Or does it?
The Associated Press is reporting that Israel has begun a major ground offensive:
BOURJ AL-MULOUK, Lebanon – Israel pressed the first full day of a massive new ground attack, sending 10,000 troops into southern Lebanon on Wednesday and seizing five people it said were Hezbollah fighters in a dramatic airborne raid on a northeastern town. Hezbollah retaliated with its deepest strikes yet into Israel, firing a record number of more than 160 rockets.
Diplomatic efforts faltered, with France saying it will not participate in a Thursday U.N. meeting that could send troops to help monitor a cease-fire between Israel and Hezbollah. France, which may join or even lead such a force, said it does not want to talk about sending peacekeepers until fighting halts and the U.N. Security Council agrees to a wider framework for lasting peace.
Israeli commandos flew in by helicopter before dawn into the northern town of Baalbek, on the border with Syria, capturing five Hezbollah guerrillas and killing at least 10, said Israel’s army chief, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz.
It’s difficult to know what to make of this combined massed ground offensive and commando raid. I doubt that Israel can secure its objectives on the basis of air bombardment alone and the IDF undoubtedly recognizes this.
We’re hearing a lot of the term the “fog of war†these days. The term is attributed to the 19th century Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz:
“The great uncertainty of all data in war is a peculiar difficulty, because all action must, to a certain extent, be planned in a mere twilight, which in addition not infrequently — like the effect of a fog or moonshine — gives to things exaggerated dimensions and unnatural appearance.â€
In a time of 24 hour news coverage with live, on-the-scene reporting this is, perhaps, even more difficult to deal with mentally and emotionally than it was in von Clausewitz’s time when news reports from the battlefield could take weeks before they arrived. It wasn’t unheard of for major battles in a war to take place after the peace had hypothetically been concluded.
Modern warriors exploit this fog, the uncertainty, as one more means of getting into their opponents decision-making cycle and Hezbollah is quite skilled at it.
In response to the incident at Qana over the weekend in which a number of Lebanese civilians were killed, presumably by an Israeli airstrike, both the Israelis (and their supporters) and Hezbollah (and their supporters), like octopi, are throwing up enormous clouds of ink. What happened there? Does anyone really know? Does it matter?
Analysts are proclaiming victory, some for Hezbollah, some for Israel. I find it difficult to decide one way or another because, first, we don’t actually know what’s happening on the ground and, second, at least I’m not certain what Israel’s objectives are.
Consider, for example, this analysis from Stratfor, quoted by American Future:
One of Israel’s strategic goals, apart from crushing Hezbollah, is eliminating Hezbollah’s ability to fire rockets and missiles into Israel, and particularly to Haifa and points south. It is difficult to know precisely the range of Hezbollah’s rockets and missiles and how many they have, but it is clear that simply attacking Lebanon south of the Litani River will not solve that problem. To guarantee an end to rocket attacks, we estimate Israel will have to push Hezbollah back to Riyaq to end the threat from Zelzal-2 rockets, to Baalbek to protect Tel Aviv, and to Hermel to protect Haifa. To protect against the Fajr-5, Israel will have to push as deep as 10 miles north of the Litani along the coast. It is possible to bomb launchers and storage sites, and Israel can hit what it knows about, but the problem is it cannot have certain knowledge of what it knows unless it goes in on the ground. Intelligence is never as good as going and seeing.
This means if Israel wants to destroy all of Hezbollah’s military force and destroy existing threats from rockets, it will have to do more than attack Lebanon south of the Litani. It will have to go deep into the Bekaa Valley and it will have to go north of the Litani along the coast. Logic has it that Israel would therefore attempt to encircle south Lebanon along the Litani and move into the Bekaa Valley and north along the coast to isolate Hezbollah from support before dealing with intense fighting in southern Lebanon. This poses obvious logistical problems, since two armored thrusts would have to be supported by relatively few roads leading out of the Israeli panhandle in the north; Israel would want to capture roads in southeastern Lebanon near Metulla in preparation for such a thrust.
In order to secure the objective referred to above Israel would not only have to take the actions described but would also need to prevent re-supply of Hezbollah by maintaining the current naval blockade and by interdicting in one way or another ground traffic from Syria. At least to me this does not appear to be a tenable position for Israel.
Some are counseling the inevitability of a military confrontation between Israel and Syria or between Israel and Iran. I see no evidence that Iran would be deterred by Israeli raids (quite the opposite) and I don’t see any way that Israel could maintain a lengthy assault on Iran.
But why stop there? Won’t Iran itself merely be re-supplied by North Korea and China? Or by Russia and who knows who else?
Israel has legitimate security objectives: its cities should not be subject to Hezbollah rocket attacks. As I noted yesterday the point of insult for this is the tolerance of Hezbollah’s combination of roles: armed faction, political party, and social services agency. That’s simply intolerable and the UN has been completely remiss in ignoring it.
In my view the entire affair is a border incident gone bad—not initially an existential struggle for Israel but potentially escalating into one. Is there a purely military solution? I don’t see it. I think that Israel needs to make common cause with Lebanon and, for reasons I’ve previously described, bombing Lebanon or invading it is unlikely to motivate the Lebanese in that direction. Another formula must be found.
Israel only has two permanent solutions to her security problems: either its enemies need to decide they don’t want to destroy Israel, or Israel needs to destroy its enemies. Israel, of course, cannot compel the former, and with the now-obvious failure of land-for-peace (which I used to generally support), it is not clear that Israel can even bargain with most of its enemies. (Perhaps with Syria, although that is far from clear; certainly not with Hizb’allah or the Palestinians; very likely not with the Iranians.) I am, in other words, not convinced that there is a non-military solution to Israel’s problem in the near term.
Is there a military solution, short of genocide? Maybe. Syria certainly does not want to get into a real fight with Israel, but Syria is willing to attack Israel through proxies. It might make some sense to bomb Hizb’allah and Hamas offices in Syria, taking the risk of widening the war but also opening up the possibility that Syria would back down, thus improving the regional situation. Israel can destroy Hizb’allah by making them ridiculous: militarily defeat Hizb’allah so obviously that it cannot be reasonably denied, and ensure that it cannot reconstitute by blocking routes into Syria and searching all ships into Lebanon. This would make it possible for Lebanon’s government to retake southern Lebanon, if it wants to. More importantly, as just another failed Arab army, Hizb’allah would lose much of its current wide support among Arabs.
I am not sure that the problem of the Palestinians can be solved short of genocide. Israel could reoccupy Gaza and the West Bank for real, eliminating the Palestinian government and all of its resources, and then go after the terrorists in real force (ie, continue and expand current Gaza operations, and possibly duplicate them in the West Bank). This would cause a difficult fight, a much more difficult fight than, say, the US has had in Iraq. On the other hand, the territories were largely peaceful until the PLO was invited back in (big, big mistake). This would be terrible for the Palestinians, because Israel would (to be effective) have to cut of the territories from any access to the outside world that doesn’t go through Israeli control, impose restrictions on internal movement, raid houses constantly to find and destroy existing weapons, and in other ways act generally nasty. Of course, the Palestinians would have brought such a fate on themselves, so it’s hard to be too sympathetic to their plight.
Would that solve the problem with the Palestinians? Maybe, in time. Likely not, though. I am far from sure that there is a solution to Israel’s problems short of genocide, and that may just mean that Israel gets used to fairly constant attacks against it, and fairly constant reprisals by it. Not pleasant, but I don’t think genocide is in the Israeli character, and the Arabs may decide not to settle for anything less.
Do you have an example of that, Jeff? It seems to me that objective success isn’t particularly relevant to support in that part of the world.
Genocide of whom? As I see it the problem is that unless Israel can successfully limit the circle of their enemies (or the circle of their enemies self-limits) the range of their military efforts will expand sufficiently to draw others (including us) in.
I think that the present situation is a great illustration of what happens when you make enough bad decisions: you’re left with no good alternatives.
In the particular instance of the precipitating incident for the current round of hostilities (a border incident in which Hezbollah fighters crossed the Israeli border to attack a single truck of IDF forces who’d strayed away from support) the only good alternative that Israel had was not to play. They didn’t do it and it’s now a high-stakes game of chicken.
Hezbollah was trying to draw in the arab countries for an all-out war of extermination against Israel. Remember how angry Nazrullah was at the arabs for not jumping in to form a multi-front war? Miscalculation.
Arab rulers don’t want to die, don’t want to lose their cushy place. They know Hezbollah is Iran’s cat’s paw, not the arabs’. Syria’s the puppet of Iran in this game, outside the arab mainstream.