Wednesday, July 19, 2006

United States to Israel: you have one more week to blast Hizbullah

It's been an ill thought out campaign from the beginning with mindless violence and a deep seated need for revenge replacing genuine military objectives.

Now, as it appears even the US and Israelis have accepted that this is a futile course, they can't even get their scripts straight about who to blame this on. Israel have blamed Iran whilst the George Bush says that Syria is behind this.

Whoever they eventually decide to blame, it's being reported that the US is only willing to allow this madness to continue for one more week. Although, to be honest, I'll be surprised if it's allowed to continue for that long for the reasons I laid out yesterday.

Steven Cook, a specialist in US-Middle East policy at the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations, said: "It's abundantly clear [that US policy is] to give the Israelis the opportunity to strike a blow at Hizbullah ...

"They have global reach, and prior to 9/11 they killed more Americans than any other group. But the Israelis are overplaying their hand."
I think Mr Cook is actually being overly generous there. Israel have not merely "overplayed their hand", they have engaged in a collective act of madness and, in a result that they surely should have foreseen, they are shortly about to lose. The stated military objective was the complete destruction of Hizbullah and anything less than that will be considered a military failure.

The fact that they are already down scaling their own publicly stated objectives, to striking "a blow" at Hizbullah rather than destroying them, implies that they realise the task they have set themselves is unrealistic. Which makes me wonder, how realistic are the terms of UN resolution 1559, which asks the fledgling government of Lebanon to take on a task that is so obviously beyond even an army the size of Israel's?

The US and Israel will no doubt attempt to find a way to portray this as a victory, but the scale of what has happened here should not be overlooked.

Military analyst William S. Lind has stated:

With Hezbollah’s entry into the war between Israel and Hamas, Fourth Generation war has taken another developmental step forward. For the first time, a non-state entity has gone to war with a state not by waging an insurgency against a state invader, but across an international boundary. Again we see how those who define 4GW simply as insurgency are looking at only a small part of the picture.

I think the stakes in the Israel-Hezbollah-Hamas war are significantly higher than most observers understand. If Hezbollah and Hamas win—and winning just means surviving, given that Israel’s objective is to destroy both entities—a powerful state will have suffered a new kind of defeat, again, a defeat across at least one international boundary and maybe two, depending on how one defines Gaza’s border. The balance between states and 4GW forces will be altered world-wide, and not to a trivial degree.

So far, Hezbollah is winning. As Arab states stood silent and helpless before Israel’s assault on Hamas, another non-state entity, Hezbollah, intervened to relieve the siege of Gaza by opening a second front. Its initial move, a brilliantly conducted raid that killed eight Israeli soldiers and captured two for the loss of one Hezbollah fighter, showed once again that Hezbollah can take on state armed forces on even terms (the Chechens are the only other 4GW force to demonstrate that capability). In both respects, the contrast with Arab states will be clear on the street, pushing the Arab and larger Islamic worlds further away from the state.

Hezbollah then pulled off two more firsts. It responded effectively to terror bombing from the air, which state think is their monopoly, with rocket barrages that reached deep into Israel. Once can only imagine how this resonated world-wide with people who are often bombed but can never bomb back. And, it attacked another state monopoly, navies, by hitting and disabling a blockading Israeli warship with something (I question Israel’s claim that the weapon was a C-801 anti-ship missile, which should have sunk a small missile corvette). Hezbollah’s leadership has promised more such surprises.

Israel's ill thought out campaign will end disastrously. They will not have defeated Hizbullah who, by the very fact they are left standing at all, will have their reputation on the street enhanced; but, more importantly, they will not have their soldiers back and will have to engage in the very prisoner swap that they publicly declared that they would never do.

Noises are already being made to this effect.
A peace formula is also beginning to emerge: it includes an understanding on a future prisoner exchange, a deployment of the Lebanese army up to the Israeli border, a Hizbullah pullback, and the beefing up of an international monitoring force. For the first time, Ms Livni suggested Israel might accept such a force on a temporary basis.
So it appears that, at the end of the day, after all this death and of all this mindless destruction, Israel will agree to what - a mere week ago - was unthinkable. Prisoners will be exchanged.

Don't get me wrong, I am very happy that the young Israeli soldiers may be returned safely to their parents, I simply wish that so many people didn't have to needlessly die before the Israelis accepted a deal that was always on the table.

And Bush and Olmert will both try to spin this as "victory".

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