August 24, 2006
Was it that bad?
My first inclination is not to say that Israel lost its war with Hezbollah as much as it achieved nothing. The ceasefire, at best, returned to the status quo before the war and over 100 Israelis were killed. Was it worth it?
It seemed worse than not fighting, is fighting without a clear goal in mind and then settling for what seems like a less than optimal result.
Still despite what seems like conventional wisdom that Hezbollah defeated Israel, a number of pundits are arguing the opposite: Israel won and Hezbollah lost.
Nasrallah's concept of deterring Israel with his arsenal of rockets failed miserably. The Israeli rear remained resilient after 4,000 Katyushas were launched at the north of Israel, and the Israeli government and army had the willpower to strike back, even when Nasrallah used the Lebanese as a human shield. Contrary to his bravado, his organization suffered a heavy blow, with a quarter of his fighters killed and his infrastructure badly damaged.
What is perfectly true is that the Israelis lacked a coherent war plan, so that even their most purposeful bombing came off as brutally destructive (though with a deterrence payoff, as Syria's immobility showed), while the ground actions were hesitant and inconclusive from start to finish.There was a fully developed plan, of course, in the contingency folders - a sophisticated blend of amphibious, airborne and ground penetrations to swiftly reach deep behind the front, before rolling back, so as to destroy Hizbullah positions one by one from the rear, all the way to the Israeli border.
That plan was not implemented because of the lack of casualties among Israeli civilians. It had been a fair assumption that thousands of Hizbullah rockets fired in concentrated barrages would kill many civilians, perhaps hundreds of them each day. Barrages cancel out the inaccuracy of unguided rockets, and powerfully compound blast effects. That would make a large-scale offensive by more than 45,000 soldiers a compelling necessity, politically justifying the hundreds of casualties that it would certainly have cost.
Hizbullah, however, distributed its rockets to village militias that were very good at hiding them from air attacks, sheltering them from artillery and from probing Israeli unmanned air vehicles, but quite incapable of launching them effectively, in simultaneous launches against the same targets.
Instead of hundreds of dead civilians, the Israelis were therefore losing one or two a day, and even after three weeks, the grand total was less than in some one-man suicide bombings.
I'd add to this that Nasrallah seems to have gone underground. If he's a victor, he's sure been hesitant to appear openly in Lebanon to receive the adulation he feels he warrants. He knows that if he appears in Lebanon, in an identfiable location his chances of living another day will have been dramatically reduced.
Many of the problems with the war was the perception that Israel's government didn't know what it was doing. And the war was declared won in newspaper by reporters who seemed smitten with the idea that Hezbollah had beaten Israel. But who suffered more?
If that's the criteria, than Israel did beat Hezbollah. Even if it doesn't appear that way now. It doesn't make Israel's victory any more satisfying.
Technorati tags: Israel, Hezbollah.
