What now for Israel?
Aug 28, 2006 11:14:27 GMT -5
Post by Disgruntled70sHab on Aug 28, 2006 11:14:27 GMT -5
BC, you gave a pretty good synopsis on what Hezbollah has already won and what Israel has already lost.
Found this aticle on Gwynne Dyer's site. I think he made some very, very good observations. For instance, he cites why Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert made the call to go into Lebanon in the first place. And how that decision will politically ruin him and likely benefit Binyamin Netanyahu, the "hardest of hard-liners."
15 August 2006
The New Middle East
By Gwynne Dyer
Common sense has prevailed. Most of the Israeli troops who were
sent into south Lebanon last weekend have already retreated, and the last
thousand or two will be back inside the Israeli frontier by next weekend.
They are not waiting for the Lebanese army and the promised international
peacekeeping force to come in and "disarm Hezbollah." They are getting the
hell out.
The last-minute decision to airlift Israeli troops deep into the
four hundred square miles (1,000 sq. km.) of Lebanon south of the Litani
river made good sense politically. That way, Israel didn't have to fight
its way in and take the inevitable heavy casualties. It just exploited its
total control of the air to fly its troops into areas not actively defended
by Hezbollah just before the ceasefire, in order to create the impression
that it had defeated the guerilla organisation and established control over
southern Lebanon.
However, those isolated packets of troops actually controlled
nothing of value, and they were surrounded by undefeated Hezbollah fighters
on almost every side. Hezbollah could not have resisted for long the
temptation to attack the more exposed Israeli units, perhaps even forcing
some to surrender. So the Israeli troops are coming out now, in order to
give Hezbollah no easy targets.
General Dan Halutz, the Israeli chief of staff, was right to make
this decision, but it removes the last remote possibility that Israel can
extract any political gains from the military stalemate in southern
Lebanon. Hezbollah says it has no intention of disarming, and Lebanese
defence minister Elias Murr says that his army will not try to disarm
Hezbollah. The French, who are supposed to lead the greatly expanded United
Nations peacekeeping force in the area, say that they will not commit their
troops until Hezbollah is disarmed.
There will probably be some kind of fudge in the end that allows at
least token numbers of Lebanese army troops and a somewhat expanded UN
force to operate in southern Lebanon, but Hezbollah is staying put and so
are its weapons. Over a thousand people killed, much of Lebanon's
infrastructure destroyed, significant damage in northern Israel as well,
and at the end of this "war of choice" Israel has achieved none of its
objectives.
Israel's assault on Hezbollah was as much a "war of choice" as the
US invasion of Iraq. Seymour Hersh claims in this week's "New Yorker" that
the Bush administration approved it months ago, and the San Francisco
Chronicle reported that a senior Israeli officer made Power-Point
presentations on the planned operation to selected Western audiences over a
year ago.
"By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks
that we're seeing now had already been blocked out," Professor Gerald
Steinberg of Bar Ilan University told the Chronicle, "and in the last year
or two it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board."
Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was seduced by this plan
because, lacking military experience himself, he needed the credibility of
having led a major military operation. Otherwise, he would lack support
for his plan to impose unilateral borders in the occupied West Bank that
would keep the major settlement blocks within Israel, while handing the
rest to the Palestinians. So he seized on the kidnapping of two Israeli
soldiers and the killing of three others by Hezbollah on 12 July, the
latest in an endless string of back-and-forth border violations, as the
pretext for an all-out onslaught on the organisation.
But it didn't work. The Israeli armed forces have effectively been
fought to a standstill by a lightly armed but highly trained and
disciplined guerilla force, and there will be major repercussions at home
and abroad.
Israel's humiliation might be a blessing in disguise if it
persuaded enough Israeli voters that exclusive reliance on military force
to smash and subdue their Arab neighbours is a political dead-end, but
there is little chance of that. The Israeli politician likeliest to
benefit from this mess is Binyamin Netanyahu, hardest of hard-liners, who
flamboyantly quit the Likud Party last year in protest at former prime
minister Ariel Sharon's policy of pulling out of the occupied Gaza Strip.
That split Likud and forced Sharon to launch a new party, Kadima,
which now dominates the centre-right of Israeli politics and is the nucleus
of Olmert's coalition government. But Kadima may not long survive this
disastrous war, and the heir apparent, at the head of a resurgent Likud, is
Netanyahu. The last opinion poll in Israel gave him an approval rating of
58 percent.
Much graver, in the long run, is the erosion of Israel's myth of
military invincibility. It is always more economical to frighten your
enemies into submission than to fight them, but Arabs have been losing
their fear of Israel for some years now. This defeat will greatly
accelerate the process, and there are a lot more Arabs than there are
Israelis.
Syria's President Bashar al-Assad summed up the matter brutally but
accurately when he said on Monday that Israel is at "an historic
crossroads. Either it moves towards peace and gives back (Palestinian,
Syrian and Lebanese) rights (to Israeli-occupied lands), or it faces
chronic instability until (an Arab) generation comes and puts an end to the
problem." Of course, he didn't mention that an Arab military victory over
Israel would also effectively put an end to the Arabs, since Israel has
hundreds of nuclear weapons.
Israel had a chance to handle this differently. But, it seems the invasion was more of an excuse to eradicate Hezbollah and a chance at establishing political credibility than it was about getting back those three kidnapped soldiers. Omert failed on both counts.
Cheers.
Found this aticle on Gwynne Dyer's site. I think he made some very, very good observations. For instance, he cites why Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert made the call to go into Lebanon in the first place. And how that decision will politically ruin him and likely benefit Binyamin Netanyahu, the "hardest of hard-liners."
15 August 2006
The New Middle East
By Gwynne Dyer
Common sense has prevailed. Most of the Israeli troops who were
sent into south Lebanon last weekend have already retreated, and the last
thousand or two will be back inside the Israeli frontier by next weekend.
They are not waiting for the Lebanese army and the promised international
peacekeeping force to come in and "disarm Hezbollah." They are getting the
hell out.
The last-minute decision to airlift Israeli troops deep into the
four hundred square miles (1,000 sq. km.) of Lebanon south of the Litani
river made good sense politically. That way, Israel didn't have to fight
its way in and take the inevitable heavy casualties. It just exploited its
total control of the air to fly its troops into areas not actively defended
by Hezbollah just before the ceasefire, in order to create the impression
that it had defeated the guerilla organisation and established control over
southern Lebanon.
However, those isolated packets of troops actually controlled
nothing of value, and they were surrounded by undefeated Hezbollah fighters
on almost every side. Hezbollah could not have resisted for long the
temptation to attack the more exposed Israeli units, perhaps even forcing
some to surrender. So the Israeli troops are coming out now, in order to
give Hezbollah no easy targets.
General Dan Halutz, the Israeli chief of staff, was right to make
this decision, but it removes the last remote possibility that Israel can
extract any political gains from the military stalemate in southern
Lebanon. Hezbollah says it has no intention of disarming, and Lebanese
defence minister Elias Murr says that his army will not try to disarm
Hezbollah. The French, who are supposed to lead the greatly expanded United
Nations peacekeeping force in the area, say that they will not commit their
troops until Hezbollah is disarmed.
There will probably be some kind of fudge in the end that allows at
least token numbers of Lebanese army troops and a somewhat expanded UN
force to operate in southern Lebanon, but Hezbollah is staying put and so
are its weapons. Over a thousand people killed, much of Lebanon's
infrastructure destroyed, significant damage in northern Israel as well,
and at the end of this "war of choice" Israel has achieved none of its
objectives.
Israel's assault on Hezbollah was as much a "war of choice" as the
US invasion of Iraq. Seymour Hersh claims in this week's "New Yorker" that
the Bush administration approved it months ago, and the San Francisco
Chronicle reported that a senior Israeli officer made Power-Point
presentations on the planned operation to selected Western audiences over a
year ago.
"By 2004, the military campaign scheduled to last about three weeks
that we're seeing now had already been blocked out," Professor Gerald
Steinberg of Bar Ilan University told the Chronicle, "and in the last year
or two it's been simulated and rehearsed across the board."
Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert was seduced by this plan
because, lacking military experience himself, he needed the credibility of
having led a major military operation. Otherwise, he would lack support
for his plan to impose unilateral borders in the occupied West Bank that
would keep the major settlement blocks within Israel, while handing the
rest to the Palestinians. So he seized on the kidnapping of two Israeli
soldiers and the killing of three others by Hezbollah on 12 July, the
latest in an endless string of back-and-forth border violations, as the
pretext for an all-out onslaught on the organisation.
But it didn't work. The Israeli armed forces have effectively been
fought to a standstill by a lightly armed but highly trained and
disciplined guerilla force, and there will be major repercussions at home
and abroad.
Israel's humiliation might be a blessing in disguise if it
persuaded enough Israeli voters that exclusive reliance on military force
to smash and subdue their Arab neighbours is a political dead-end, but
there is little chance of that. The Israeli politician likeliest to
benefit from this mess is Binyamin Netanyahu, hardest of hard-liners, who
flamboyantly quit the Likud Party last year in protest at former prime
minister Ariel Sharon's policy of pulling out of the occupied Gaza Strip.
That split Likud and forced Sharon to launch a new party, Kadima,
which now dominates the centre-right of Israeli politics and is the nucleus
of Olmert's coalition government. But Kadima may not long survive this
disastrous war, and the heir apparent, at the head of a resurgent Likud, is
Netanyahu. The last opinion poll in Israel gave him an approval rating of
58 percent.
Much graver, in the long run, is the erosion of Israel's myth of
military invincibility. It is always more economical to frighten your
enemies into submission than to fight them, but Arabs have been losing
their fear of Israel for some years now. This defeat will greatly
accelerate the process, and there are a lot more Arabs than there are
Israelis.
Syria's President Bashar al-Assad summed up the matter brutally but
accurately when he said on Monday that Israel is at "an historic
crossroads. Either it moves towards peace and gives back (Palestinian,
Syrian and Lebanese) rights (to Israeli-occupied lands), or it faces
chronic instability until (an Arab) generation comes and puts an end to the
problem." Of course, he didn't mention that an Arab military victory over
Israel would also effectively put an end to the Arabs, since Israel has
hundreds of nuclear weapons.
Israel had a chance to handle this differently. But, it seems the invasion was more of an excuse to eradicate Hezbollah and a chance at establishing political credibility than it was about getting back those three kidnapped soldiers. Omert failed on both counts.
Cheers.