Hezbollah has already won
By Ted Belman
Olmert is fighting this war on the cheap. Overwhelming force is needed. Olmert will settle for an inconclusive solution. Rice will not be able to create a solution that makes a difference.
In previous posts I expressed concern with the progress of the war suggesting incursions should have been made much earlier. Today I wondered why Israel isn’t conducting simultaneous incursions in about 10 villages along the border at the same time. It certainly has enough troops. This business of doing one village at a time baffles me.
Also I have no illusions about what an occupation force or buffer force can accomplish. The US, or NATO or any other force that is put together will no more be able to quell the violence then they are in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now if the force is to be mandated to fight Hezbollah, then better to let Israel do it because Israel has the will and the ability which an international force wouldn’t have.
Furthermore, every day that Israel fails to stop Hezbollah, is another day of huge impact on Israel’s economy. Psycholigically also, the longer it takes the more respect Hezbollah earns.
DEBKA shares my concerns
[..] At the same time, DEBKAfile’s military experts say that what he says is correct and must be taken into account in any diplomatic formula sought to end the warfare.
1. He could go on firing his rockets even when a multinational force is posted on the Lebanese-Israeli border. The force currently contemplated by Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert at this early stage of international diplomacy would consist of German, French and Czech units.
2. And even if multinational troops were deployed additionally on the Lebanese-Syrian border, they would not hamper Hizballah’s rocket offensive. Therefore a buffer zone would offer no solution to a cessation of cross-border hostilities.
DEBKAfile’s military analysts say that the way the Israel-Hizballah war has been prosecuted up until Monday, July 24, is more likely to bring Nassrallah closer to his war objectives than Olmert.
Notwithstanding the IDF’s important battle gains at a number of focal South Lebanese points in the last 24 hours – including the latest raids on the outskirts of Bint Jubeil on the heels of the capture of Maroun er Ras – only one multiple firing rocket launcher (picture) and 6 single-barrel launchers have been destroyed.
This figure will certainly multiply substantially in the coming days. Yet it will not change the essential strategic picture or stop the rocket fire from holding northern Israel and more than a million inhabitants to siege.
Last week, Israel’s army chiefs believed they had encountered Hizballah’s primary war tactic – Viet Cong-style guerrilla warfare out of hundreds of small bunkers scattered across the country. This week had scarcely begun when a still more formidable impediment was discovered: Hizballah camouflage techniques borrowed from the Japanese in the 1945 Iwo Jima battle. To stop the rockets coming, Israeli special forces must continue to blow up the tunnels and also adopt the methods the US Army’s methods for overcoming the Japanese dug in at Iwo Jima and other Pacific islands at the end of World War II. Without regard to losses, they stormed Japanese dug-in positions and camouflaged units. using flame throwers and gasoline to burn the foliage concealing the enemy.
DEBKAfile’s military sources report that Israeli military chiefs have just begun studying Hizballah’s arts of camouflage. A senior officer told DEBKAfile grimly: “Now we know that when a stand of five or six trees suddenly starts walking, we are seeing a 14-barreled Fajr 3 rocket launcher on the move; one or two trees in motion may conceal a couple of Hizballah fighters.”
But the situation is more difficult when the trees or bushes stand still and blend in with the surrounding dense foliage. By the time IDF spotters report five suspicious trees or bushes to overhead aircraft, helicopters or the nearest ground units, the Hizballah launchers or the fighters have moved on and changed their camouflage outfits. The small Israeli special operations units called in to hunt and destroy the last-seen mobile vegetation face a mystifying task.
“This is a high-precision operation,” said the officer. “It is time-consuming – could take weeks if not months - dangerous and calls for larger numbers of troops than we have available.”
In the first ten days of the war, therefore, the Israeli air force bombed out empty Hizballah premises in South Beirut and Baalbek, but missed the moving woods and vegetation which concealed the rocket launchers – which explains why the blitz continued notwithstanding heavy Israeli air force assaults on Hizballah’s centers and strongholds.
But Israel military strategists have got a handle on Hizballah’s rocket-launching methods. Each rocket crew, carefully camouflaged, advances independently to its firing position and fires a volley, never a single rocket. If one crew chances on another, they all loose their rockets simultaneously.
DEBKAfile’s military analysts assert that the rocket offensive against Israel will go on for the following reasons:
1. While the IDF has begun to understand Hizballah’s tactics and methods of warfare, the Olmert government has decided to deny the operation sufficient ground troops to come to grips with the small knots of moving rocket crewmen.
Some of DEBKAfile’s military experts fear the Israeli government may be falling into the Bush administration’s disastrous error of allocating too few troops to the Iraq war for attaining its goals.
2. Iran is constantly pumping through Syria fresh rocket teams to replace those wiped out by Israeli forces.
3. Hizballah’s leader wants no part in the diplomatic initiatives led by US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice in conjunction with the Europeans, Olmert, the Lebanese government and moderate Sunni Arab rulers. Nasrallah is playing his own game and will not be a party to a ceasefire at this point or stop firing his rockets – except on his terms.
4. He will show the same contempt for a multinational force, however effective, deployed on Lebanon’s borders with Israel and Syria, and simply keep on shooting. He knows as well as anyone that German or French troops will never go chasing through Lebanon’s woods and hay stacks to tackle his fighters in face-to-face combat. He may not stick to as many as 100 rockets a day – as at present, but he will keep his hand on the button and push it whenever it suits him. Nasrallah will only end the war when he can claim victory – or is finally eliminated.
Most Israeli generals agree that going for a multinational force, which appears to be the direction seriously contemplated by Ehud Olmert, would constitute a repeat of the blunder Ariel Sharon and Olmert himself perpetrated when, in their haste to evacuate the Gaza Strip last summer, they handed security over the Gazan-Egyptian Philadelphi border to Egyptian forces and the crossing to European monitors.
Nasrallah has already struck the pose of victor and is dictating terms. Monday, July 24, he handed the Lebanese government a list of the prisoners in Israeli jails whom he wants released as the price for returning the kidnapped Israeli soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. He has not budged an inch from his initial demand for their release: indirect negotiations for a prisoner swap.
The Israeli prime minister, who has switched his war objectives several times, is heading for a course that may at best restore the three abducted Israeli solders, Gilead Shalit in Hamas’ hands, as well as Goldwasser and Regev. But this course will not rescue northern Israel and a third of the country from the nightmare of rockets falling night and day and destroying their lives or the Palestinian Qassam missiles from Gaza making life intolerable for Israel’s south.
This is the reality. What is the solution? What is for sure is that nothing short of dealing with Syria will help. Even if Syria is crushed, Iran can still smuggle in weapons from Iraq.
I agree in general that this is disturbing, however, with everything that is happening the Middle East, I can’t help but feel that there are bigger issues that the main force of Israel is being reserved for. Perhap Iran is waiting and hoping that we will commit too much to this area and leave them open for their big surprise?
Comment by sliceomatic
— July 24, 2006 @ 12:02 pm
The lesson of Debka’s remarks seems to be that solving knotty problems with force doesn’t work, whether you are the IDF or Hezbollah.
Insanity is doing something and when it doesn’t work, doing it some more.
Comment by bkallen
— July 24, 2006 @ 12:25 pm
The solution is not dealing with the clowns but with the circus owner: Iran. The sooner the better.
Comment by jfsalaso
— July 24, 2006 @ 1:08 pm
The real problem is that international peacekeepers absent US forces will attempt to be neutral. Should terrorist and their targets be treated equally?
The mindset of peacekeeps is to treat all parties equal and not take sides. By treating aggressors as defenders and vice versa, peacekeepers will complicate the situation by in certain circumstances effectively becoming ‘terrorist protection agents\”. Even in situations where they may confront terrorist they will tend to take a deffensive position. You cannot stop terrorism with defense. Terrorist attacks will not stop, but the Israelis will be politically hindered from dealing with them freely and effectively because of the presence of \’peacekeepers\’. Eventually Israelis will be forced to take actions to protect themselves after international forces fail at the task, at which point Israel would be portrayed as an aggressor and turned into the “bad guy” by the media and international community.
I\’m no military expert but I must wonder if Israel made a mistake by not going into Lebanon with a full scale military assult from the outset.
Comment by RandyTexas
— July 24, 2006 @ 1:48 pm
Hezbollah won this war!! I beg to differ, gentlemen, it is Iran. Iran supplied the training, the tactics, the war materioel and military direction of Hezbollah’s proxy troops and resupplied both its own Revoluntionary Guards cadres and Hezbolleh rocket troops with more ammunition, Zilzul and el Jahr 3 and 5 rockets that have the capability of reaching Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.
The debka analogy to Iwo Jima is apt, actually Okinawa is more appropriate. Why? Because in both of the tail ending campaigns the Japanese built huge warrens of underground bunkers and firing platforms with pre-registered artillery and mortars and interlocking fields of automatic weapons fire that killed thousands of jarheads, GIs, including a field General. It was also analogous, because the Japense militarists were suffused with the cult of the Emperor, doctrine of bushido and were fanatics to the extent of not blinking an eyebrow about soldiers, sailors and airmen sacrificing themselves in kamikaze human wave attacks and aerial suicide bombs.
The Iranian Mahdist overlords are suffused with a similar fanatcism-Shia Jew and Christian hatred. Their stated objective as my friend Dr. Andrew Bostom has written is to:
establish a Mahdist Sharia state in Lebanon, destroy Israel and kill Jews around the world. And they have done it.
Now why the IAF didn’t shoot out of the sky those Iranian air frieghters resupplying Hezbollah on flights from Bandar Abbas to Homs in Syria last Friday is beyond my ken.
Bombing Syria receiving airfields might be a useful start to halt the Iranian skytrain of resupply.
ZAHAL may be constrained by diplomatesse of Messrs. Olmert and his inexperienced Minister of Defense or the overarching ministrations of condi rice-the new kissinger.
But sooner or later those nearly 2 million Israelis living in those sweltering bomb shelters are going to demand aggressive pursuit of the proxy war to do something simple and yet complex-stop the rockets and missiles from reigning death and immobilizing the population and destroying the economy.
ZAHAL can and should mobilize the reserves and begin a broadfront slugfest, because bringing in a NATO multinational force will be like Yoggi Berra used to opine in his famous malapropism; “like de ja vu all over again.”
Remember, Beirut 1983 and thsoe dead Marines, Navy and Army personnel and French Paras and what we and the French did:skedadle before Iran and their rev guards in the bekaa Valley and Hezbollah islamokazes.
Israel made a mistake in May 2000 when it left Southern Lebanon,in a pell mell rout and when it left Gaza nearly one year ago.
Israel needs a unity government with able Ministers to unleash the full fury and capabilities to destroy Islamofascists spreading death in its midst.
What is the talmudic dictat: “someone is coming to kill you. Kill them first.” Neither Olmert nor peretz have read thec appropriate tractate have they?
Comment by Jerry Gordon
— July 24, 2006 @ 2:32 pm
Randy, your last thought is the right one. We, Israel, should have sent in 50,000 troops using what ever means to destroy the Hizbollah and I say this as an ex- military officer. It doesn’t matter about overkill with these people.
Olmert and Peretz are so stupid that they have to scratch each other’s ass. I have asked this question before, Where is Moshe Ya’alon when he is needed. Halutz doesn’t count because he is a yes man to Kadima.
Comment by Ed D
— July 24, 2006 @ 3:04 pm
There must be more to the Israeli strategy than meets the eye but in both Gaza and Southern Lebanon Israel is pursuing a go-easy policy. I cannot believe, as Debka says, that the IDF has just figured out that the Hezbollah are in tunnels and enclaves that they have been building, reinforcing and equipping for 6 or more years.
It is also a fact that you cannot separate Hezbollah from the rest of the population because many non-combatants are supplying and working for the Islamic war machine. Lebanon said that it would ally itself to Hezbollah militarily and that is what they are doing.
I wondered aloud from the outset why Israel did not attack mostly in the Beka Valley, the southern areas and Syria, sparing Beirut. Then we learned that rockets were being launched from every location in Lebanon and I understand now why they have left Syria out. There is just too much on Israel’s plate and they are spread too thinly at the moment. Anything short of nuclear bombing will leave the Hezbollah rats intact at the end of the day.
Iran and Syria are taking advantage of world opinion, Israel’s reluctance to hit civilians and other factors.
If bombing of Israel does not stop immediately then it is time for Israel to put Syria (and maybe Iran) on notice: stop Hezbollah now or face the wrath of Israel. The US must join in this war for there to be any lasting results. Otherwise, there will be a weak, unenforceable cessation of fire followed by an incessant, never-ending war that will cripple Israel. The Islamists have a long-term view but they need a drastic attitude change forced upon them that will last a lifetime or longer.
Comment by Gary Gerofsky
— July 24, 2006 @ 3:08 pm
At a minimum if Israel made all of Lebanon south of the Litani a no man’s land, it would be easy to occupy and that would end the Katushas which have a shorter range. Then they can focus on the longer range missiles which are fewer in number.
Comment by Ted Belman
— July 24, 2006 @ 3:14 pm
Israel May Not Be Fighting Fast Enough…
Israpundit worries that the Israeli response to Hezbollah has not ben robust enough, and that the IDF would best serve Israel to fight much harder than they have. From the safety of Chicago, I would only observe that Israeli soldiers have been suite …..
Trackback by Occidentality
— July 24, 2006 @ 7:43 pm
There are a massive amount of troops poised along the border - hundreds of tanks and APC’s. I just returned from a tour of the border and a stint of volunteering in Tzfat - article and pictures up tomorrow. There’s more brewing here than anybody is aware of yet. I’m not sure why there is a delay in sending them in, but I can think of many possible reasons.
Comment by Peretz Rickett
— July 25, 2006 @ 4:53 pm