Soccer Dad

Air of uncertainty

William Arkin will soon be publishing a book about the Israeli-Hezbollah war of last summer. According to the New York Times. the book will be "critical" of Israel.

A study of the 2006 Israeli-Hezbollah war commissioned by the United States Air Force and to be published this month concludes that Israel’s use of air power was of diminishing value as the fight dragged on because it was used without enough discrimination.

Although the war was widely criticized in Israel and abroad for relying too heavily on the air force, the study argues that air power remains the most flexible tool in fighting groups like Hezbollah, because ground forces alone could not have achieved Israel’s aims. Israel’s error, the study concludes, was insufficient discernment in its airstrikes.

By bombing too many targets of questionable importance for its aims, and not explaining why it bombed what it did, Israel lost the war for public opinion, according to the author of the study, William M. Arkin, an expert in assessing bomb damage. “Israel bombed too much and bombed the wrong targets, falling back upon cookie-cutter conventional targeting in attacking traditional military objects,” Mr. Arkin wrote. “Individual elements of each target group might have been justified, but Israel also undertook an intentionally punishing and destructive air campaign against the people and government of Lebanon.”

(h/t Backspin)

Steven Erlanger, the Times's Israel correspondent who wrote the review, doesn't explain to what degree Mr. Arkin changed his mind. Last year, after touring Lebanon, Arkin wrote:

Israel may have made a grave error in attacking Hezbollah as it did, it may have used the wrong weapons and hit the wrong targets, it may have completely misread the enemy, it may have made its security worse for years to come.

But the fact that one can drive a short distance from Dresden-like south Beirut and return to modern life itself should signal that this is something very different: Israeli bombers did not fly over Beirut and unleash loads of bombs. Each individual building was the quarry; the intent was there, and the technology existed, to spare the rest.

(See also here.)

I would argue that the review should have been called "Book Faults Some Aspects of Israeli Air War in Lebanon" (emphasis mine.)

I'm wondering how critical Arkin was of Israel. If his columns from last year are any indication, he wasn't critical that Israel struck back against Hezbollah. He wasn't critical of Israel's use of airpower either. (Even Erlanger's review says that.)

Clearly the title of the review wasn't accurate. I suspect that Erlanger's reading of the book wasn't entirely accurate either, unless Arkin changed his views significantly from last year.

UPDATE: More via memeorandum.

OpFor looks at Arkin's record (as more than an "expert in assessing bomb damage") and wonders why the Air Force would trust his analysis. LGF provides links to more background.

UPDATE II: More at Israel Matzav.

Crossposted on Yourish.

israel, hezbollah.