Watching the antics of the assorted Palestinian terrorists in Gaza there is a sense of a sort of hopeless ineptitude combined with a mafia macho swagger. Not so Hezbollah:
Hezbollah’s actions on the battlefields of southern Lebanon should give the Israelis, the West and neighboring Arab governments reason to worry. In just two weeks, Hezbollah has been fighting the Israeli military to an effective standstill on the ground (remember that time is not on Israel’s side due to pressure to accept a cease fire). Not only is Hezbollah fighting at the platoon and company level, but fighting effectively during the initial engagements. al-Qaeda in Iraq (3 years of fighting) and the Taliban in Afghanistan (almost 5 years of fighting) have yet to reach such a level of effectiveness on the battlefield.
Iran has trained a proxy army that now sits on the border with Israeli, an army that cannot be dealt with from the air. If this problem is kicked down the road, Hezbollah will be that much more dangerous. And everything we think we know about Iran’s conventional military capabilities needs to be rethought.
counterterrorism blog
Well armed, dug in and highly motivated, Hezbollah is making the IDF pay for every inch of ground captured. If they can keep doing this a general rethink of how to approach the Middle East is going to come up pretty damn fast.
The issue is not about Israel losing: with enough firepower and manpower and casualties Israel will win here. But the cost could be enormous. At least it is if Israel continues to fight a limited ground war. Slogging it out a mile or two into Lebanon and then handing over to a multinational force which is not going to disarm Hezbollah is a pointless waste of time and money and, sadly, life. Because in this particular little war all Hezbollah has to do to become the object of the Arab street’s affections is stay standing until Israel is forced to allow a ceasefire.
This is not a good outcome for either Isreal or people concerned about Iran’s growing influence.
Strategically my sense is that Israel needs to bring its vastly superior firepower into play. But it also has to be a bit more agressive than simply pushing company strength units a mile or two into Lebanon.
After the “failure” of the Rome meeting - and frankly I don’t think the parties in Rome had any intention of succeeding - Israel has between two and four weeks to crush Hezbollah or accept a cease firre which, as counter-terrorism blog points out simply postpones the problem. Worse, as a propoganda victory, Hezbollah surviving to fight another day would be a huge blow.
From my armchair it seems to me that the Israelis best chance at outright defeating Hezbollah is to drive due north up the Bekaa Valley with serious aircover. Establish a forward base and then work back southward clearing Hez as they go.
There is a slight risk that this might draw Syria into the fight officially; but that is a minor risk compared to Hezbollah surviving as a coherent fighting unit.
One might reasonably ask if Israel has the capacity to fight as smart as she did in the 6 Day War or toward the end of the Yom Kippur War. An entire generation of IDF officers has been stuck in the anti-suicide bomber, security check paradigm of Gaza and the West Bank. Small scale, nasty skirmishes with poorly trained but sometimes lethal thugs. This is essentially police work done by soldiers and that grind is not healthy for an army or an officer corps.
Written by jay on July 27th, 2006 with 4 comments.
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“We want to find out why this United Nations post was attacked and also why it remained manned during what is now, more or less, a war during obvious danger to these individuals,” he told reporters.
Asked about UN head Kofi Annan’s statement suggesting Israel had targeted the outpost, Harper said: “I certainly doubt that to be the case.”
afp
It sure is nice to have a Prime Minister who does not drink the UN Kool Aid and is not tethered to the Axworthian paradigm in foreign affairs.
Whether or not this is smart politically is a whole other question; but if Harper keeps this up I know I will be getting off the fence, holding my nose as to the social views of my local CPC candidate, and working to get Harper his majority. It is about time Canada became an honest broker.
Written by jay on July 27th, 2006 with 3 comments.
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Here’s the link.
But the moral crisis in Britain extends far wider and deeper than the wretched BBC and other media. The surreally distorted response by so many to Israel’s attempt to destroy the would-be purveyors of genocide raises the question of whether Britain will ever again support a just war — because it no longer knows what a just war is, and no longer has the intellectual capacity to know. This is in large measure because moral agency has disappeared altogether from the analysis. Intention, the essence of moral actions, is now tossed aside as of no significance. All that matters are the consequences of an action. This is in accordance with the prevailing amoral consensus which has negated moral agency altogether in order to remove the burden of personal responsibility. What someone intends to do is therefore held to be of no account. All that matters is the consequences of their action.
melanie phillips
I have been spending a fair bit of time over at the Zerb’s reading “the other side” and commenting. Phillips is writing about England but much the same point can be made about a certain segment of Canadian society.
In a sense the oversimplifications of on the spot media mean that the mass audience does not hear much about the realities of war. For example, it is unlikely that General Lew McKenzie’s revelation that he was in email communication with the poor chap killed at the UN outpost and that that soldier had told him the Hezbollah positions were within three meters of the outpost will get a lot of play. You can hear the whole interview from the CBC over at LGF here.
We received emails from him a few days ago, and he was describing the fact that he was taking fire within, in one case, three meters of his position for tactical necessity, not being targeted. Now that’s veiled speech in the military. What he was telling us was Hezbollah soldiers were all over his position and the IDF were targeting them. And that’s a favorite trick by people who don’t have representation in the UN. They use the UN as shields knowing that they can’t be punished for it.
General Lew McKenzie, cbc
Of course, if you have been paying attention you will know this already. And you will be wondering why the UN did not immediately pull out.
Phillips’ point is, however, more about the inability of England, and by extension the rest of the West, to be clear about the moral imperatives which underlie the Israelis’ self defence or, for that matter, our own capacity to defend ourselves.
A good deal has been written about asymmetrical warfare: the weak using unconventional tactics to defeat the strong. The asymmetry is more profound than this.
One side, fortunately the weaker one at present, has a clear vision of what victory would look like. We might think the re-establishment of the Caliphate and the eventual conversion - voluntary or by the sword - of the world to Islam is a truly wacky vision; but it is a vision which can motivate men to stand with small arms while tanks advance on their positions.
Our side has no such vision and, indeed, takes it as part of the ethical commitment of modernity that the creation of such a vision is immoral in itself. State and Church working together for the conversion of the heathen is a quaintly racialist ideal best left to the 19th century imperialists.
What we have not done is developed any sort of alternative vision. The catastrophe of WWI, the horror of WWII, the end of left idealism as the Soviet Union was found to have rested on a policy of mass slaughter and delusion, the Depression’s echos in the free market world, the effective end of European Christian certainty, the enuii of so many of our best and brightest have left the West, particularily Europe, without much to fight for.
At the moment, Israel sees herself as fighting for her survival. What are the rest of us fighting for?
We know what wwe are fighting against: we don’t want planes hitting buildings in the name of Allah or anyone else. We don’t want homicide bombers blasting our subways. But those are purely negative values. They do not begin to address what it might be that we are fighting for.
The Hezbollah terrorist is, albeit in a largely delusional way, fighting for something. Unless and until we are able to make our own case and articulate a vision, ours will be a purely defensive fight. We will be constrained by consequentialism and bizarre notions of proportionality. We will adhere to the idea that it is only legitimate to use minimum force in our own defence.
Which will mean that, across the decades, we will lose.
For Israel losing is not an option because if she loses her enemies will push her people into the sea without a second thought. There is an immediate and fatal consequence to losing and it is a consequence that no Israeli is prepared to accept.
For the West at large the consequences of losing are more remote, more abstract. Israel’s citizenry would be slaughtered or forced to take ship the instant Hezbollah or Hamas claimed victory. For the West in general, defeat at the hands of Islam would be far more gradual. Shira courts here, a reduction in rights there, a rule against images of Mohammad over there: the slow priviledging of Islam under the guise of multi-cultural sensitivity.
Without a firm position as to the core values of the West and a commitment to their defence we are at grave risk of sinking, imperceptibly, into a cringe before the certainties of an Islam rampant.
Written by jay on July 27th, 2006 with no comments.
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