This is 'strategy?'
Okay...so Israel clears everyone out of the land between their border and the Litani river:
If Hezbollah are fish that swim in a sea of the people, using Mao Tse Tung's analogy, then Israel has determined to drain the sea. Certainly Hezbollahis will also move northward, but in doing so they will be pushed further and further out of rocket range, especially the Katyusha rockets, which comprise at least 90 percent of what they have fired into Israel.Er...then what? Hezbollah mysteriously vanishes? Hezbollah's sponsors DON'T merely provide them with more effective weapons to engage Israel from deeper in Lebanon? Lebanese support for Hezbollah won't increase as Israel razes hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses in southern Lebanon? This is not a 'desired end state' - this is a push for a temporary solution that will, in the end, strengthen Hezbollah and other radical organizations in the region.
Israel cannot simply make Hezbollah disappear through military action. All they can REALLY do through military action is temporarily weaken Hezbollah in a manner that will likely strengthen them in the long term. I can't imagine Israel really wants that.
UPDATE:
Obviously I'm not alone in my beliefs. For the record: it's possible to be pro-Israeli without thinking Israel's current military operation (or military strategy) makes sense. I know...hard for much of the right side of the blogosphere to believe....
4 comments:
Has the entire strategic thinking power gone out of the western armies? I'm in fundamental agreement with you about the Israel/Lebanon situation, of course. But my own take is that the Iraq saga has also been a strategic misstep. The Mideast has ALWAYS (in all of civilized history, i.e. >10,000 years!) been delicately balanced, and it has had badly-drawn borders since the fall of the Ottoman Empire-- why mess with it and just hope for the best?
What's going on? I would never have thought the Israelis would think air war solves deep strategic problems? It seems as if everything I thought was conventional wisdom about the western way of war has been thrown away in the last few years. Was I just reading the wrong books and missed some big new thing that says "strategic consequences" dont come before any other decision anymore?
Sorry to ramble, but I'm just confused. I dont exactly understand what has led to the current situation-- with even more chance of spreading than there was a month ago?
I think Israel is poisoned by its conventional successes from 48-73 while the US took the wrong lessons from Vietnam, built a force around those wrong lessons, and then fought a war (Gulf War I) that falsely confirmed those post-Vietnam beliefs. We and the Israelis are paying the steep price right now for a sort of unearned hubris.
We (and the Israelis) had the advantage of fighting Arab opponents that had been lured (during the Cold War) to our style of conventional warfare. Enough Arabs learned their lessons from those losses and their success in Afghanistan that they have largely abandoned that style...and we resort to calling it unfair because they won't meet us on our chosen terms of engagement.
Excellent commentary, Tim. You're the clearest thinker I'm reading on the big picture of "contemporary warfare." If u ever have time, could u do maybe a small primer on how you see the history of warfare having developed in the last century? I'm without hypotheses and guesses to see clearly how we arrived at this current situation. A situation that doesnt seem to be being recognized as troublesome by many.
Tim, I'm sure you saw it, but just in case here's another voice seeing beyond self-created, politically-imposed filters: http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20060804/cm_csm/ylang04
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