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It has taken until now for Israeli and U.S. military experts to fully
comprehend the sheer scale of the Israeli defeat and its implications
for both countries.
New figures show that contrary to initial Israeli claims that Hezbollah
lost upwards of 500 fighters, the real number of losses totaled
somewhere around 200. That is close to the number of Israeli military
dead—a reflection of just how formidable a foe Hezbollah had proven to
be.
the Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his cabinet were in “George
Bush Mission Accomplished” mode.
However, when the Israeli military moved into Lebanon, it found exactly
what the U.S. military learned in Iraq—
it is one thing to seize ground, but it is a far different story to hold
it.
Dispirited at the end of the war, the Israeli command—in
an act of bloody revenge considered a war crime by many foreign
observers—littered vast areas of Lebanon, including hundreds of towns,
villages and farms, with cluster-bomb droplets, which have been killing
innocent men, women and children ever since.
Now that the dust has settled in
bomb-ravaged Lebanon, evidence shows that
Israel’s military defeat at the hands of Hezbollah, the militia group in
southern Lebanon, was bigger than at first thought and it eroded
America’s standing in what the Bush administration calls the Muslim
street, as well as in the palaces of America’s few Arab friends.
The most starling facts now coming
to light reveal that Hezbollah outmaneuvered Israel’s highly vaunted
military strategists, defeated its counter-intelligence planners and
built a sophisticated command and control system that proved impervious
to a high-tech war. That system allowed Hezbollah’s military leaders to
communicate with frontline fighters despite Israel’s carpet bombing huge
swathes of Lebanon, a country about the size of Connecticut.
Hezbollah, and not Israel or the
Pentagon, learned quite a bit from studying the Vietnam War. Hezbollah
leaders deduced that if a guerrilla army can survive heavy bombing, it
can emerge to successfully confront ground assaults. That is how
Hezbollah played it.
From the outset, the Israelis
arrogantly believed it was facing an inferior opponent. They believed
they knew where their enemy’s main ammo dumps and command and control
systems were located.
Israeli generals presumed that the
Israeli air force and its heavily armed unmanned drones could seek and
destroy all Hezbollah bunkers in a three-day “shock and awe” blitz.
This, they thought, would decapitate the Hezbollah leadership, destroy
its weapons dumps and knock out its command systems. As a consequence,
Hezbollah fighters would have no means of re-supply and would have to
emerge from their foxholes to surrender or be shot.
That, however, proved to be pure
military fantasy rooted in Israel’s belief in its own military
invincibility. And what Israeli generals
did not anticipate was the fact that Hezbollah could beat
them at their own game.
In the aftermath of Israel being
driven from southern Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah had been setting the
stage for an elaborate ruse that Israeli intelligence and military
planners fell right into.
Over the years, Hezbollah had built
bunkers to protect fighters when the time came for war. Hezbollah’s
leaders knew Israeli satellites could see from space and they knew
Israel had agents on the ground who were watching their every move. So
what Hezbollah did was to build decoys to fool the Israelis. It was a
classic military tactic used by Allied forces during World War II,
especially the British who often used decoy tanks or boats to fool the
Luftwaffe.
However, while Hezbollah was
building the decoys, it secretly constructed the deep, hardened bunkers,
many with air-conditioning, to hold their fighters, their command and
control centers and massive arsenals of weapons, including missiles.
Mossad, the famed Israeli
intelligence agency, is only now beginning to realize that, for years,
Hezbollah had also been training highly specialized troops, and
frontline fighters who could hit and run, using classic guerrilla
tactics against advancing heavy armor and troops.
Like most guerrilla armies, a cell
structure was employed, whereby each Hezbollah unit assigned to the
front line knew what it had to do and the locations of its own arms
dumps. That meant if a fighter was captured he could only divulge a
limited amount of information under tough or brutal Israeli
interrogation.
The effectiveness of Hezbollah’s
high-tech command system shocked U.S. and Israeli military analysts
because it operated unhindered throughout the 34-day war. It allowed
Hezbollah leaders to provide their front lines with detailed information
from informers about Israeli troop movements.
More importantly, it provided the
Hezbollah leadership with a picture of the battlefield that led them to
conclude that only one brigade of several thousand fighters, known as
the Nasr Brigade, was sufficient to handle the large Israeli advance.
There was, therefore, no need to commit reinforcements from the
organization’s 20,000 reserve force which was intended for use in a
long, drawn-out war with Israel.
It
has taken until now for Israeli and U.S. military experts to fully
comprehend the sheer scale of the Israeli defeat and its implications
for both countries.
New
figures show that contrary to initial Israeli claims that Hezbollah lost
upwards of 500 fighters, the real number of losses totaled somewhere
around 200. That is close to the number of Israeli military dead—a
reflection of just how formidable a foe Hezbollah had proven to be.
SOBERING LESSONS
For the U.S. military in Iraq, and
more specifically the so-called “Rumsfeld Doctrine,” which AFP analyzed
in-depth on Oct. 23, Israel’s defeat had some very sobering lessons.
First, Israel was quick to
underestimate its enemy because, within days of its bombardment of
Lebanon, the Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert and his cabinet were in “George Bush Mission
Accomplished” mode. However, when the Israeli military moved into
Lebanon, it found exactly what the U.S. military learned in Iraq—it
is one thing to seize ground, but it is a far different story to hold it.
Throughout the war, the Israeli
army could advance into towns in southern Lebanon, but it was never
capable of holding on to them.
Each time it moved into a
bombed-out village, it lost so many tanks and men that it was forced to
retreat or lose more men and machinery.
Dispirited at the end of the war, the Israeli command—in
an act of bloody revenge considered a war crime by many foreign
observers—littered vast areas of Lebanon, including hundreds of towns,
villages and farms, with cluster-bomb droplets, which have been killing
innocent men, women and children ever since.
On the political front, Israel’s
defeat at the hands of Hezbollah has done more than discredit a military
strategy. It has ripped down the country’s mantle of invincibility. In
addition, the United States has lost what little influence it had in
Lebanon and found its standing among the majority Shiite population in
neighboring Iraq severely weakened.
Hezbollah’s victory has also put
America’s puppet regimes in the Middle
East on notice that the Muslim street sided with Hezbollah in contrast
to the outspoken opinions of the leaders of Egypt,
Saudi Arabia and Jordan, who backed the Israeli-U.S.
goal of destroying Hezbollah.
Worse still for Washington,
Israel’s loss was also America’s, because Hezbollah’s victory has now
empowered Syria and Iran in the region and has inflamed Muslim anger at
the United States.
Ironically, U.S.-backing for Israel
illustrated once again President Bush’s hypocritical call for bringing
democracy at the barrel of a gun to the Middle East. Bush supported
Israel’s plan to destroy Hezbollah, a Shiite militia group that has been
active in democracies in Lebanon and in Iraq.
Shiites have always condemned Israel’s policies in the Middle East.
Iraqi Shiites see Hezbollah Shiites as their brothers, just as they do
the majority Shiite population in Iran (Heazbollah
Support was not limited to Shiites in Iraq, Iran, Lebanon and other
Arabian Gulf states, the support came too from the vast majority
of Arabs whether Moslem Sunnis and Christians) .
The lesson that Washington should have learned from the massive Baghdad
demonstration in favor of Hezbollah during the war was that Iraqis have
no allegiance to the United States, which toppled the Sunni-led
government in Iraq.
The failed Israeli military
campaign was also a body blow for neo-conservatives and their Israeli
allies who believed the defeat of Hezbollah would humiliate its backers,
Iran and Syria, and also further the strategy of regime change in the
region. Neo-cons in the White
House did not even care how many innocents were killed by Israeli air
strikes in Lebanon. They were prepared to support a long war by Israel
and applauded Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice when she made the
absurd claim that the Lebanon war represented the “birth pangs of a new
Middle East.”
There are now concerned voices warning that it is only a matter of time
before Israel seeks to restore its cloak of invincibility by finding an
excuse to invade Lebanon again and finish the job. Alternatively, Israel
could mount an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Either course of
action would be disastrous. It would lead to all-out war and would
collapse the Middle East, leaving nearly 140,000 U.S. soldiers hostage
to attacks across the region.
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