.S. call a “terrorist group,” Hezbollah is an integrated political, social, cultural and military movement that represents Lebanon’s Shia, who make up 40% of that nation’s people.

87% support Hezbollah

Recent polls show 87% of Lebanese, including many Christians, Druze, Armenians, Orthodox, and Sunnis now support Hezbollah.

Hezbollah has become an overnight hero among Sunnis, who formerly regarded Shias as vile heretics.

Meanwhile, Israel has acknowledged its military failure to date by shoving aside its Northern Command commander, Maj.-Gen. Udi Adam. He insists his hands were tied by politicians.

A ceasefire agreement was reached late Friday by the UN Security Council. If it does not come into effect, some 40,000 more Israeli troops are poised to enter southern Lebanon. The most likely ground scenario is a westward thrust from the Galilee Panhandle along the Litani River, thus isolating southern Lebanon. But Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, has vowed to fight for every village and hill; however, his men are running low on munitions and taking serious, though not crippling, losses.

Bombing will not destroy Hezbollah. The encouragement of this foolish strategy by U.S. President George W. Bush marks his third military disaster. Israel risks getting permanently stuck in Lebanon through mission creep. Hezbollah cannot be uprooted without wiping out Lebanon’s 1.5 million Shias.

But Israel’s political leaders cannot stop the war without a clear military victory. Anything less will be called a major defeat and bring political oblivion. All Hezbollah has to do to win is survive the Israeli onslaught.

Even the assassination of Nasrallah will not eliminate Hezbollah. Israel’s best way out of this mess is through the current U.S.-French ceasefire proposals. Meanwhile, Hezbollah is being hailed as the new hero of the Muslim world, a turbaned David battling the U.S./Israeli Goliath.


4. Israeli Leaders Fault Bush on War -- by Robert Parry

Amid the political and diplomatic fallout from Israel's faltering invasion of Lebanon, some Israeli officials are privately blaming President George W. Bush for egging Prime Minister Ehud Olmert into the ill-conceived military adventure against the Hezbollah militia in south Lebanon.

Bush conveyed his strong personal support for the military offensive during a White House meeting with Olmert on May 23, according to sources familiar with the thinking of senior Israeli leaders.

Olmert, who like Bush lacks direct wartime experience, agreed that a dose of military force against Hezbollah might damage the guerrilla group's influence in Lebanon and intimidate its allies, Iran and Syria, countries that Bush has identified as the chief obstacles to U.S. interests in the Middle East.

As part of Bush's determination to create a "new Middle East" - one that is more amenable to U.S. policies and desires - Bush even urged Israel to attack Syria, but the Olmert government refused to go that far, according to Israeli sources.

One source said some Israeli officials thought Bush's attack-Syria idea was "nuts" since much of the world would have seen the bombing campaign as overt aggression.

In an article on July 30, the Jerusalem Post referred to Bush's interest in a wider war involving Syria. Israeli "defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the US that America would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria," the newspaper reported.

While balking at an expanded war into Syria, Olmert did agree on the need to show military muscle in Lebanon as a prelude to facing down Iran over its nuclear program, which Olmert has called an "existential" threat to Israel.

With U.S. forces bogged down in Iraq, Bush and his neoconservative advisers saw the inclusion of Israeli forces as crucial for advancing a strategy that would punish Syria for supporting Iraqi insurgents, advance the confrontation with Iran and isolate Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza.

But the month-long war has failed to achieve its goals of destroying Hezbollah forces in south Lebanon or intimidating Iran and Syria.

Instead, Hezbollah guerrillas fought Israeli troops to a virtual standstill in villages near the border and much of the world saw Israel's bombing raids across Lebanon - which killed hundreds of civilians - as "disproportionate."

Now, as the conflict winds down, some Israeli officials are ruing the Olmert-Bush pact on May 23 and fault Bush for pushing Olmert into the conflict.

Building Pressure

Soon after the May 23 meeting in Washington, Israel began to ratchet up pressure on the Hamas-led government in the Palestinian territories and on Hezbollah and other Islamic militants in Lebanon. As part of this process, Israel staged low-key attacks in both Lebanon and Gaza. [For details, see Consortiumnews.com "A 'Pretext' War in Lebanon."]

The tit-for-tat violence led to the Hamas seizure of an Israeli soldier on June 24 and then to Israeli retaliatory strikes in Gaza. That, in turn, set the stage for Hezbollah's attack on an Israeli outpost and the capture of two more Israeli soldiers on July 12.

Hezbollah's July 12 raid became the trigger that Bush and Olmert had been waiting for. With the earlier attacks unknown or forgotten, Israel and the U.S. skillfully rallied international condemnation of Hezbollah for what was called an unprovoked attack and a "kidnapping" of Israeli soldiers.

Behind the international criticism of Hezbollah, Bush and Olmert justified an intense air campaign against Lebanese targets, killing civilians and destroying much of Lebanon's commercial infrastructure. Israeli troops also crossed into southern Lebanon with the intent of delivering a devastating military blow against Hezbollah, which retaliated by firing Katyusha rockets into Israel..

However, the Israeli operation was eerily reminiscent of the disastrous U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq. Like the U.S. assault, Israel relied heavily on "shock and awe" air power and committed an inadequate number of soldiers to the battle.

Israeli newspapers have been filled with complaints from soldiers who say some reservists weren't issued body armor while other soldiers found their equipment either inferior or inappropriate to the battlefield conditions.

Israeli troops also encountered fierce resistance from Hezbollah guerrillas, who took a page from the Iraqi insurgents by using explosive booby traps and ambushes to inflict heavier than expected casualties on the Israelis.

Channel 2 in Israel disclosed that several top military commanders wrote a letter to Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, the chief of staff, criticizing the war planning as chaotic and out of line with the combat training of the soldiers and officers. [Washington Post, Aug. 12, 2006]

One Israeli plan to use llamas to deliver supplies in the rugged terrain of south Lebanon turned into an embarrassment when the animals simply sat down.

Reporter Nahum Barnea, who traveled with an Israeli unit in south Lebanon, compared the battle to "the famous Tom and Jerry cartoons" with the powerful Israeli military playing the role of the cat Tom and the resourceful Hezbollah guerrillas playing the mouse Jerry. "In every conflict between them, Jerry wins," Barnea wrote.

Olmert Criticized

Back in Israel, some leading newspapers have begun calling for Olmert's resignation.

"If Olmert runs away now from the war he initiated, he will not be able to remain prime minister for even one more day," the newspaper Haaretz wrote in a front-page analysis. "You cannot lead an entire nation to war promising victory, produce humiliating defeat and remain in power.

"You cannot bury 120 Israelis in cemeteries, keep a million Israelis in shelters for a month and then say, 'Oops, I made a mistake.'" [See Washington Post, Aug. 12, 2006]

For his part, Bush spent July and early August fending off international demands for an immediate cease-fire. Bush wanted to give Olmert as much time as possible to bomb targets across Lebanon and dislodge Hezbollah forces in the south.

But instead of turning the Lebanese population against Hezbollah - as Washington and Tel Aviv had hoped - the devastation rallied public support behind Hezbollah.

As the month-long conflict took on the look of a public-relations disaster for Israel, the Bush administration dropped its resistance to international cease-fire demands and joined with France in crafting a United Nations plan for stopping the fighting.

Quoting "a senior administration official" with Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, the New York Times reported that "it increasingly seemed that Israel would not be able to achieve a military victory, a reality that led the Americans to get behind a cease-fire." [NYT, Aug. 12, 2006]

But the repercussions from Israel's failed Lebanon offensive are likely to continue. Olmert must now confront the political damage at home and the chief U.S. adversaries in the Middle East may be emboldened by the outcome, more than chastened.

As in the Iraq War, Bush has revealed again how reliance on tough talk and military might can sometimes undercut - not build up - U.S. influence in the strategically important Middle East.

(Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com . It's also available at Amazon.com , as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & "Project Truth.")