| NEW YORK | RUPEE NEWS | July 30th, 2008 | Moin Ansari | The story of Israeli defeats are not advertised and are certainly hidden.
The Winograd Commission offers a quite honest appraisal of some aspects of the July 2006 War. [1] It acknowledges that it was “a serious missed opportunity.” Israel had “initiated a long war, which ended without its clear military victory (italics added).” The Commission notes that a militia “of a few thousand men resisted, for a few weeks, the strongest army in the Middle East, which enjoyed full air superiority and size and technology advantages.” Nothing could reverse Israel’s handicaps: not even a massive ground offensive launched in the last days of the war.
- Chinese Sun Tzu vs Indian Chanakya-Kautilya statecraft
- Chan Akya: Your neighbor is your natural enemy state. The neighbor of your neighbor is your friend
- “if the end could be achieved by non-military method, even by methods of intrigue, duplicity and fraud, he would not advocate an armed conflict“. Chan Akya
- Sun Tzu says, “supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemies resistance without fighting“
- Israel’s occupation is doomed By Uri Avnery : Uri Avnery argues says that one invaluable lesson which Israel must learn from its defeat in Lebanon is that there is no military solution, whether in regard to Lebanon, the Palestinians or Syria
Mr. S. Alam in an article describes the findings of the Winograd Commission of Israel. There is muted criticism of the top Generals. Mr. Alam however over dramatizes the Hizbullah victories. The Israeli army has created a myth which is not congruent with the reality of the situation in the Middle East.1) In 1948 there was active support and connivance of the British authorities in support of the Balfour Declaration. Even the veneer of neutrality was discarded and armed depots and, bases and Police Departments were handed over to the Israelis. The poorly armed and equipped Arab armies were not fighting a rag tag band of guerillas, they were fighting the British Empire and lost.
2) The Israeli victory in 1956 with which occupied the Suez Canal was in actual fact a victory for the British and the French with a tag-along-army of Israel. The invaders were forced to retreat and Nasser kept the nationalized Suez Canal
3) If any war can be called a victory for Isreal, it would be Six Day War. Heavily armed by Britain and the USA, the Isrealis wreaked havoc on the combined Arab armies of Syria, Jordan and Egypt. It was mainly a war of the Israeli Airforce which picked up the other forces like ducks. There is a large body of evidence which now shows that there was heavy direct US involvement in 1967 in support of Israel. This support was not limited to logistics and arms.
4) The most egregious intervention of America was in the 1973 war. Not only had Anwar Saadat’s forces crossed the “natural boundaries” of the Suez Canal, but his Egyptian Army also destroyed the Bar Lev Lines. There was no barrier between the Barlev Lines and Tel Aviv. At this juncture, the existence of Israeli was in total jeopardy. The American Airforce painted with the Star of David attacked the Egyptian forces and satellite communications helped them in reducing the affectivity of the 3rd Army. The 3rd Army was not destroyed and could have lasted for a while. A Cease fire was quickly agreed to with the promise of total withdrawal from all Egyptian territory. A Whitewash and fig leaf was needed to hide this total annihilation. Thus Israel surrendered in the 1973 war—only it was actually consummated as part of a “peace treaty” and not at Taba.
5) The 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon was unable to meet the political objectives in rearranging the Middle East. Like the earlier invasion of Lebanon, this time too, Israeli tanks were able to cross the border, and even eject the PLO, but Israel was unable to install and sustain its puppet regime in Beirut. By attempting to banish the secular PLO from Beirut, the Israelis actually created sowed the seeds for Hizbullah and Hamas which remain as strong as ever. The 2006 Israeli “defeat” in Lebanon can only be described as a political rebuff, a PR fiasco, a military SNAFU and an army stalemate. The Airforce was unable to stop the Qassms so it resorted to collective punishment in destroying Lebanon’s infrastructure. It did not change the dynamics in Beirut, because the invasion was unable to wreck the government and jettison the Hizbullah from Beirut like Sharon did with the PLO. Hizbullah’s pyrrhic “victory” had to deal with the total destruction of the Lebanese infrastructure, meticulously built after Israel’s earlier invasion.
According to Uri Avnery, the Israeli peacnik. The facts speak for themselves:
- On the 32nd day of the war, Hizbullah is still standing and fighting. That by itself is a stunning feat: a small guerrilla organization, with a few thousand fighters, is standing up to one of the strongest armies in the world and has not been broken after a month of “pulverizing”. Since 1948, the armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan have repeatedly been beaten in wars that were much shorter. As I have already said: if a light-weight boxer is fighting a heavy-weight champion and is still standing in the 12th round, the victory is his – whatever the count of points says.
- In the test of results – the only one that counts in war – the strategic and tactical command of Hizbullah is decidedly better than that of our own army. All along, our army’s strategy has been primitive, brutal and unsophisticated.
- Clearly, Hizbullah has prepared well for this war – while the Israeli command has prepared for a quite different war.
- On the level of individual fighters, Hizbullah are not inferior to our soldiers, neither in bravery nor in initiative. (Uri Avnery argues says that one invaluable lesson which Israel must learn from its defeat in Lebanon is that there is no military solution, whether in regard to Lebanon, the Palestinians or Syria)
Has Israel Finally Met Its Match? The Meaning of Hizbullah’s Big Win By M. SHAHID ALAM
On January 31, 2008, when the Winograd Commission submitted its final report on the Second Lebanese War of July 2006, this was a first in Israeli history: a report on why the Israeli military had failed in a war.
The Winograd Commission offers a quite honest appraisal of some aspects of the July 2006 War. [1] It acknowledges that it was “a serious missed opportunity.” Israel had “initiated a long war, which ended without its clear military victory (italics added).” The Commission notes that a militia “of a few thousand men resisted, for a few weeks, the strongest army in the Middle East, which enjoyed full air superiority and size and technology advantages.” Nothing could reverse Israel’s handicaps: not even a massive ground offensive launched in the last days of the war.
Yet, after this clear-headed assessment, the Commission stumbles. It blames Israel’s military setback on “serious failings and flaws” in decision-making, preparedness, coordination between the civilian and military leadership, and strategic planning.[2] In other words, the Israeli military’s poor showing in July 2006 was not the result of any fundamental shift in the balance of forces. These failures were the result of a few bad judgments, inadequate preparation and less-than-optimal coordination between different branches of the Israeli military: all of them errors which can and will be easily corrected in a rematch with the Hizbullah.
We cannot credibly blame the Israeli defeat on failures in decision-making. Israel had many years to destroy the Hizbullah during its long occupation of southern Lebanon; but it withdrew unilaterally in April 2000, with the Hizbullah claiming victory. In July 2006 too, the Israeli military fell far short of matching its earlier easy victories over Arab armies: but this was not because of failures of leadership, the failure to use sufficient firepower (which it did), or the failure to launch a timely ground offensive (it would get grounded the way it had before).
The Israeli military offensive of July 2006 had failed because Israel was fighting a war that did not play to its advantages in size and technology. Israel had finally met its match a foe that was prepared to fight, that knew how to fight on its own terms, a foe that was elusive and cunning, skilled and daring, ready to adapt its methods to neutralize Israel’s technical superiority, that controlled its terrain, and, most importantly, was backed by Iran and Syria. For the first time in its history, an Israeli invasion had been reversed by a cunning guerilla resistance.
In the past, Arab armies had handed easy victories to Israel. Repeatedly, the Arab states chose to fight conventional wars: these backward, recently decolonized countries sent their poorly trained, poorly led, poorly motivated military to fight against the best, most determined military force the developed West could put together. Israel’s victories against the Arab armies is overrated: it always remained an unequal match. The Palestinians chose to fight a guerilla war in Jordan in the late 1960s, but they did so prematurely, without preparing the political conditions for their success. They were defeated because they were forced to fight on two fronts: against Arab enemy states and the Israelis.
The Israelis only deceive themselves when they use alibis bad decisions or inadequate preparation to ‘explain’ their military failures. Ever since their withdrawal from southern Lebanon in April 2000, the Israeli leadership had prepared for the occasion to deal a knockout blow to Hizbullah. Indeed, when the Israelis launched their latest invasion of Lebanon on July 12 2006, they had had more than six years to prepare; and they had had more than two decades to study their adversary.
The Hizbullah too had prepared. Without fanfare, but with dedication, discipline, skill, and cunning, the Hizbullah leaders assembled an arsenal of low-tech rockets as well as more advanced missiles; they built secret bunkers; they laid out defensible communications; they acquired capabilities in electronic warfare; they used drones and eaves-dropping equipment to gather information; they placed spies inside Israel; they studied their enemy; and, most importantly, they had planned and trained, while maintaining the highest secrecy.[3] In a word, the small bands of Arab guerillas in southern Lebanon were prepared and ready.
Israel executed its long-planned offensive against Hizbullah on July 12, 2006, using the excuse of a border skirmish to launch a full-scale and devastating war against Lebanon. They launched massive air and artillery strikes against Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure targeting Beirut and sites as far north as the port city of Tripoli. Israeli ground forces crossed the Lebanese border the same day, and continued to expand their ground invasion in stages throughout the war. During the 33-day war, the Israeli air force flew more than 15,000 sorties and struck 7000 targets in Lebanon; the Israeli navy imposed a blockade on Lebanon, and bombed 2,500 Lebanese targets; and, all told, the Israelis destroyed 15,000 homes, 900 commercial buildings, 400 miles of roads, 80 bridges, and Lebanon’s international airport. Lebanon’s human toll at the end of the war consisted of 845 dead, including 743 civilians, 34 soldiers and 68 Hizbullah guerillas.[4] In addition, close to a million Lebanese were forced to flee their homes.[5] The intent of these genocidal attacks was to turn the Lebanese against the Hizbullah. The Israelis failed in this objective too.
In all its wars against Arab armies, the Israelis had achieved clear victories within days. In 1956, they had captured nearly all of the Sinai in about seven days. In June 1967, they crippled the Egyptian air force within two hours: and the war against the three front-line Arab armies was over in six days. In October war of 1973, the Israelis recovered from their initial losses to cross the Suez Canal ten days after the start of the war, and five days later they had encircled the Egyptian Third Army, a mere 40 miles from Cairo. On the Syrian front, the Israelis had advanced to within ten miles of Damascus. Since 1973, Israel has many times violated the sovereignty of Arab states with impunity.
In contrast, Israel’s full-scale war against Hizbullah’s small guerilla force of some 3000 fighters had lasted for 33 days, without giving the Israelis the satisfaction of claiming victory.[6] On July 12 2006, Israel had started a full-scale war against Lebanon, convinced that it could destroy Hizbullah or greatly diminish its military force within a few days and do it with air power alone. Israel’s decision to end the war 33 days later, even as Hizbullah kept up its barrage of Katyusha rockets into Israel, was a dark chapter in Israel’s military history. Israel’s military might had been neutralized by a seemingly Lilliputian adversary.
In July 2006, agility and cunning favored the Hizbullah. Consider the victories that Israel failed to score against this tiny but agile foe: it failed to destroy or jam Hizbullah’s communications network; to knock out Hizbullah’s television and radio stations; to kill or capture Hassan Nasrallah; or to dent Hizbullah’s ability to launch Katyusha rockets into Israel. Hizbullah was firing Katyusha rockets at the rate of 100 a day during July, doubled this rate in early August, and, in the last few hours before the ceasefire came into effect, fired 250 rockets.[7] On the day of the ceasefire, the Hizbullah still had 14,000 rockets in its arsenal, enough to continue the war for another three months.[8]
Contrary to Israeli denials, the daily barrage of Katyusha rockets took a heavy toll on the Israeli economy. Altogether, a quarter of the 4000 rockets Hizbullah launched during the war hit urban areas: they “paralyzed the whole of northern Israel, its main port, refineries, and many other strategic installations. Over one million Israelis lived in bomb shelters and about 300,000 temporarily left their homes and sought refuge in the south.”[9] For a change, the Hizbullah had brought the war to Israel.
Moreover, the Hizbullah scored several clear victories over Israel’s military. According to an IDF Report Card published in the Jerusalem Post, Israel had deployed some 400 Merkava MK-4 tanks its safest and deadliest tank in Lebanon: 40 of these were hit by Hizbullah’s anti-tank weapons, 20 of them were destroyed, and 30 tank crewmen were killed.[10] According to a report published by The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, “Hizbullah’s success with antitank weapons during the July War reflects many years spent training on these weapons as well as a good plan to use these weapons once the battle began.”
Hizbullah’s infantry or ‘village units’ deployed along the border to slow down the advance of Israeli ground forces “made the IDF pay for every inch of ground that it took. At the same time, crucially, Hizbullah dictated the rules of how the war was to be fought.” It is worth noting that the fighters Hizbullah deployed in southern Lebanon were not its best. “One of the war’s ironies,” Andrew Axum writes, “is that many of Hizballah’s best and most skilled fighters never saw action, lying in wait along the Litani River with the expectation that the IDF assault would be much deeper and arrive much faster than it did.”[11]
The Hizbullah scored its most impressive military victory in the area of intelligence. Israel’s electronic warfare systems are amongst the most advanced in the world; they are war-tested and developed in cooperation with the United States. Indeed, the Israeli commanders were certain at the outset of the war of their ability to jam Hizbullah communications. They were wrong. Hizbullah’s command and control system remained operational throughout the war; they evaded Israeli jamming devices by using fiber optic lines instead of relying on wireless signals.
The Hizbullah had blocked the Barak anti-missile system on Israeli ships; hacked into Israeli battlefield communications in order to monitor Israeli tank movements; and, they monitored cell phone conversations in Hebrew between Israeli reservists and their families. They intercepted Israeli military communications on battlefield casualties and announced them on their media network.[12] They successfully employed decoys to hide the location of hundreds of bunkers they had built in southern Lebanon to store weapons and shelter their fighters.[13] As a world leader in weapons technology and communications, Israel had held a decisive advantage in electronic warfare in its wars with Arab armies. In July 2006, the Hizbullah had neutralized this advantage.
Israel claims that it killed 400-500 Hizbullah fighters. Crooke and Perry insist that these numbers are exaggerated. “It is impossible for Shi’ites (and Hezbollah),” they argue, “not to allow an honorable burial for its martyrs, so in this case it is simply a matter of counting funerals. Fewer than 180 funerals have been held for Hezbollah fighters – nearly equal to the number killed on the Israeli side.”[14]
The Israeli setbacks in the July War of 2006, then, represents a paradigm shift not something that can be pinned on careless errors in decision-making. Unlike the Arab armies in the past, the Hizbullah had fought a people’s war. It neutralized Israel’s technological superiority by deploying its mobile, elusive, disciplined and skilled guerilla detachments not a centralized, conventional army to fight the Israelis.
The Hizbullah fights in small groups, it is evasive, it is secretive, it owns its terrain, it trains, it has high morale, and it enjoys complete popular support amongst Lebanon’s Shi’ites. It can launch thousands of low-tech rockets which rendered sophisticated anti-missile defenses useless. It has also acquired and learned to use with great effectiveness anti-tank missiles that make Israel’s most advanced tanks vulnerable. They have successfully targeted even Israeli warships.
If the Hizbullah can extend these advantages, if it can add shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to its arsenal and bring down a few Israeli helicopters and jets, Israel could quickly lose its unchallenged control over Lebanese skies. Israel’s daily and wanton violations of Lebanese airspace would also come to an end.
The Hizbullah offers Israel a new kind of asymmetric warfare: it combines low-tech guerilla tactics with sophisticated missile and communications technology. Understandably, the Israelis find these Hizbullah achievements hard to digest. What the world witnessed in Lebanon in July 2006 were events that contain the potential for shifting the balance of power in the Middle East. Earlier, the Iraqi insurgents had demonstrated that they can make an occupation even by the world’s greatest power very costly. Now, the Hizbullah had shown that a disciplined guerilla force, with access to advanced missiles, can repel the most powerful invading army.
It appears that the weapons gap that had opened up in recent decades between Western powers and the weaker, technologically backward nations may be closing. How rapidly this happens will depend on the willingness of Russia, China, North Korea, Iran with other countries getting ready to join them to make these weapons available to movements of resistance. Alternatively, if these countries hesitate, the arms smugglers will step in to provide this service. Once anti-tank, anti-ship and shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles can be bought on the world’s illicit arms markets as readily as AK-47s, this will begin to alter the fortunes of resistance movements battling great powers.
In the late nineteenth century, the advanced Western nations had opened a lethal weapons gap with their automatic weapons: this gave them a quick, nearly costless colonization of Africa and Southeast Asia. When that gap began to close in the interwar period, it gave an impetus to resistance movements in Indonesia, Vietnam, Kenya and Algeria.[15] Already weakened from fighting their own fratricidal wars, the Western colonial powers retreated: and the Third World was born.
Will the twenty-first century herald the dawn of another era of gains for movements of resistance across Asia, Africa and Latin America?
M. Shahid Alam is professor of economics at Northeastern University, and author of Challenging the New Orientalism: Dissenting Essays on America’s ‘War Against Islam’. He may be reached at alqalam02760@yahoo.com.
References:
[1] It would be naïve to expect the Winograd Commission to censure Israel for unleashing a war of destruction against Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure for bombing villages, apartment blocks, ambulances, dairy plants, bridges, roads and the Beirut airport. With the unconditional support of Western nations and the US taking the lead over the past sixty years, Israel’s wars of aggression against Arabs, its ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, its assassinations of Palestinian leaders, its bombing of civilian infrastructure, its torture of prisoners, its siege of civilian areas have been excused as ‘security’ measures against ‘terrorism.’
[2] Summary of the Winograd Commission Report. International Herald Tribune (January 31, 2007).
FAILURE and DEFEAT IN AFGHANISTAN, PAYBACK FOR PAKISTAN: “Character assassination” of Musharraf to “Assassination of Bhutto” and pre-planned riots in Sindh are a desperate attempt to hide the debacle in Afghansitan and save the Mayor of Kabul and Destabilize Pakistan.
Mars and Venus: Pretzel answers to Jalaibi questions
US-Pakistan Strategic Partnership Statement “full of sound and fury signifying nothing”
US-Pakistan relations: Despite rhetoric–Still transactional
THE PAKISTANI RESILIENCE IN THE FACE OF THREATS: Mountbatten, Nehru, Indira, Kruschev, Johnson, Carter, Kissinger (Nixon), Gobachov, Clinton, Armitage (Bush), Karzia (Bush and Vajpayee/Sing) have all threatened Pakistan: The Pakistanis are used to it…so what else is new?!! Pakistan’s Nuclear Program should be seen in the backdrop of these threats.
Invading Pakistan? Lessons learned from the Hizballah war?
Indian intelligence: “‘the aim of RAW is to keep internal disturbances flaring up and the ISI preoccupied so that Pakistan can lend no worthwhile resistance to Indian designs in the region.” Its not just Pakistan. Nepal and Sri Lanka also face the same challenges.
Israel’s Labanon war
On July 12th 2006, Israel invaded Lebanon. The official casus belli were the killings of three members of the Israeli Army by Hezbollah in Israel and the capture of two others. In actuality Israel prepared for the war in advance and waited for the opportunity to present itself in order to justify an attack. Motives such as these keep coming up for both sides in the border area between the two countries. Critic Noam Chomsky recounts a few of the incidents: ‘IDF kidnapping of civilians on June 24, Hamas capture of a soldier the next day, then the huge U.S.-Israeli escalation of attacks on Gaza… then the kidnapping of soldiers by Hezbollah, then the U.S.-Israeli destruction of most of Lebanon, justified by the pretense of outrage over kidnapping, which – to repeat – is demonstrated, conclusively, to be cynical fraud’. While the war was still going on, Israel changed the code name by which military operations were being carried out from Operation Just Cause to Operation Change of Direction.
In March of 2007 Israeli Prime Minister Olmert admitted to the Winograd Commission that approximately three months before the Lebanon War he gave his permission for the operation by accepting a plan from his then-chief of staff Dan Halutz. Shortly after the kidnapping and in the midst of hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, Halutz sold off his shares, and in so doing avoided the losses that occurred when the market fell by ten percent as a result of the war that followed. Olmert made his admission to the commission in order to demonstrate that the dramatic loss of the war was not due to ill preparedness .
In reality, the Lebanon War was even better planned than Prime Minister Olmert would admit to the commission. In January of 2006, four days after succeeding a comatose Ariel Sharon, Olmert held an initial conversation on a war against Lebanon. But it might be correct to look back even further. The war was ‘in a sense’ already being planned back in 2000, right after Israel withdrew troops from Lebanon after being there for 18 years, says Professor Gerald Steinberg of Israel’s Bar-Ilan University. According to Steinberg, a war of about three weeks had been devised by 2004, after which it was simulated and rehearsed. The actual Lebanon War ended up lasting 34 days, resulting in 159 deaths on the Israeli side and 1125 deaths on the Lebanese side, of which hundreds were children. America was made aware of Israeli plans to attack Lebanon. American and other diplomats, journalists and thinktanks were notified approximately one year prior to the war with the help of a PowerPoint presentation, given by a senior Israeli army officer, writes the San Fransisco Chronicle. The meetings in which the plans for war were discussed in detail were held off the record and on the condition that the identity of the officer be kept secret.
After the war questions arise whether British Prime Minister Tony Blair was aware of Israeli plans and whether he might not have attempted more in order to avoid bloodshed. Journalist John Kampfner writes under the headline Blood on his hands: ‘I am told that the Israelis informed George W. Bush in advance of their plans to ‘destroy’ Hezbollah by bombing villages in southern Lebanon. The Americans duly informed the British. So Blair knew’. Kampfner’s information is confirmed by an anonymous source from the English Daily Mail which was quoted in August of 2006 and said that Tony Blair was informed of developments concerning Lebanon by the U.S. At the same time the newspaper quotes another source, this one by first and last name – John Pike, director of Global Security: ‘Has the U.S. given Israel a green light to attack Hezbollah and push its troops into southern Lebanon? Yes, of course it has’. According to Pike there is an agreement between Israel and the U.S. that Iranian nuclear plants would eventually have to be bombed – ‘probably next year’ – to stop the development of a nuclear weapon. Pike feels that once that happens, Iran will order Hezbollah to attack Israel.
To him this explains the attack on Lebanon in July of 2006. Pike believes that there was a secret agreement between the U.S. and Israel that at some point before the attack on the Iranian nuclear facilities, Hezbollah had to be disarmed and that as soon as a pretext became available, Israel should use force. Just as in the case of Iran, Israeli interests run parallel to those of the United States. This also appears to be the case in a 2003 report from the reputable Jane’s Intelligence Digest that the U.S. was weighing an attack on Hezbollah. And in 2008 a plan was revealed that was not only considered, but was also approved and carried out. Approved by President Bush and realized by his Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – a plan to arm the Palestinian party Fatah. The goal was to provoke a Palestinian civil war in which the democratically elected Hamas would be toppled. The result was the complete control of Hamas over the Gaza Strip.
The armies of both Israel and Hezbollah were criticized in a report by Human Rights Watch for intentionally killing civilians. During the fighting, Israel dropped up to a million cluster bombs, probably acquired from the world’s biggest producer of this type of explosive, as well as the one that provides Israel with billions of dollars in military aid – the United States. ‘We already had a major landmine problem from previous Israeli invasions, but this is far worse’, says Chris Clark of the UN Mine Action Coordination Center, standing before a map filled with flags indicating bomb sites. Cluster bombs were first used by the Nazis and are permitted under international law. In January of 2008 the United States resists proposals for stricter laws relating to cluster bombs and said that the explosives aren’t bad as long as they are used responsibly.
In June Defense Secretary Robert Gates states that by 2018 the military will no longer use cluster weapons with a failure rate greater than 1 percent. In the interim period the US will deplete its existing stockpiles of cluster munitions with a greater than 1 percent dud rate by exporting them to foreign governments that agree not to use them starting in 2018. In the bombing of Lebanon, Israel may have made use – as it has done for decades – of American intelligence. In the area of psychological warfare, upwards of 700,000 automated voice mails were delivered to Lebanese citizens in and around the time of the war, and 17 million leaflets were dropped above Lebanon during 47 missions, some of which for example depicted Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah as a snake or a scorpion. Israel also interrupted a Hezbollah TV channel in order to show a dead Hezbollah fighter, accompanied by the message that there will be many more such bodies to come. After the war was over, the Beirut advertising agency Idea Creation launched a $100,000 ad campaign at Hezbollah’s behest called Divine Victory, delivering the message of a military victory over Israel .
A Middle East expert familiar with the mindset of both the Israeli and American governments says in August of 2006 to journalist Seymour Hersh that the White House had several reasons for supporting the Israeli attack. The most important was Iran. Another source, the neoconservative Middle East expert Meyrav Wurmser, confims this by saying that the main argument by the White House for supporting Israel was that the war ‘would damage and weaken Hezbollah so that it would pose less of a threat to Israel in the event of an attack on Iran’. Wurmser is employed by the conservative thinktank Hudson Institute and is the wife of David Wurmser, who up until mid-2007 was the Middle East advisor to Vice President Dick Cheney. According to Meyrav Wurmser some of her colleagues are unhappy over what Israel did: ‘The thought in America was that Israel should fight against the real enemy, the one backing Hizbullah. It was obvious that it is impossible to fight directly against Iran , but the thought was that its strategic and important ally Syria should be hit. [...] The neocons are responsible for the fact that Israel got a lot of time and space [for the execution of the war]‘. Wurmser feels that an attack on Syria would have been a harsh blow to Iran. The great dissatisfaction in the White House – Wurmser even calls it ‘anger’ at Israel – over the loss of the war is focused on the fact that Israel didn’t take the fight to Syria. On 6 September 2007 Israël attacked Syria: Operation Orchard.
Joe Klein in Neocon cross hairs for opposing new wars
APPENDIX A
What Israel’s Defeat in Lebanon Means for Defense Industry Fat Cats By WILLIAM S. LIND
In the 1989 Marine Corps Gazette article where I and four colleagues first laid out the Four Generations of Modern War, we foresaw two potential futures. One, the way the world has gone, was 4GW. The other, the direction the Pentagon has taken, became known as the Revolution in Military Affairs, or, more recently, Transformation. This vision of future war, a vision anchored in hi-tech, high-price “systems,” is, I am happy to report, militarily dead.
While its corpse still twitches in Iraq and Afghanistan, its obituary was published in April, in Israel, when the Winograd Commission published its report (is Winograd, one wonders, the city in Galicia where old Polish generals go to die of cirrhosis?) On May 29, a summary of its findings by Haninah Levine was made available by the Center for Defense Information. The defense industry fat cats must have read it and wept.
The Winograd Commission was established to examine the Israeli debacle in Lebanon last summer. According to the Levine summary, its first lesson is, “Western militaries are in active state of denial concerning the limitations of precision weapons.” Speaking of the then-IDF Chief of Staff General Dan Halutz — Israel’s first and, I suspect, last Chief of Staff drawn from the Air Force — Levine writes:
Halutz encouraged the civilian leaders to believe that Israel could launch a precision air and artillery offensive without getting dragged into a broad ground offensive. … the failure of Halutz and the General Staff to appraise the enemy’s abilities: correctly at the outbreak of the war stemmed not from incorrect intelligence or analysis, but from a willed denial of the limitations of the IDF’s precision weapons.
In how many valleys of Afghanistan is the same sad lesson being taught? In how many towns of Diyala province in Iraq, or streets in Sadr City?
Levine continues,
The Winograd Commission traces studiously the origins of the General Staff’s error of judgment. The commission outlines the changes which took place in Israeli military doctrine over the preceding decade in response both to strategic developmentsand to technological developments — the so called “revolution in military affairs,” whose keystone is the advent of precision air-to-surface and surface-to-surface weapon systems
The first lessen of the Second Lebanon War is that wishful thinking concerning the capabilities of precision weapon systems overpowered the General Staff’ s analytical abilities…. Faith in advanced air and artillery systems as magical “game-changing” systems absolved the General Staff from the need to consider what capabilities (such as distributed and hardened facilities) the enemy possessed, and led the IDF into a strategic trap it had recognized in advance.
This lesson, I think, can be extrapolated in two useful ways in the American context. First, the strategic or more precisely doctrinal, trap set by the RMA has long been recognized. The trap, quite simply is that for the RMA to succeed, it had to contradict the nature of war.
The RMA reduces war to putting fires on targets. It promises to use new technology to make everything targetable. But this means it also promises to eliminate uncertainty, to make war transparent, to eliminate the quality that defines war, the independent hostile will of the enemy. In other words, it is bunk. The fact that it is bunk was evident to a great many people from the outset, even people in Washington.
Why, then, did it get as far as it did (it remains DOD policy even today)? Here we can extrapolate again from the Winograd Commission’s finding: the RMA’s hi-tech systems are indeed magically “game changing.” But the game they change is the budget game, not war. The RMA has given the Pentagon such magical results as bomber aircraft that cost more per unit than the Navy’s ships (the B-2), three fighters for one billion dollars (the F-22), and the most magical system of all, the Army’s Future Contract System, a system no one can describe but costs more than any program in any other service. Boy, that’s magic! Even the Wizard of Id must be jealous.
The fact is, Pentagon policy has nothing to do with war, which has a great deal to do with why we are losing two wars. The Pentagon is the last Soviet industry. It is not about producing a product, least of all a product that works. It is solely, entirely, about acquiring and justifying resources. That the RMA does supremely well.
The defeat in Lebanon seems to have confronted the RMA in Israel with the unpleasant reality of the outside world. Will two defeats have the same effect on Washington? Perhaps, but don’t bet on it. Half a trillion dollars a year can buy a great deal of political magic.
William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is Director for the Center for Cultural Conservatism for the Free Congress Foundation.
