Israel enters any battle with certain pre-ordained constraints which make lasting victories extremely difficult to achieve. The current hostilities are no different in that respect yet it just may be that the Israelis are actually fighting to win this war.
What we know:
1) Israel can never initiate open-ended hostilities.
2) Israel typically has a very small window in which to fight back against attacks.
3) The International Community will never tolerate Israel destroying an Arab opponent.
4) The Western Media is functionally allied with the enemy.
These prior constraints have dictated Israel's strategy for the last 40 years:
5) Israel has always had to rely on speed and audacity to surprise and destroy Arab armies.
Knowing this, under the well worn dictum that armies always prepare to fight the last war:
6) Hezbollah has spent the last 6 years preparing themselves for an Israeli assault based on speed and audacity.
7) Part of the Hezbollah strategy (and Arab strategy in general) is to maximize civilian casualties in order to provide propaganda for the world's press to use against Israel.
Further, these constraints determine the shape of victory for either side:
5) Hezbollah only needs to survive to win this war; Israel can only win by destroying Hezbollah as a fighting force.
6) For an Israeli victory to be consolidated, the Lebanese army must be able, eventually, to maintain the ensuing peace.
7) Israel must do all this while minimizing collateral damage.
Many commentators believe the Israelis need a massive ground campaign to beat Hezbollah and instead are currently fighting a short-sighted campaign which aims to minimize their casualties at the risk of losing the war.
Ralph Peters is one prominent critic who believes the Israelis are losing:
Israel's government overruled its generals and refused to expand the ground war in southern Lebanon. Given the difficulties encountered and the casualties suffered, the decision is understandable. And wrong.
....
For the Israelis, the town of Bint Jbeil is an embarrassment, an objective that proved unexpectedly hard to take. But the town's a tactical issue to the Israeli Defense Force, not a strategic one.
For Hezbollah, it's Stalingrad, where the Red Army stopped the Germans. And that's how terrorist propagandists will mythologize it.
The Israeli government has certainly facilitated the current meme, that they are divided and the politicians are staying the military's hand out of fear of casualties.
John Hinderaker believes that Israel's strategy is a prescription for failure (and Paul Mirengoff, in the same post, agrees with his assessment):
The current strategy is intended to "push the rocket launchers further north." But, given what we now know about the range of the rockets Hezbollah already has, and given Iran's ability to resupply the terrorist group with ever more dangerous weapons, is this a sensible strategic goal?
I don't think so. I think that Israel needs to kill as many Hezbollah terrorists as possible, thereby disabling the group, at least temporarily. The Lebanese government can then assert its sovereignty over southern Lebanon, and the international community must both hold Lebanon responsible for any terrorism launched from its territory, and provide whatever help is necessary to prevent Hezbollah or similar armed groups from re-forming there. Anything less, it seems to me, is a strategic defeat for Israel and for the free (i.e., non-Sharia) world.
Richard Fernandez, whose opinion on matters strategic should always be accorded a high degree of respect, believes that, by inadvertence or by design, the Israeli strategy is working:
Reduced to its essentials, the IDF strategy may be ridiculously simple: fix the Hezbollah force in Southern Lebanon while detaching its command structure from the field by simultaneously striking Beirut. One of the great mysteries, upon which newpaper accounts shed no light, is why the IDF should so furiously pulverize Hezbollah's enclaves in southern Beirut, blockade the port and disable the airport. The object isn't to shut down Lebanon. It is to momentarily disorient the Hezbollah headquarters in Beirut, so that in a moment of absentmindedness, the Hezbollah forces in Southern Lebanon will do what comes most naturally: commit themselves against the IDF.
Jeff Medcalf at Caerdroia, in a post I linked to yesterday, believes that Hezbollah indeed prepared for the last war (and that many commentators also believe that Israel needs to fight in the same way):
Hizb'allah seems to have been counting on Israel fighting the same war as they did in 1982, and Hizb'allah was prepared for that. (Some commenters seem to be operating under the same assumption.) In fact, I would say that, had Israel fought this way, we would already be seeing signs of major disaster, as Israeli forces would be being cut off and defeated in detail by the "left behinds". ....
The way to avoid this is to destroy the enemy stronghold by stronghold, tunnel by tunnel. It's not a style of war Israelis or Americans are used to seeing any more, but it is very, very effective. There is simply no way that Hizb'allah can fight from the areas that Israel has already captured. As a result, Israel has captured less territory, but has destroyed the enemy's capability entirely in the area it has captured. (The exception being where Israel has raided out from its salient and then withdrawn; those areas have gone right back to Hizb'allah control.)
I tend to agree with both Richard and Jeff that Israel is fighting to win but I also believe that Israel has been using th last 6 years to plan for this war and has quite possibly done a better job than any of us are giving them credit for.
First, in preparing the battle space, they have included the diplomatic and media fronts. Notice how little criticism there actually has been from the International Community and the press. While there remain many TV and newspaper reports of innocent civilian casualties, there are also very often accompanying stories about Hezbollah's tendency to hide behind civilians. Kofi Annan, also fighting the last war, made his typically stupid, anti-Israel statements, and was immediately shot down by the Canadian PM who had suffered losses and pinned the blame where it belonged, on Hezbollah. It just might be that Israel is benefiting from a slightly more balanced press than in the past and recognizes that they have a much larger window of opportunity as a result. Further, the Israelis have done a masterful job of minimizing casualties, including by their highly publicized campaign of warnings to the inhabitants of Southern Lebanon. Most of the world appears to accept that casualties in Hezbollah areas are in fact Hezbollah fighters and supporters.
Finally, there is a possible technological and strategic development that may put this entire campaign into a different perspective. Even those who believe Israel has done the correct thing by isolating Hezbollah, drawing their fighters into the field and are now prepared to fight form bunker to bunker may be missing something crucial. I will have to rely on the Engineers among my readership to let me know the flaws in my reasoning but allow for a suggestion:
For many years Doctors have used Ultrasound to discern the shape of internal organs (and babies). The sound waves bounce off of boundaries, between solid and liquid, and between solid or liquid and air. Computers can build detailed three dimensional maps of the internal terrain form the way in which the sound waves bounce back. Geologists use similar tools to find oil deposits under ground. News reports have the Israelis encircling towns which contain Hezbollah and their networks. By ringing the towns with sensors and setting off a few explosions, I cannot see any reason why the Israelis would not be able to construct a map of the underground tunnels and bunkers that the Hezbollah fighters are using for refuge and storage.
An underground bunker that needs to be cleaned out by Israeli infantry is a charnal house; an underground bunker that has its entrances dynamited shut is a Hezbollah tomb.
Again, this is highly speculative and there may be all sorts of reasons why this cannot work, but it would fit the approach the Israelis have been taking and would simultaneously minimize Israeli and non-combatant casualties, while leaving Hezbollah with the option of remaining in hiding and becoming entombed or emerging to face the IDF on more neutral terms; either way, Hezbollah casualties would be maximized.
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