Tenten
Jedi
Very long, instructive and full of details.
3 parts : intelligence war - ground war - political war
PART 1: Winning the intelligence war
Source Part1: http://tinyurl.com/y37js6
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ12Ak01.html
PART 2: Winning the ground war
Source Part2: http://tinyurl.com/y788v9
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ13Ak01.html
PART 3: The political war
Source Part3: http://tinyurl.com/wvz69
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ14Ak01.html
HOW HEZBOLLAH DEFEATED ISRAEL
PART 1: Winning the intelligence war
By Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry
Introduction
Writing five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, US military
expert Anthony Cordesman published an account of the Israeli-Hezbollah
conflict. "Preliminary Lessons of the Israeli-Hezbollah War" created
enormous interest in the Pentagon, where it was studied by planners for
the Joint Chiefs of Staff and passed hand-to-hand among military experts
in Washington. Cordesman made no secret of his modest conclusions, rightly
recognizing that his study was not only "preliminary", but that it took no
account of how Hezbollah fought the conflict or judged its results.
"This analysis is ... limited," Cordesman noted, "by the fact that no
matching visit was made to Lebanon and to the Hezbollah." Incomplete
though it might have been, Cordesman's study accomplished two goals: it
provided a foundation for understanding the war from the Israeli point of
view and it raised questions on how and how well Hezbollah fought. Nearly
two months after the end of the Israeli-Hezbollah war, it is now possible
to fill in some of the lines left blank by Cordesman.
The portrait that we give here is also limited. Hezbollah officials will
neither speak publicly nor for the record on how they fought the conflict,
will not detail their deployments, and will not discuss their future
strategy. Even so, the lessons of the war from Hezbollah's perspective are
now beginning to emerge and some small lessons are being derived from it
by US and Israeli strategic planners. Our conclusions are based on
on-the-ground assessments conducted during the course of the war, on
interviews with Israeli, American and European military experts, on
emerging understandings of the conflict in discussions with military
strategists, and on a network of senior officials in the Middle East who
were intensively interested in the war's outcome and with whom we have
spoken.
Our overall conclusion contradicts the current point of view being
retailed by some White House and Israeli officials: that Israel's
offensive in Lebanon significantly damaged Hezbollah's ability to wage
war, that Israel successfully degraded Hezbollah's military ability to
prevail in a future conflict, and that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF),
once deployed in large numbers in southern Lebanon, were able to prevail
over their foes and dictate a settlement favorable to the Israeli
political establishment.
Just the opposite is true. From the onset of the conflict to its last
operations, Hezbollah commanders successfully penetrated Israel's
strategic and tactical decision-making cycle across a spectrum of
intelligence, military and political operations, with the result that
Hezbollah scored a decisive and complete victory in its war with Israel.
The intelligence war
In the wake of the conflict, Hezbollah general secretary Hassan Nasrallah
admitted that Israel's military response to the abduction of two of its
soldiers and the killing of eight others at 9:04 on the morning of July 12
came as a surprise to the Hezbollah leadership.
Nasrallah's comment ended press reports that Hezbollah set out purposely
to provoke a war with Israel and that the abductions had been part of a
plan approved by Hezbollah and Iran. While Hezbollah had made it clear
over a period of years that it intended to abduct Israeli soldiers, there
was good reason to suppose that it would not do so in the middle of the
summer months - when large numbers of affluent Shi'ite families from the
diaspora would be visiting Lebanon (and spending their money in the
Shi'ite community), and when Gulf Arabs were expected to arrive in large
numbers in the country.
Nor is it the case, as was initially reported, that Hezbollah coordinated
its activities with Hamas. Hamas was taken by surprise by the abductions
and, while the Hamas leadership defended Hezbollah actions, in hindsight
it is easy to see why they might not have been pleased by them: over the
course of the conflict Israel launched multiple military operations
against Hamas in Gaza, killing dozens of fighters and scores of civilians.
The offensive went largely unnoticed in the West, thereby resuscitating
the adage that "when the Middle East burns, the Palestinians are
forgotten".
In truth, the abduction of the two Israeli soldiers and the killing of
eight others took the Hezbollah leadership by surprise and was effected
only because Hezbollah units on the Israeli border had standing orders to
exploit Israeli military weaknesses. Nasrallah had himself long signaled
Hezbollah's intent to kidnap Israeli soldiers, after former prime minister
Ariel Sharon reneged on fulfilling his agreement to release all Hezbollah
prisoners - three in all - during the last Hezbollah-Israeli prisoner
exchange.
The abductions were, in fact, all too easy: Israeli soldiers near the
border apparently violated standing operational procedures, left their
vehicles in sight of Hezbollah emplacements, and did so while out of
contact with higher-echelon commanders and while out of sight of covering
fire.
We note that while the Western media consistently misreported the events
on the Israeli-Lebanon border, Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper substantially
confirmed this account: "A force of tanks and armored personnel carriers
was immediately sent into Lebanon in hot pursuit. It was during this
pursuit, at about 11am ... [a] Merkava tank drove over a powerful bomb,
containing an estimated 200 to 300 kilograms of explosives, about 70
meters north of the border fence. The tank was almost completely
destroyed, and all four crew members were killed instantly. Over the next
several hours, IDF soldiers waged a fierce fight against Hezbollah gunmen
... During the course of this battle, at about 3pm, another soldier was
killed and two were lightly wounded."
The abductions marked the beginning of a series of IDF blunders that were
compounded by commanders who acted outside of their normal border
procedures. Members of the patrol were on the last days of their
deployment in the north and their guard was down. Nor is it the case that
Hezbollah fighters killed the eight Israelis during their abduction of the
two. The eight died when an IDF border commander, apparently embarrassed
by his abrogation of standing procedures, ordered armored vehicles to
pursue the kidnappers. The two armored vehicles ran into a network of
Hezbollah anti-tank mines and were destroyed. The eight IDF soldiers died
during this operation or as a result of combat actions that immediately
followed it.
That an IDF unit could wander so close to the border without being covered
by fire and could leave itself open to a Hezbollah attack has led Israeli
officers to question whether the unit was acting outside the chain of
command. An internal commission of inquiry was apparently convened by
senior IDF commanders in the immediate aftermath of the incident to
determine the facts in the matter and to review IDF procedures governing
units acting along Israel's northern border. The results of that
commission's findings have not yet been reported.
Despite being surprised by the Israeli response, Hezbollah fighters in
southern Lebanon were placed on full alert within minutes of the
kidnappings and arsenal commanders were alerted by their superiors.
Hezbollah's robust and hardened defenses were the result of six years of
diligent work, beginning with the Israeli withdrawal from the region in
2000. Many of the command bunkers designed and built by Hezbollah
engineers were fortified, and a few were even air-conditioned.
The digging of the arsenals over the previous years had been accompanied
by a program of deception, with some bunkers being constructed in the open
and often under the eyes of Israeli drone vehicles or under the
observation of Lebanese citizens with close ties to the Israelis. With few
exceptions, these bunkers were decoys. The building of other bunkers went
forward in areas kept hidden from the Lebanese population. The most
important command bunkers and weapons-arsenal bunkers were dug deeply into
Lebanon's rocky hills - to a depth of 40 meters. Nearly 600 separate
ammunition and weapons bunkers were strategically placed in the region
south of the Litani.
For security reasons, no single commander knew the location of each bunker
and each distinct Hezbollah militia unit was assigned access to three
bunkers only - a primary munitions bunker and two reserve bunkers, in case
the primary bunker was destroyed. Separate primary and backup marshaling
points were also designated for distinct combat units, which were tasked
to arm and fight within specific combat areas. The security protocols for
the marshaling of troops was diligently maintained. No single Hezbollah
member had knowledge of the militia's entire bunker structure.
Hezbollah's primary arsenals and marshaling points were targeted by the
Israeli Air Force (IAF) in the first 72 hours of the war. Israel's
commanders had identified these bunkers through a mix of intelligence
reports - signals intercepts from Hezbollah communications,
satellite-reconnaissance photos gleaned from cooperative arrangements with
the US military, photos analyzed as a result of IAF overflights of the
region, photos from drone aircraft deployed over southern Lebanon and,
most important, a network of trusted human-intelligence sources recruited
by Israeli intelligence officers living in southern Lebanon, including a
large number of foreign (non-Lebanese) nationals registered as guest
workers in the country.
The initial attack on Hezbollah's marshaling points and major bunker
complexes, which took place in the first 72 hours of the war, failed. On
July 15, the IAF targeted Hezbollah's leadership in Beirut. This attack
also failed. At no point during the war was any major Hezbollah political
figure killed, despite Israel's constant insistence that the
organization's senior leadership had suffered losses.
According to one US official who observed the war closely, the IAF's air
offensive degraded "perhaps only 7%" of the total military resource assets
available to Hezbollah's fighters in the first three days of fighting and
added that, in his opinion, Israeli air attacks on the Hezbollah
leadership were "absolutely futile".
Reports that the Hezbollah senior leadership had taken refuge in the
Iranian Embassy in Beirut (untouched during Israel's aerial offensive) are
not true, though it is not known precisely where the Hezbollah leadership
did take shelter. "Not even I knew where I was," Hezbollah leader
Nasrallah told one of his associates. Even with all of this, it is not the
case that the Israeli military's plans to destroy Lebanon's infrastructure
resulted from the IAF's inability to degrade Hezbollah's military capacity
in the war's first days.
The Israeli military's plans called for an early and sustained bombardment
of Lebanon's major highways and ports in addition to its plans to destroy
Hezbollah military and political assets. The Israeli government made no
secret of its intent - to undercut Hezbollah's support in the Christian,
Sunni and Druze communities. That idea, to punish Lebanon for harboring
Hezbollah and so turn the people against the militia, had been a part of
Israel's plan since the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.
While IDF officials confidently and publicly announced success in their
offensive, their commanders recommended that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
approve increased air sorties against potential Hezbollah caches in
marginal target areas at the end of the first week of the bombing. Olmert
approved these attacks, while knowing that in making such a request his
senior officers had all but admitted that their initial assessment of the
damage inflicted on Hezbollah was exaggerated.
Qana was the result of Olmert's agreement to "stretch the target
envelope". One US military expert who monitored the conflict closely had
this to say of the Qana bombing: "This isn't really that complicated.
After the failure of the initial campaign, IAF planning officers went back
through their target folders to see if they had missed anything. When they
decided they hadn't, someone probably stood up and went into the other
room and returned with a set of new envelopes of targets in densely
populated areas and said, 'Hey, what about these target envelopes?' And so
they did it." That is, the bombing of targets "close in" to southern
Lebanon population areas was the result of Israel's failure in the war -
not its success.
The "target stretching" escalated throughout the conflict; frustrated by
their inability to identify and destroy major Hezbollah military assets,
the IAF began targeting schools, community centers and mosques - under the
belief that their inability to identify and interdict Hezbollah bunkers
signaled Hezbollah's willingness to hide their major assets inside
civilian centers.
IAF officers also argued that Hezbollah's ability to continue its rocket
attacks on Israel meant that its militia was being continually resupplied.
Qana is a crossroads, the junction of five separate highways, and in the
heart of Hezbollah territory. Interdicting the Qana supply chain provided
the IAF the opportunity to prove that Hezbollah was only capable of
sustaining its operations because of its supply-dependence on the
crossroads town. In truth, however, IDF senior commanders knew that
expanding the number of targets in Lebanon would probably do little to
degrade Hezbollah capabilities because Hezbollah was maintaining its
attacks without any hope of resupply and because of its dependence on
weapons and rocket caches that had been hardened against Israeli
interdiction. In the wake of Qana, in which 28 civilians were killed,
Israel agreed to a 48-hour ceasefire.
The ceasefire provided the first evidence that Hezbollah had successfully
withstood Israeli air attacks and was planning a sustained and prolonged
defense of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah commanders honored the ceasefire at
the orders of their political superiors. With one or two lone exceptions,
no rockets were fired into Israel during this ceasefire period. While
Hezbollah's capacity actually to "cease fire" was otherwise ignored by
Israeli and Western intelligence experts, Hezbollah's ability to enforce
discipline on its field commanders came as a distinctly unwanted shock to
IDF senior commanders, who concluded that Hezbollah's communication's
capabilities had survived Israel's air onslaught, that the Hezbollah
leadership was in touch with its commanders on the ground, and that those
commanders were able to maintain a robust communications network despite
Israeli interdiction.
More simply, Hezbollah's ability to cease fire meant that Israel's goal of
separating Hezbollah fighters from their command structure (considered a
necessity by modern armies in waging a war on a sophisticated
technological battlefield) had failed. The IDF's senior commanders could
only come to one conclusion - its prewar information on Hezbollah military
assets was, at best, woefully incomplete or, at worst, fatally wrong.
In fact, over a period of two years, Hezbollah intelligence officials had
built a significant signals-counterintelligence capability. Throughout the
war, Hezbollah commanders were able to predict when and where Israeli
fighters and bombers would strike. Moreover, Hezbollah had identified key
Israeli human-intelligence assets in Lebanon. One month prior to the
abduction of the IDF border patrol and the subsequent Israeli attack,
Lebanese intelligence officials had broken up an Israeli spy ring
operating inside the country.
Lebanese (and Hezbollah) intelligence officials arrested at least 16
Israeli spies in Lebanon, though they failed to find or arrest the leader
of the ring. Moreover, during two years from 2004 until the eve of the
war, Hezbollah had successfully "turned" a number of Lebanese civilian
assets reporting on the location of major Hezbollah military caches in
southern Lebanon to Israeli intelligence officers. In some small number of
crucially important cases, Hezbollah senior intelligence officials were
able to "feed back" false information on their militia's most important
emplacements to Israel - with the result that Israel target folders
identified key emplacements that did not, in fact, exist.
Finally, Hezbollah's ability to intercept and "read" Israeli actions had a
decisive impact on the coming ground war. Hezbollah intelligence officials
had perfected their signals-intelligence capability to such an extent that
they could intercept Israeli ground communications between Israeli
military commanders. Israel, which depended on a highly sophisticated set
of "frequency hopping" techniques that would allow their commanders to
communicate with one another, underestimated Hezbollah's ability to master
counter-signals technology. The result would have a crucial impact on
Israel's calculation that surprise alone would provide the margin of
victory for its soldiers.
It now is clear that the Israeli political establishment was shocked by
the failure of its forces to accomplish its first military goals in the
war - including the degradation of a significant number of Hezbollah
arsenals and the destruction of Hezbollah's command capabilities.
But the Israeli political establishment had done almost nothing to prepare
for the worst: the first meeting of the Israeli security cabinet in the
wake of the July 12 abduction lasted only three hours. And while Olmert
and his security cabinet demanded minute details of the IDF's plan for the
first three days of the war, they failed to articulate clear political
goals in the aftermath of the conflict or sketch out a political exit
strategy should the offensive fail.
Olmert and the security cabinet violated the first principle of war - they
showed contempt for their enemy. In many respects, Olmert and his cabinet
were captives of an unquestioned belief in the efficacy of Israeli
deterrence. Like the Israeli public, they viewed any questioning of IDF
capabilities as sacrilege.
The Israeli intelligence failure during the conflict was catastrophic. It
meant that, after the failure of Israel's air campaign to degrade
Hezbollah assets significantly in the first 72 hours of the war, Israel's
chance of winning a decisive victory against Hezbollah was increasingly,
and highly, unlikely.
"Israel lost the war in the first three days," one US military expert
said. "If you have that kind of surprise and you have that kind of
firepower, you had better win. Otherwise, you're in for the long haul."
IDF senior officers concluded that, given the failure of the air campaign,
they had only one choice - to invade Lebanon with ground troops in the
hopes of destroying Hezbollah's will to prevail.
Next: Winning the ground war
HOW HEZBOLLAH DEFEATED ISRAEL
PART 2: Winning the ground war
By Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry
Israel's decision to launch a ground war to accomplish what its air force
had failed to do was made hesitantly and haphazardly. While Israeli
Defense Forces (IDF) units had been making forays into southern Lebanon
during the second week of the conflict, the Israeli military leadership
remained undecided over when and where - even whether - to deploy their
ground units.
In part, the army's indecisiveness over when, where and whether
to deploy its major ground units was a function of the air force's claims
to victory. The Israeli Air Force (IAF) kept claiming that it would
succeed from the air - in just one more day, and then another. This
indecision was mirrored by the Western media's uncertainty about when a
ground campaign would take place - or whether in fact it had already
occurred.
Senior Israeli officers continued to tell their press contacts that the
timing of a ground offensive was a tightly kept secret when, in fact, they
didn't know themselves. The hesitation was also the result of the
experience of small IDF units that had already penetrated beyond the
border. Special IDF units operating in southern Lebanon were reporting to
their commanders as early as July 18 that Hezbollah units were fighting
tenaciously to hold their positions on the first ridgeline overlooking
Israel.
At this point, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made a political decision: he
would deploy the full might of the IDF to defeat Hezbollah at the same
time that his top aides signaled Israel's willingness to accept a
ceasefire and the deployment of an international force. Olmert determined
that Israel should not tip its hand - it would accept the deployment of a
United Nations force, but only as a last resort.
First, he decided, Israel would say that it would accept a North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) force. In keeping with this strategy, Israeli
reserve forces were called to the front on July 21. The surprise call-up
(the IDF was to defeat Hezbollah first from the air, and then - if that
failed - use its regular forces, with no reserve forces to be called) made
the initial deployment of the reserves hurried and uncoordinated. (It is,
to repeat, likely that Israel did not believe it would have to call on its
reserves during the conflict, or it would have called them much earlier.)
Moreover, the decision to call the reserves took key senior reserve
officers, usually the first to be notified of a pending call-up, by
surprise. The reserve call-up was handled chaotically - with the reserve
"tail" of logistical support lagging some 24-48 hours behind the
deployment of reserve forces.
The July 21 call-up was a clear sign to military strategists in the
Pentagon that Israel's war was not going well. It also helps to explain
why Israeli reserve troops arrived at the front without the necessary
equipment, without a coherent battle plan, and without the munitions
necessary to carry on the fight. (Throughout the conflict, Israel
struggled to provide adequate support to its reserve forces: food,
ammunition and even water supplies reached units a full 24-48 hours behind
a unit's appearance at its assigned northern deployment zones.)
The effect of this was immediately perceived by military observers.
"Israeli troops looked unprepared, sloppy and demoralized," one former
senior US commander noted. "This wasn't the vaunted IDF that we saw in
previous wars."
In keeping with Olmert's political ploy, the IDF's goal of the total
destruction of Hezbollah was also being markedly scaled back. "There is
one line between our military objectives and our political objectives,"
Brigadier-General Ido Nehushtan, a member of Israel's general staff, said
on the day after the reserve call-up. "The goal is not necessarily to
eliminate every Hezbollah rocket. What we must do is disrupt the military
logic of Hezbollah. I would say that this is still not a matter of days
away."
This was a decidedly strange way of presenting a military strategy - to
conduct a war to "disrupt the military logic" of an enemy. Nehushtan's
statement had a chilling effect on IDF ground commanders, who wondered
exactly what the war's goals were. But other IDF commanders were upbeat -
while the IAF had failed to stop Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israeli
cities, fewer rockets were fired at Israel from July 19-21 than at any
other time (a very small number on July 19, perhaps as few as 40 on July
20 and 50 on July 22).
July 22 also marks the first time that the United States responded
militarily to the conflict. Late on the day of the 21st, the White House
received a request from Olmert and the IDF for the provision of large
amounts of precision-guided munitions - another telltale sign that the IAF
had failed in its mission to degrade Hezbollah military assets
significantly during the opening rounds of the war.
The request was quickly approved and the munitions were shipped to Israel
beginning on the morning of July 22. Senior Pentagon officials were
dismayed by the shipment, as it meant that Israel had expended most of its
munitions in the war's first 10 days - an enormous targeting expenditure
that suggested Israel had abandoned tactical bombing of Hezbollah assets
and was poised for an onslaught on what remained of Lebanon's
infrastructure, a strategy that had not worked during World War II, when
the United States and Britain destroyed Germany's 66 major population
centers without any discernable impact either on German morale or military
capabilities.
But there was little grumbling in the Pentagon, though one former serving
officer observed that the deployment of US munitions to Israel was
reminiscent of a similar request made by Israel in 1973 - at the height of
the Yom Kippur War. "This can only mean one thing," this officer said at
the time. "They're on the ropes."
In spite of its deep misgivings about the Israeli response (and the
misgivings, though unreported, were deep and significant - and extended
even into the upper echelons of the US Air Force), senior US military
officers kept their views out of public view. And for good reason:
criticism of Israel for requesting a shipment of arms during the 1973 war
led to the resignation of then Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) chairman
General George Brown. Brown was enraged that US weapons and munitions were
being sent to Israel at the same time that American commanders in Vietnam
were protesting a lack of supplies in their war in Southeast Asia.
The current JCS chairman, Peter Pace, who remained notably silent during
the Israeli-Hezbollah war, understood history, saluted, and remained
silent. But the JCS and senior military commanders were not the only US
officials who were worried about Israel's performance. While the new US
munitions were winging their way to Israel (via Prestwick, Scotland),
intelligence officials were conducting initial assessments of the war's
opening days, including one noting that in spite of the sustained Israeli
air offensive, Al-Manar was still broadcasting in Beirut, though the IAF
had destroyed the broadcast bands of Lebanon's other major networks. (This
would remain true throughout the war - Al-Manar never went off the air.)
How effective could the Israeli air campaign have been if they couldn't
even knock out a television station's transmissions?
The call-up of Israel's reserves was meant to buttress forces already
fighting in southern Lebanon, and to add weight to the ground assault. On
July 22, Hezbollah units of the Nasr Brigade fought the IDF
street-to-street in Maroun al-Ras. While the IDF claimed at the end of the
day that it had taken the town, it had not. The fighting had been bloody,
but Hezbollah fighters had not been dislodged. Many of the Nasr Brigade's
soldiers had spent countless days waiting for the Israeli assault and,
because of Hezbollah's ability to intercept IDF military communications,
Israeli soldiers bumped up against units that were well entrenched.
IDF detachments continually failed to flank the defenders, meeting
counterpunches toward the west of the city. Special three-man
hunter-killer teams from the Nasr Brigade destroyed several Israeli
armored vehicles during the fight with light man-made anti-tank missiles.
"We knew they were going to do this," Ilay Talmor, an exhausted Israeli
second lieutenant, said at the time. "This is territory they say is
theirs. We would do the same thing if someone came into our country."
While the IDF continued to insist that its incursions would be "limited in
scope", despite the recall of thousands of reserve troops, IDF battalions
began to form south of the border. "We are not preparing for an invasion
of Lebanon," said Avi Pazner, a senior Israeli government spokesman. The
IDF then called Maroun al-Ras its "first foothold" in southern Lebanon. "A
combination of air force, artillery and ground-force pressure will push
Hezbollah out without arriving at the point where we have to invade and
occupy," Pazner said.
The difference between "pushing" out a force and invading and occupying a
town was thereby set, another clear signal to US military experts that the
IDF could enter a town but could not occupy it. One US officer schooled in
US military history compared the IDF's foray into southern Lebanon to
Robert E Lee's bloody attack on Union positions at Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania, during the American Civil War. "Oh I can get there, all
right," Lee's lieutenant said during that war, "it's staying there that's
the problem."
After-battle reports of Hezbollah commanders now confirm that IDF troops
never fully secured the border area and Maroun al-Ras was never fully
taken. Nor did Hezbollah ever feel the need to call up its reserves, as
Israel had done. "The entire war was fought by one Hezbollah brigade of
3,000 troops, and no more," one military expert in the region said. "The
Nasr Brigade fought the entire war. Hezbollah never felt the need to
reinforce it."
Reports from Lebanon underscore this point. Much to their surprise,
Hezbollah commanders found that Israeli troops were poorly organized and
disciplined. The only Israeli unit that performed up to standards was the
Golani Brigade, according to Lebanese observers. The IDF was "a motley
assortment", one official with a deep knowledge of US slang reported. "But
that's what happens when you have spent four decades firing rubber bullets
at women and children in the West Bank and Gaza."
IDF commanders were also disturbed by the performance of their troops,
noting a signal lack of discipline even among its best-trained regular
soldiers. The reserves were worse, and IDF commanders hesitated to put
them into battle.
On July 25, Olmert's strategy of backing down from a claimed goal to
destroy Hezbollah was in full force. The Israeli Defense Minister Amir
Peretz was the bearer of these tidings, saying that Israel's current goal
was to create a "security zone" in southern Lebanon. His words were
accompanied by a threat: "If there is not a multinational force that will
get in to control the fences, we will continue to control with our fire
towards anyone that gets close to the defined security zone, and they will
know that they can be hurt."
Gone quite suddenly was a claim that Israel would destroy Hezbollah; gone
too was a claim that only NATO would be acceptable as a peacekeeping unit
on the border. On July 25, Israel also reported that Abu Jaafar, a
commander of Hezbollah's "central sector" on the Lebanese border, was
killed "in an exchange of fire" with Israeli troops near the border
village of Maroun al-Ras - which had not yet been taken. The report was
not true. Abu Jaafar made public comments after the end of the war.
Later on July 25, during US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to
Jerusalem, the Israeli military fought its way into Bint Jbeil, calling it
"Hezbollah's terror capital". The fight for Bint Jbeil went on for nine
days. But it remained in Hezbollah hands until the end of the conflict. By
then, the town had been destroyed, as Hezbollah fighters were able to
survive repeated air and artillery shellings, retreating into their
bunkers during the worst of the air and artillery campaign, and only
emerging when IDF troops in follow-on operations tried to claim the city.
The Hezbollah tactics were reminiscent of those followed by the North
Vietnamese Army during the opening days of the Vietnam conflict - when NVA
commanders told their troops that they needed to "ride out the bombs" and
then fight the Americans in small unit actions. "You must grab them by
their belt buckles," a Vietnamese commander said in describing these
tactics.
On July 24, as yet another sign of its looming failure in Lebanon, Israel
deployed the first of thousands of cluster munitions against what it
called "Hezbollah emplacements" in southern Lebanon. Cluster munitions are
an effective, if vicious, combat tool and those nations that use them,
including every single member of NATO (as well as Russia and China), have
consistently refused to enter an international agreement banning their use.
The most responsible nation-states that use them, however, "double fuse"
their munitions to cut down on the failure rate of the "bomblets" after
they have been deployed. During the administration of US president Bill
Clinton, defense secretary William Cohen agreed to the double-fusing of US
cluster munitions and a phase-out of the "high dud rate" munitions in the
US stockpile, which was intended to cut the failure rate of these
munitions from 14% (some estimates are higher) to less than 3% (though
some estimates are lower).
While investigations into Israel's use of these munitions is not yet
complete, it now appears that the IDF deployed single-fused munitions.
Recent reports in the Israeli press indicate that artillery officers
carpeted dozens of Lebanese villages with the bomblets - as close to the
definition of the "indiscriminate" use of firepower as one can get.
The Israeli munitions may well have been purchased from aging US
stockpiles that were not double-fused, making the United States complicit
in this indiscriminate targeting. Such a conclusion seems to fit with the
time-line of the resupply of munitions to Israel on July 22. The IDF may
well have been able to offload these munitions and deploy them quickly
enough to have created the cluster-munitions crisis in Lebanon that
plagues that nation still - and that started on July 24.
On July 26, IDF officials conceded that the previous 24 hours in their
fight for Bint Jbail was "the hardest day of fighting in southern
Lebanon". After failing to take the town from Hezbollah in the morning,
IDF commanders decided to send in their elite Golani Brigade. In two hours
in the afternoon, nine Golani Brigade soldiers were killed and 22 were
wounded. Late in the afternoon, the IDF deployed its elite Paratroopers
Brigade to Maroun al-Ras, where fighting with elements of the Nasr Brigade
was in its third day.
On July 27, in response to the failure of its units to take these cities,
the Israeli government agreed to a call-up of three more reserve divisions
- a full 15,000 troops. By July 28, however, it was becoming clear just
how severe the failure of the IAF had been in its attempts to stop
Hezbollah rocket attacks. On that day, Hezbollah deployed a new rocket,
the Khaibar-1, which hit Afula.
On July 28, the severity of Israel's intelligence failures finally reached
the Israeli public. On that day, Mossad officials leaked information that,
by their estimate, Hezbollah had not suffered a significant degradation in
its military capabilities, and that the organization might be able to
carry on the conflict for several more months. The IDF disagreed, stating
that Hezbollah had been severely damaged. The first cracks in the Israeli
intelligence community were beginning to show.
Experts in the US were also beginning to question Israel's strategy and
capability. The conservative Brookings Institution published a commentary
by Philip H Gordon (who blamed Hezbollah for the crisis) advising, "The
issue is not whether Hezbollah is responsible for this crisis - it is - or
whether Israel has the right to defend itself - it does - but whether this
particular strategy [of a sustained air campaign] will work. It will not.
It will not render Hezbollah powerless, because it is simply impossible to
eliminate thousands of small, mobile, hidden and easily resupplied rockets
via an air campaign."
Gordan's commentary reflected the views of an increasing number of
military officers, who were scrambling to dust off their own air plans in
the case of a White House order targeting Iranian nuclear sites. "There is
a common misperception that the [US] Air Force was thrilled by the Israeli
war against Lebanon," one Middle East expert with access to senior
Pentagon officials told us. "They were aghast. They well know the limits
of their own power and they know how it can be abused.
"It seemed to them [USAF officers] that Israel threw away the book in
Lebanon. This wasn't surgical, it wasn't precise, and it certainly wasn't
smart. You can't just coat a country in iron and hope to win."
The cold, harsh numbers of the war point up the fallacy of the Israeli air
and ground campaign. Hezbollah had secreted upwards of 18,000 rockets in
its arsenals prior to the conflict. These sites were hardened against
Israeli air strikes and easily survived the air campaign. Hezbollah
officials calculated that from the time of firing until the IAF was able
to identify and deploy fighters to take out the mobile rockets was 90
seconds. Through years of diligent training, Hezbollah rocket teams had
learned to deploy, fire and safely cover their mobile launchers in less
than 60 seconds, with the result that IAF planes and helicopters (which
Israel has in much fewer numbers than it boasts) could not stop
Hezbollah's continued rocket fire at Israel ("Israel is about three
helicopters away from a total disaster," one US military officer
commented).
Hezbollah fired about 4,000 rockets at Israel (a more precise, though
uncertain, figure calculates the firing of 4,180 rockets), bringing its
stockpiles down to 14,000 rockets - enough to prosecute the war for at
least three more months.
Moreover, and more significant, Hezbollah's fighters proved to be
dedicated and disciplined. Using intelligence assets to pinpoint Israeli
infantry penetrations, they proved the equal of Israel's best fighting
units. In some cases, Israeli units were defeated on the field of battle,
forced into sudden retreats or forced to rely on air cover to save
elements from being overrun. Even toward the end of the war, on August 9,
the IDF announced that 15 of its reserve soldiers were killed and 40
wounded in fighting in the villages of Marjayoun, Khiam and Kila - a
stunning casualty rate for a marginal piece of real estate.
The robust Hezbollah defense was also taking its toll on Israeli armor.
When Israel finally agreed to a ceasefire and began its withdrawal from
the border area, it left behind upwards of 40 armored vehicles, nearly all
of them destroyed by expertly deployed AT-3 "Sagger" anti-tank missiles -
which is the NATO name for the Russian-made vehicle- or man-deployed,
wire-guided, second-generation 9M14 Malyutka - or "Little Baby".
With a range of 3 kilometers, the Sagger proved enormously successful in
taking on Israeli tanks, a fact that must have given Israeli armor
commanders fits, in large part because the Sagger missile deployed by
Hezbollah is an older version (developed and deployed in 1973) of a more
modern version that is more easily hidden and deployed and has a larger
warhead. If the IDF could not protect its armor against the 1973 "second
generation" version, IDF commanders must now be wondering how it can
possibly protect itself against a version that is more modern, more
sophisticated, and more deadly.
Prior to the implementation of the ceasefire, the Israeli political
establishment decided that it would "clear drop" Israeli paratroopers in
key areas along the Litani River. The decision was apparently made to
convince the international community that the rules of engagement for a UN
force should extend from the Litani south. Such a claim could not be made
unless Israel could credibly claim to have cleared that part of Lebanon to
the Litani.
A significant number of Israeli forces were airlifted into key areas just
south of the Litani to accomplish this goal. The decision might well have
led to a disaster. Most of the Israeli forces airlifted to these sites
were immediately surrounded by Hezbollah units and may well have been
decisively mauled had a ceasefire not gone into effect. The political
decision angered retired IDF officers, one of whom accused Olmert of
"spinning the military" - using the military for public relations purposes.
Perhaps the most telling sign of Israel's military failure comes in
counting the dead and wounded. Israel now claims that it killed about
400-500 Hezbollah fighters, while its own losses were significantly less.
But a more precise accounting shows that Israeli and Hezbollah casualties
were nearly even. It is impossible for Shi'ites (and Hezbollah) not to
allow an honorable burial for its martyrs, so in this case it is simply a
matter of counting funerals. Fewer than 180 funerals have been held for
Hezbollah fighters - nearly equal to the number killed on the Israeli
side. That number may be revised upward: our most recent information from
Lebanon says the number of Shi'ite martyr funerals in the south can now be
precisely tabulated at 184.
But by any accounting - whether in rockets, armored vehicles or numbers of
dead and wounded - Hezbollah's fight against Israel must be accorded a
decisive military and political victory. Even if it were otherwise (and it
is clearly not), the full impact of Hezbollah's war with Israel over a
period of 34 days in July and August has caused a political earthquake in
the region.
Hezbollah's military defeat of Israel was decisive, but its political
defeat of the United States - which unquestioningly sided with Israel
during the conflict and refused to bring it to an end - was catastrophic
and has had a lasting impact on US prestige in the region.
Next: How Hezbollah won the political war
HOW HEZBOLLAH DEFEATED ISRAEL
PART 3: The political war
By Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry
In the wake of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, a public poll in Egypt asked
a cross-section of that country's citizenry to name the two political
leaders they most admired. An overwhelming number named Hassan Nasrallah.
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad finished second.
The poll was a clear repudiation not only of Egyptian President Hosni
Mubarak, who had made his views against Hezbollah known at the outset of
the conflict, but of those Sunni leaders, including Saudi King Abdullah
and Jordan's Abdullah II, who criticized the Shi'ite group in an avowed
attempt to turn the Sunni world away from support of Iran.
"By the end of the war these guys were scrambling for the exits," one US
diplomat from the region said in late August. "You haven't heard much from
them lately, have you?"
Mubarak and the two Abdullahs are not the only ones scrambling for the
exits - the United States' foreign policy in the region, even in light of
its increasingly dire deployment in Iraq, is in a shambles. "What that
means is that all the doors are closed to us, in Cairo, in Amman, in Saudi
Arabia," another diplomat averred. "Our access has been curtailed. No one
will see us. When we call no one picks up the phone."
A talisman of this collapse can be seen in the itinerary of US Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice, whose inability to persuade President George W
Bush to halt the fighting and her remark about the conflict as marking
"the birth pangs" of a new Middle East in effect destroyed her credibility.
The US has made it clear that it will attempt to retrieve its position by
backing a yet-to-be-announced Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, but
America's continued strangulation of the democratically constituted
government of the Palestinian Authority has transformed that pledge into a
stillborn political program. The reason for this is now eminently clear.
In the midst of the war, a European official in Cairo had this to say
about the emotions roiling the Egyptian political environment: "The
Egyptian leadership is walking down one side of the street," he said, "and
the Egyptian people are walking down the other."
The catastrophic failure of Israeli arms has buoyed Iran's claim to
leadership of the Muslim world in several critical areas.
First, the Hezbollah victory has shown that Israel - and any modern and
technologically sophisticated Western military force - can be defeated in
open battle, if the proper military tactics are employed and if they are
sustained over a prolonged period. Hezbollah has provided the model for
the defeat of a modern army. The tactics are simple: ride out the first
wave of a Western air campaign, then deploy rocket forces targeting key
military and economic assets of the enemy, then ride out a second and more
critical air campaign, and then prolong the conflict for an extended
period. At some point, as in the case of Israel's attack on Hezbollah, the
enemy will be forced to commit ground troops to accomplish what its air
forces could not. It is in this last, and critical, phase that a
dedicated, well-trained and well-led force can exact enormous pain on a
modern military establishment and defeat it.
Second, the Hezbollah victory has shown the people of the Muslim world
that the strategy employed by Western-allied Arab and Muslim governments -
a policy of appeasing US interests in the hopes of gaining substantive
political rewards (a recognition of Palestinian rights, fair pricing for
Middle Eastern resources, non-interference in the region's political
structures, and free, fair and open elections) - cannot and will not work.
The Hezbollah victory provides another and different model, of shattering
US hegemony and destroying its stature in the region. Of the two most
recent events in the Middle East, the invasion of Iraq and the Hezbollah
victory over Israel, the latter is by far the most important. Even
otherwise anti-Hezbollah groups, including those associated with
revolutionary Sunni resistance movements who look on Shi'ites as
apostates, have been humbled.
Third, the Hezbollah victory has had a shattering impact on America's
allies in the region. Israeli intelligence officials calculated that
Hezbollah could carry on its war for upwards of three months after its end
in the middle of August. Hezbollah's calculations reflected Israel's
findings, with the caveat that neither the Hezbollah nor Iranian
leadership could predict what course to follow after a Hezbollah victory.
While Jordan's intelligence services locked down any pro-Hezbollah
demonstrations, Egypt's intelligence services were struggling to monitor
the growing public dismay over the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon.
Open support for Hezbollah across the Arab world (including, strangely,
portraits of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah carried in the midst of
Christian celebrations) has put those Arab rulers closest to the United
States on notice: a further erosion in their status could loosen their
hold on their own nations. It seems likely that as a result, Mubarak and
the two Abdullahs are very unlikely to support any US program calling for
economic, political or military pressures on Iran. A future war - perhaps
a US military campaign against Iran's nuclear sites - might not unseat the
government in Tehran, but it could well unseat the governments of Egypt,
Jordan and perhaps Saudi Arabia.
At a key point in the Israel-Hezbollah contest, toward the end of the war,
Islamist party leaders in a number of countries wondered whether they
would be able to continue their control over their movements or whether,
as they feared, political action would be ceded to street captains and
revolutionaries. The singular notion, now common in intelligence circles
in the United States, is that it was Israel (and not Hezbollah) that, as
of August 10, was looking for a way out of the conflict.
Fourth, the Hezbollah victory has dangerously weakened the Israeli
government. In the wake of Israel's last lost war, in 1973, prime minister
Menachem Begin decided to accept a peace proposal from Egyptian president
Anwar Sadat. The breakthrough was, in fact, rather modest - as both
parties were allies of the United States. No such breakthrough will take
place in the wake of the Israel-Hezbollah war.
Israel believes that it has lost its deterrent capabilities and that they
must be retrieved. Some Israeli officials in Washington now confirm that
it is not a matter of "if" but of "when" Israel goes to war again. Yet it
is difficult to determine how Israel can do that. To fight and win against
Hezbollah, Israel will need to retrain and refit its army. Like the United
States after the Vietnam debacle, Israel will have to restructure its
military leadership and rebuild its intelligence assets. That will take
years, not months.
It may be that Israel will opt, in future operations, for the deployment
of ever bigger weapons against ever larger targets. Considering its
performance in Lebanon, such uses of ever larger weapons could spell an
even more robust response. This is not out of the question. A US attack on
Iranian nuclear installations would likely be answered by an Iranian
missile attack on Israel's nuclear installations - and on Israeli
population centers. No one can predict how Israel would react to such an
attack, but it is clear that (given Bush's stance in the recent conflict)
the United States would do nothing to stop it. The "glass house" of the
Persian Gulf region, targeted by Iranian missiles, would then assuredly
come crashing down.
Fifth, the Hezbollah victory spells the end of any hope of a resolution of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at least in the short and medium terms.
Even normally "progressive" Israeli political figures undermined their
political position with strident calls for more force, more troops and
more bombs. In private meetings with his political allies, Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas castigated those who cheered on Hezbollah's
victory, calling them "Hamas supporters" and "enemies of Israel". Abbas is
in a far more tenuous position than Mubarak or the two Abdullahs - his
people's support for Hamas continues, as does his slavish agreement with
George W Bush, who told him on the sidelines of the United Nations
Security Council meeting that he was to end all attempts to form a unity
government with his fellow citizens.
Sixth, the Hezbollah victory has had the very unfortunate consequence of
blinding Israel's political leadership to the realities of their
geostrategic position. In the midst of the war with Lebanon, Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert adopted Bush's language on the "war on terrorism",
reminding his citizenry that Hezbollah was a part of "the axis of evil".
His remarks have been reinforced by Bush, whose comments during his
address before the UN General Assembly mentioned al-Qaeda once - and
Hezbollah and Hamas five times each. The United States and Israel have now
lumped Islamist groups willing to participate in the political processes
in their own nations with those takfiris and Salafists who are bent on
setting the region on fire.
Nor can Israel now count on its strongest US supporters, that network of
neo-conservatives for whom Israel is an island of stability and democracy
in the region. These neo-conservatives' disapproval of Israel's
performance is almost palpable. With friends like these, who needs
enemies? That is to say, the Israeli conflict in Lebanon reflects
accurately those experts who see the Israel-Hezbollah conflict as a proxy
war. Our colleague Jeff Aronson noted that "if it were up to the US,
Israel would still be fighting", and he added: "The United States will
fight the war on terrorism to the last drop of Israeli blood."
The continued weakness of the Israeli political leadership and the fact
that it is in denial about the depth of its defeat should be a deep
concern for the United States and for every Arab nation. Israel has proved
that in times of crisis, it can shape a creative diplomatic strategy and
maneuver deftly to retrieve its position. It has also proved that in the
wake of a military defeat, it is capable of honest and transparent
self-examination. Israel's strength has always been its capacity for
public debate, even if such debate questions the most sacrosanct
institution - the Israel Defense Forces. At key moments in Israel's
history, defeat has led to reflection and not, as now seems likely, an
increasingly escalating military offensive against Hamas - the red-headed
stepchild of the Middle East - to show just how tough it is.
"The fact that the Middle East has been radicalized by the Hezbollah
victory presents a good case for killing more of them," one Israeli
official recently said. That path will lead to disaster. In light of
America's inability to pull the levers of change in the Middle East, there
is hope among some in Washington that Olmert will show the political
courage to begin the long process of finding peace. That process will be
painful, it will involve long and difficult discussions, it may mean a
break with the US program for the region. But the US does not live in the
region, and Israel does. While conducting a political dialogue with its
neighbors might be painful, it will prove far less painful than losing a
war in Lebanon.
Seventh, Hezbollah's position in Lebanon has been immeasurably
strengthened, as has the position of its most important ally. At the
height of the conflict, Lebanese Christians took Hezbollah refugees into
their homes. The Christian leader Michel Aoun openly supported Hezbollah's
fight. One Hezbollah leader said: "We will never forget what that man did
for us, not for an entire generation." Aoun's position is celebrated among
the Shi'ites, and his own political position has been enhanced.
The Sunni leadership, on the other hand, fatally undermined itself with
its uncertain stance and its absentee landlord approach to its own
community. In the first week of the war, Hezbollah's actions were greeted
with widespread skepticism. At the end of the war its support was solid
and stretched across Lebanon's political and sectarian divides. The Sunni
leadership now has a choice: it can form a unity government with new
leaders that will create a more representative government or they can
stand for elections. It doesn't take a political genius to understand
which choice Saad Hariri, the majority leader in the Lebanese parliament,
will make.
Eighth, Iran's position in Iraq has been significantly enhanced. In the
midst of the Lebanon conflict, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
privately worried that the Israeli offensive would have dire consequences
for the US military in Iraq, who faced increasing hostility from Shi'ite
political leaders and the Shi'ite population. Rice's statement that the
pro-Hezbollah demonstrations in Baghdad were planned by Tehran revealed
her ignorance of the most fundamental political facts of the region. The
US secretaries of state and of defense were simply and unaccountably
unaware that the Sadrs of Baghdad bore any relationship to the Sadrs of
Lebanon. That Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki would not castigate
Hezbollah and side with Israel during the conflict - and in the midst of
an official visit to Washington - was viewed as shocking by Washington's
political establishment, even though "Hezbollah in Iraq" is one of the
parties in the current Iraqi coalition government.
We have been told that neither the Pentagon nor the State Department
understood how the war in Lebanon might effect America's position in Iraq
because neither the Pentagon nor the State Department asked for a briefing
on the issue from the US intelligence services. The United States spends
billions of dollars each year on its intelligence collection and analysis
activities. It is money wasted.
Ninth, Syria's position has been strengthened and the US-French program
for Lebanon has failed. There is no prospect that Lebanon will form a
government that is avowedly pro-American or anti-Syrian. That Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad could, in the wake of the war, suggest a
political arrangement with Israel shows his strength, not his weakness.
That he might draw the correct conclusions from the conflict and believe
that he too might successfully oppose Israel is also possible.
But aside from these possibilities, recent history shows that those
thousands of students and Lebanese patriots who protested Syria's
involvement in Lebanon after the death of Rafiq Hariri found it ironic
that they took refuge from the Israeli bombing in tent cities established
by the Syrian government. Rice is correct on one thing: Syria's
willingness to provide refuge for Lebanese refugees was a pure act of
political cynicism - and one that the United States seems incapable of
replicating. Syria now is confident of its political position. In a
previous era, such confidence allowed Israel to shape a political opening
with its most intransigent political enemies.
Tenth, and perhaps most important, it now is clear that a US attack on
Iranian nuclear installations would be met with little support in the
Muslim world. It would also be met by a military response that would
collapse the last vestiges of America's political power in the region.
What was thought to be a "given" just a few short weeks ago has been shown
to be unlikely. Iran will not be cowed. If the United States launches a
military campaign against the Tehran government, it is likely that
America's friends will fall by the wayside, the Gulf Arab states will
tremble in fear, the 138,000 US soldiers in Iraq will be held hostage by
an angered Shi'ite population, and Iran will respond by an attack on
Israel. We would now dare say the obvious - if and when such an attack
comes, the United States will be defeated.
Conclusion
The victory of Hezbollah in its recent conflict with Israel is far more
significant than many analysts in the United States and Europe realize.
The Hezbollah victory reverses the tide of 1967 - a shattering defeat of
Egypt, Syria and Jordan that shifted the region's political plates,
putting in place regimes that were bent on recasting their own foreign
policy to reflect Israeli and US power. That power now has been sullied
and reversed, and a new leadership is emerging in the region.
The singular lesson of the conflict may well be lost on the upper echelons
of Washington's and London's pro-Israel, pro-values,
we-are-fighting-for-civilization political elites, but it is not lost in
the streets of Cairo, Amman, Ramallah, Baghdad, Damascus or Tehran. It
should not be lost among the Israeli political leadership in Jerusalem.
The Arab armies of 1967 fought for six days and were defeated. The
Hezbollah militia in Lebanon fought for 34 days and won. We saw this with
our own eyes when we looked into the cafes of Cairo and Amman, where
simple shopkeepers, farmers and workers gazed at television reports,
sipped their tea, and silently mouthed the numbers to themselves: "seven",
"eight", "nine" ...
Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry are the co-directors of Conflicts Forum, a
London-based group dedicated to providing an opening to political Islam.
Crooke is the former Middle East adviser to European Union High
Representative Javier Solana and served as a staff member of the Mitchell
Commission investigating the causes of the second intifada. Perry is a
Washington, DC-based political consultant, author of six books on US
history, and a former personal adviser to Yasser Arafat.
(Research for this article was provided by Madeleine Perry.)
3 parts : intelligence war - ground war - political war
PART 1: Winning the intelligence war
Source Part1: http://tinyurl.com/y37js6
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ12Ak01.html
PART 2: Winning the ground war
Source Part2: http://tinyurl.com/y788v9
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ13Ak01.html
PART 3: The political war
Source Part3: http://tinyurl.com/wvz69
http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ14Ak01.html
HOW HEZBOLLAH DEFEATED ISRAEL
PART 1: Winning the intelligence war
By Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry
Introduction
Writing five years after the attacks of September 11, 2001, US military
expert Anthony Cordesman published an account of the Israeli-Hezbollah
conflict. "Preliminary Lessons of the Israeli-Hezbollah War" created
enormous interest in the Pentagon, where it was studied by planners for
the Joint Chiefs of Staff and passed hand-to-hand among military experts
in Washington. Cordesman made no secret of his modest conclusions, rightly
recognizing that his study was not only "preliminary", but that it took no
account of how Hezbollah fought the conflict or judged its results.
"This analysis is ... limited," Cordesman noted, "by the fact that no
matching visit was made to Lebanon and to the Hezbollah." Incomplete
though it might have been, Cordesman's study accomplished two goals: it
provided a foundation for understanding the war from the Israeli point of
view and it raised questions on how and how well Hezbollah fought. Nearly
two months after the end of the Israeli-Hezbollah war, it is now possible
to fill in some of the lines left blank by Cordesman.
The portrait that we give here is also limited. Hezbollah officials will
neither speak publicly nor for the record on how they fought the conflict,
will not detail their deployments, and will not discuss their future
strategy. Even so, the lessons of the war from Hezbollah's perspective are
now beginning to emerge and some small lessons are being derived from it
by US and Israeli strategic planners. Our conclusions are based on
on-the-ground assessments conducted during the course of the war, on
interviews with Israeli, American and European military experts, on
emerging understandings of the conflict in discussions with military
strategists, and on a network of senior officials in the Middle East who
were intensively interested in the war's outcome and with whom we have
spoken.
Our overall conclusion contradicts the current point of view being
retailed by some White House and Israeli officials: that Israel's
offensive in Lebanon significantly damaged Hezbollah's ability to wage
war, that Israel successfully degraded Hezbollah's military ability to
prevail in a future conflict, and that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF),
once deployed in large numbers in southern Lebanon, were able to prevail
over their foes and dictate a settlement favorable to the Israeli
political establishment.
Just the opposite is true. From the onset of the conflict to its last
operations, Hezbollah commanders successfully penetrated Israel's
strategic and tactical decision-making cycle across a spectrum of
intelligence, military and political operations, with the result that
Hezbollah scored a decisive and complete victory in its war with Israel.
The intelligence war
In the wake of the conflict, Hezbollah general secretary Hassan Nasrallah
admitted that Israel's military response to the abduction of two of its
soldiers and the killing of eight others at 9:04 on the morning of July 12
came as a surprise to the Hezbollah leadership.
Nasrallah's comment ended press reports that Hezbollah set out purposely
to provoke a war with Israel and that the abductions had been part of a
plan approved by Hezbollah and Iran. While Hezbollah had made it clear
over a period of years that it intended to abduct Israeli soldiers, there
was good reason to suppose that it would not do so in the middle of the
summer months - when large numbers of affluent Shi'ite families from the
diaspora would be visiting Lebanon (and spending their money in the
Shi'ite community), and when Gulf Arabs were expected to arrive in large
numbers in the country.
Nor is it the case, as was initially reported, that Hezbollah coordinated
its activities with Hamas. Hamas was taken by surprise by the abductions
and, while the Hamas leadership defended Hezbollah actions, in hindsight
it is easy to see why they might not have been pleased by them: over the
course of the conflict Israel launched multiple military operations
against Hamas in Gaza, killing dozens of fighters and scores of civilians.
The offensive went largely unnoticed in the West, thereby resuscitating
the adage that "when the Middle East burns, the Palestinians are
forgotten".
In truth, the abduction of the two Israeli soldiers and the killing of
eight others took the Hezbollah leadership by surprise and was effected
only because Hezbollah units on the Israeli border had standing orders to
exploit Israeli military weaknesses. Nasrallah had himself long signaled
Hezbollah's intent to kidnap Israeli soldiers, after former prime minister
Ariel Sharon reneged on fulfilling his agreement to release all Hezbollah
prisoners - three in all - during the last Hezbollah-Israeli prisoner
exchange.
The abductions were, in fact, all too easy: Israeli soldiers near the
border apparently violated standing operational procedures, left their
vehicles in sight of Hezbollah emplacements, and did so while out of
contact with higher-echelon commanders and while out of sight of covering
fire.
We note that while the Western media consistently misreported the events
on the Israeli-Lebanon border, Israel's Ha'aretz newspaper substantially
confirmed this account: "A force of tanks and armored personnel carriers
was immediately sent into Lebanon in hot pursuit. It was during this
pursuit, at about 11am ... [a] Merkava tank drove over a powerful bomb,
containing an estimated 200 to 300 kilograms of explosives, about 70
meters north of the border fence. The tank was almost completely
destroyed, and all four crew members were killed instantly. Over the next
several hours, IDF soldiers waged a fierce fight against Hezbollah gunmen
... During the course of this battle, at about 3pm, another soldier was
killed and two were lightly wounded."
The abductions marked the beginning of a series of IDF blunders that were
compounded by commanders who acted outside of their normal border
procedures. Members of the patrol were on the last days of their
deployment in the north and their guard was down. Nor is it the case that
Hezbollah fighters killed the eight Israelis during their abduction of the
two. The eight died when an IDF border commander, apparently embarrassed
by his abrogation of standing procedures, ordered armored vehicles to
pursue the kidnappers. The two armored vehicles ran into a network of
Hezbollah anti-tank mines and were destroyed. The eight IDF soldiers died
during this operation or as a result of combat actions that immediately
followed it.
That an IDF unit could wander so close to the border without being covered
by fire and could leave itself open to a Hezbollah attack has led Israeli
officers to question whether the unit was acting outside the chain of
command. An internal commission of inquiry was apparently convened by
senior IDF commanders in the immediate aftermath of the incident to
determine the facts in the matter and to review IDF procedures governing
units acting along Israel's northern border. The results of that
commission's findings have not yet been reported.
Despite being surprised by the Israeli response, Hezbollah fighters in
southern Lebanon were placed on full alert within minutes of the
kidnappings and arsenal commanders were alerted by their superiors.
Hezbollah's robust and hardened defenses were the result of six years of
diligent work, beginning with the Israeli withdrawal from the region in
2000. Many of the command bunkers designed and built by Hezbollah
engineers were fortified, and a few were even air-conditioned.
The digging of the arsenals over the previous years had been accompanied
by a program of deception, with some bunkers being constructed in the open
and often under the eyes of Israeli drone vehicles or under the
observation of Lebanese citizens with close ties to the Israelis. With few
exceptions, these bunkers were decoys. The building of other bunkers went
forward in areas kept hidden from the Lebanese population. The most
important command bunkers and weapons-arsenal bunkers were dug deeply into
Lebanon's rocky hills - to a depth of 40 meters. Nearly 600 separate
ammunition and weapons bunkers were strategically placed in the region
south of the Litani.
For security reasons, no single commander knew the location of each bunker
and each distinct Hezbollah militia unit was assigned access to three
bunkers only - a primary munitions bunker and two reserve bunkers, in case
the primary bunker was destroyed. Separate primary and backup marshaling
points were also designated for distinct combat units, which were tasked
to arm and fight within specific combat areas. The security protocols for
the marshaling of troops was diligently maintained. No single Hezbollah
member had knowledge of the militia's entire bunker structure.
Hezbollah's primary arsenals and marshaling points were targeted by the
Israeli Air Force (IAF) in the first 72 hours of the war. Israel's
commanders had identified these bunkers through a mix of intelligence
reports - signals intercepts from Hezbollah communications,
satellite-reconnaissance photos gleaned from cooperative arrangements with
the US military, photos analyzed as a result of IAF overflights of the
region, photos from drone aircraft deployed over southern Lebanon and,
most important, a network of trusted human-intelligence sources recruited
by Israeli intelligence officers living in southern Lebanon, including a
large number of foreign (non-Lebanese) nationals registered as guest
workers in the country.
The initial attack on Hezbollah's marshaling points and major bunker
complexes, which took place in the first 72 hours of the war, failed. On
July 15, the IAF targeted Hezbollah's leadership in Beirut. This attack
also failed. At no point during the war was any major Hezbollah political
figure killed, despite Israel's constant insistence that the
organization's senior leadership had suffered losses.
According to one US official who observed the war closely, the IAF's air
offensive degraded "perhaps only 7%" of the total military resource assets
available to Hezbollah's fighters in the first three days of fighting and
added that, in his opinion, Israeli air attacks on the Hezbollah
leadership were "absolutely futile".
Reports that the Hezbollah senior leadership had taken refuge in the
Iranian Embassy in Beirut (untouched during Israel's aerial offensive) are
not true, though it is not known precisely where the Hezbollah leadership
did take shelter. "Not even I knew where I was," Hezbollah leader
Nasrallah told one of his associates. Even with all of this, it is not the
case that the Israeli military's plans to destroy Lebanon's infrastructure
resulted from the IAF's inability to degrade Hezbollah's military capacity
in the war's first days.
The Israeli military's plans called for an early and sustained bombardment
of Lebanon's major highways and ports in addition to its plans to destroy
Hezbollah military and political assets. The Israeli government made no
secret of its intent - to undercut Hezbollah's support in the Christian,
Sunni and Druze communities. That idea, to punish Lebanon for harboring
Hezbollah and so turn the people against the militia, had been a part of
Israel's plan since the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000.
While IDF officials confidently and publicly announced success in their
offensive, their commanders recommended that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert
approve increased air sorties against potential Hezbollah caches in
marginal target areas at the end of the first week of the bombing. Olmert
approved these attacks, while knowing that in making such a request his
senior officers had all but admitted that their initial assessment of the
damage inflicted on Hezbollah was exaggerated.
Qana was the result of Olmert's agreement to "stretch the target
envelope". One US military expert who monitored the conflict closely had
this to say of the Qana bombing: "This isn't really that complicated.
After the failure of the initial campaign, IAF planning officers went back
through their target folders to see if they had missed anything. When they
decided they hadn't, someone probably stood up and went into the other
room and returned with a set of new envelopes of targets in densely
populated areas and said, 'Hey, what about these target envelopes?' And so
they did it." That is, the bombing of targets "close in" to southern
Lebanon population areas was the result of Israel's failure in the war -
not its success.
The "target stretching" escalated throughout the conflict; frustrated by
their inability to identify and destroy major Hezbollah military assets,
the IAF began targeting schools, community centers and mosques - under the
belief that their inability to identify and interdict Hezbollah bunkers
signaled Hezbollah's willingness to hide their major assets inside
civilian centers.
IAF officers also argued that Hezbollah's ability to continue its rocket
attacks on Israel meant that its militia was being continually resupplied.
Qana is a crossroads, the junction of five separate highways, and in the
heart of Hezbollah territory. Interdicting the Qana supply chain provided
the IAF the opportunity to prove that Hezbollah was only capable of
sustaining its operations because of its supply-dependence on the
crossroads town. In truth, however, IDF senior commanders knew that
expanding the number of targets in Lebanon would probably do little to
degrade Hezbollah capabilities because Hezbollah was maintaining its
attacks without any hope of resupply and because of its dependence on
weapons and rocket caches that had been hardened against Israeli
interdiction. In the wake of Qana, in which 28 civilians were killed,
Israel agreed to a 48-hour ceasefire.
The ceasefire provided the first evidence that Hezbollah had successfully
withstood Israeli air attacks and was planning a sustained and prolonged
defense of southern Lebanon. Hezbollah commanders honored the ceasefire at
the orders of their political superiors. With one or two lone exceptions,
no rockets were fired into Israel during this ceasefire period. While
Hezbollah's capacity actually to "cease fire" was otherwise ignored by
Israeli and Western intelligence experts, Hezbollah's ability to enforce
discipline on its field commanders came as a distinctly unwanted shock to
IDF senior commanders, who concluded that Hezbollah's communication's
capabilities had survived Israel's air onslaught, that the Hezbollah
leadership was in touch with its commanders on the ground, and that those
commanders were able to maintain a robust communications network despite
Israeli interdiction.
More simply, Hezbollah's ability to cease fire meant that Israel's goal of
separating Hezbollah fighters from their command structure (considered a
necessity by modern armies in waging a war on a sophisticated
technological battlefield) had failed. The IDF's senior commanders could
only come to one conclusion - its prewar information on Hezbollah military
assets was, at best, woefully incomplete or, at worst, fatally wrong.
In fact, over a period of two years, Hezbollah intelligence officials had
built a significant signals-counterintelligence capability. Throughout the
war, Hezbollah commanders were able to predict when and where Israeli
fighters and bombers would strike. Moreover, Hezbollah had identified key
Israeli human-intelligence assets in Lebanon. One month prior to the
abduction of the IDF border patrol and the subsequent Israeli attack,
Lebanese intelligence officials had broken up an Israeli spy ring
operating inside the country.
Lebanese (and Hezbollah) intelligence officials arrested at least 16
Israeli spies in Lebanon, though they failed to find or arrest the leader
of the ring. Moreover, during two years from 2004 until the eve of the
war, Hezbollah had successfully "turned" a number of Lebanese civilian
assets reporting on the location of major Hezbollah military caches in
southern Lebanon to Israeli intelligence officers. In some small number of
crucially important cases, Hezbollah senior intelligence officials were
able to "feed back" false information on their militia's most important
emplacements to Israel - with the result that Israel target folders
identified key emplacements that did not, in fact, exist.
Finally, Hezbollah's ability to intercept and "read" Israeli actions had a
decisive impact on the coming ground war. Hezbollah intelligence officials
had perfected their signals-intelligence capability to such an extent that
they could intercept Israeli ground communications between Israeli
military commanders. Israel, which depended on a highly sophisticated set
of "frequency hopping" techniques that would allow their commanders to
communicate with one another, underestimated Hezbollah's ability to master
counter-signals technology. The result would have a crucial impact on
Israel's calculation that surprise alone would provide the margin of
victory for its soldiers.
It now is clear that the Israeli political establishment was shocked by
the failure of its forces to accomplish its first military goals in the
war - including the degradation of a significant number of Hezbollah
arsenals and the destruction of Hezbollah's command capabilities.
But the Israeli political establishment had done almost nothing to prepare
for the worst: the first meeting of the Israeli security cabinet in the
wake of the July 12 abduction lasted only three hours. And while Olmert
and his security cabinet demanded minute details of the IDF's plan for the
first three days of the war, they failed to articulate clear political
goals in the aftermath of the conflict or sketch out a political exit
strategy should the offensive fail.
Olmert and the security cabinet violated the first principle of war - they
showed contempt for their enemy. In many respects, Olmert and his cabinet
were captives of an unquestioned belief in the efficacy of Israeli
deterrence. Like the Israeli public, they viewed any questioning of IDF
capabilities as sacrilege.
The Israeli intelligence failure during the conflict was catastrophic. It
meant that, after the failure of Israel's air campaign to degrade
Hezbollah assets significantly in the first 72 hours of the war, Israel's
chance of winning a decisive victory against Hezbollah was increasingly,
and highly, unlikely.
"Israel lost the war in the first three days," one US military expert
said. "If you have that kind of surprise and you have that kind of
firepower, you had better win. Otherwise, you're in for the long haul."
IDF senior officers concluded that, given the failure of the air campaign,
they had only one choice - to invade Lebanon with ground troops in the
hopes of destroying Hezbollah's will to prevail.
Next: Winning the ground war
HOW HEZBOLLAH DEFEATED ISRAEL
PART 2: Winning the ground war
By Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry
Israel's decision to launch a ground war to accomplish what its air force
had failed to do was made hesitantly and haphazardly. While Israeli
Defense Forces (IDF) units had been making forays into southern Lebanon
during the second week of the conflict, the Israeli military leadership
remained undecided over when and where - even whether - to deploy their
ground units.
In part, the army's indecisiveness over when, where and whether
to deploy its major ground units was a function of the air force's claims
to victory. The Israeli Air Force (IAF) kept claiming that it would
succeed from the air - in just one more day, and then another. This
indecision was mirrored by the Western media's uncertainty about when a
ground campaign would take place - or whether in fact it had already
occurred.
Senior Israeli officers continued to tell their press contacts that the
timing of a ground offensive was a tightly kept secret when, in fact, they
didn't know themselves. The hesitation was also the result of the
experience of small IDF units that had already penetrated beyond the
border. Special IDF units operating in southern Lebanon were reporting to
their commanders as early as July 18 that Hezbollah units were fighting
tenaciously to hold their positions on the first ridgeline overlooking
Israel.
At this point, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made a political decision: he
would deploy the full might of the IDF to defeat Hezbollah at the same
time that his top aides signaled Israel's willingness to accept a
ceasefire and the deployment of an international force. Olmert determined
that Israel should not tip its hand - it would accept the deployment of a
United Nations force, but only as a last resort.
First, he decided, Israel would say that it would accept a North Atlantic
Treaty Organization (NATO) force. In keeping with this strategy, Israeli
reserve forces were called to the front on July 21. The surprise call-up
(the IDF was to defeat Hezbollah first from the air, and then - if that
failed - use its regular forces, with no reserve forces to be called) made
the initial deployment of the reserves hurried and uncoordinated. (It is,
to repeat, likely that Israel did not believe it would have to call on its
reserves during the conflict, or it would have called them much earlier.)
Moreover, the decision to call the reserves took key senior reserve
officers, usually the first to be notified of a pending call-up, by
surprise. The reserve call-up was handled chaotically - with the reserve
"tail" of logistical support lagging some 24-48 hours behind the
deployment of reserve forces.
The July 21 call-up was a clear sign to military strategists in the
Pentagon that Israel's war was not going well. It also helps to explain
why Israeli reserve troops arrived at the front without the necessary
equipment, without a coherent battle plan, and without the munitions
necessary to carry on the fight. (Throughout the conflict, Israel
struggled to provide adequate support to its reserve forces: food,
ammunition and even water supplies reached units a full 24-48 hours behind
a unit's appearance at its assigned northern deployment zones.)
The effect of this was immediately perceived by military observers.
"Israeli troops looked unprepared, sloppy and demoralized," one former
senior US commander noted. "This wasn't the vaunted IDF that we saw in
previous wars."
In keeping with Olmert's political ploy, the IDF's goal of the total
destruction of Hezbollah was also being markedly scaled back. "There is
one line between our military objectives and our political objectives,"
Brigadier-General Ido Nehushtan, a member of Israel's general staff, said
on the day after the reserve call-up. "The goal is not necessarily to
eliminate every Hezbollah rocket. What we must do is disrupt the military
logic of Hezbollah. I would say that this is still not a matter of days
away."
This was a decidedly strange way of presenting a military strategy - to
conduct a war to "disrupt the military logic" of an enemy. Nehushtan's
statement had a chilling effect on IDF ground commanders, who wondered
exactly what the war's goals were. But other IDF commanders were upbeat -
while the IAF had failed to stop Hezbollah rocket attacks on Israeli
cities, fewer rockets were fired at Israel from July 19-21 than at any
other time (a very small number on July 19, perhaps as few as 40 on July
20 and 50 on July 22).
July 22 also marks the first time that the United States responded
militarily to the conflict. Late on the day of the 21st, the White House
received a request from Olmert and the IDF for the provision of large
amounts of precision-guided munitions - another telltale sign that the IAF
had failed in its mission to degrade Hezbollah military assets
significantly during the opening rounds of the war.
The request was quickly approved and the munitions were shipped to Israel
beginning on the morning of July 22. Senior Pentagon officials were
dismayed by the shipment, as it meant that Israel had expended most of its
munitions in the war's first 10 days - an enormous targeting expenditure
that suggested Israel had abandoned tactical bombing of Hezbollah assets
and was poised for an onslaught on what remained of Lebanon's
infrastructure, a strategy that had not worked during World War II, when
the United States and Britain destroyed Germany's 66 major population
centers without any discernable impact either on German morale or military
capabilities.
But there was little grumbling in the Pentagon, though one former serving
officer observed that the deployment of US munitions to Israel was
reminiscent of a similar request made by Israel in 1973 - at the height of
the Yom Kippur War. "This can only mean one thing," this officer said at
the time. "They're on the ropes."
In spite of its deep misgivings about the Israeli response (and the
misgivings, though unreported, were deep and significant - and extended
even into the upper echelons of the US Air Force), senior US military
officers kept their views out of public view. And for good reason:
criticism of Israel for requesting a shipment of arms during the 1973 war
led to the resignation of then Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) chairman
General George Brown. Brown was enraged that US weapons and munitions were
being sent to Israel at the same time that American commanders in Vietnam
were protesting a lack of supplies in their war in Southeast Asia.
The current JCS chairman, Peter Pace, who remained notably silent during
the Israeli-Hezbollah war, understood history, saluted, and remained
silent. But the JCS and senior military commanders were not the only US
officials who were worried about Israel's performance. While the new US
munitions were winging their way to Israel (via Prestwick, Scotland),
intelligence officials were conducting initial assessments of the war's
opening days, including one noting that in spite of the sustained Israeli
air offensive, Al-Manar was still broadcasting in Beirut, though the IAF
had destroyed the broadcast bands of Lebanon's other major networks. (This
would remain true throughout the war - Al-Manar never went off the air.)
How effective could the Israeli air campaign have been if they couldn't
even knock out a television station's transmissions?
The call-up of Israel's reserves was meant to buttress forces already
fighting in southern Lebanon, and to add weight to the ground assault. On
July 22, Hezbollah units of the Nasr Brigade fought the IDF
street-to-street in Maroun al-Ras. While the IDF claimed at the end of the
day that it had taken the town, it had not. The fighting had been bloody,
but Hezbollah fighters had not been dislodged. Many of the Nasr Brigade's
soldiers had spent countless days waiting for the Israeli assault and,
because of Hezbollah's ability to intercept IDF military communications,
Israeli soldiers bumped up against units that were well entrenched.
IDF detachments continually failed to flank the defenders, meeting
counterpunches toward the west of the city. Special three-man
hunter-killer teams from the Nasr Brigade destroyed several Israeli
armored vehicles during the fight with light man-made anti-tank missiles.
"We knew they were going to do this," Ilay Talmor, an exhausted Israeli
second lieutenant, said at the time. "This is territory they say is
theirs. We would do the same thing if someone came into our country."
While the IDF continued to insist that its incursions would be "limited in
scope", despite the recall of thousands of reserve troops, IDF battalions
began to form south of the border. "We are not preparing for an invasion
of Lebanon," said Avi Pazner, a senior Israeli government spokesman. The
IDF then called Maroun al-Ras its "first foothold" in southern Lebanon. "A
combination of air force, artillery and ground-force pressure will push
Hezbollah out without arriving at the point where we have to invade and
occupy," Pazner said.
The difference between "pushing" out a force and invading and occupying a
town was thereby set, another clear signal to US military experts that the
IDF could enter a town but could not occupy it. One US officer schooled in
US military history compared the IDF's foray into southern Lebanon to
Robert E Lee's bloody attack on Union positions at Gettysburg,
Pennsylvania, during the American Civil War. "Oh I can get there, all
right," Lee's lieutenant said during that war, "it's staying there that's
the problem."
After-battle reports of Hezbollah commanders now confirm that IDF troops
never fully secured the border area and Maroun al-Ras was never fully
taken. Nor did Hezbollah ever feel the need to call up its reserves, as
Israel had done. "The entire war was fought by one Hezbollah brigade of
3,000 troops, and no more," one military expert in the region said. "The
Nasr Brigade fought the entire war. Hezbollah never felt the need to
reinforce it."
Reports from Lebanon underscore this point. Much to their surprise,
Hezbollah commanders found that Israeli troops were poorly organized and
disciplined. The only Israeli unit that performed up to standards was the
Golani Brigade, according to Lebanese observers. The IDF was "a motley
assortment", one official with a deep knowledge of US slang reported. "But
that's what happens when you have spent four decades firing rubber bullets
at women and children in the West Bank and Gaza."
IDF commanders were also disturbed by the performance of their troops,
noting a signal lack of discipline even among its best-trained regular
soldiers. The reserves were worse, and IDF commanders hesitated to put
them into battle.
On July 25, Olmert's strategy of backing down from a claimed goal to
destroy Hezbollah was in full force. The Israeli Defense Minister Amir
Peretz was the bearer of these tidings, saying that Israel's current goal
was to create a "security zone" in southern Lebanon. His words were
accompanied by a threat: "If there is not a multinational force that will
get in to control the fences, we will continue to control with our fire
towards anyone that gets close to the defined security zone, and they will
know that they can be hurt."
Gone quite suddenly was a claim that Israel would destroy Hezbollah; gone
too was a claim that only NATO would be acceptable as a peacekeeping unit
on the border. On July 25, Israel also reported that Abu Jaafar, a
commander of Hezbollah's "central sector" on the Lebanese border, was
killed "in an exchange of fire" with Israeli troops near the border
village of Maroun al-Ras - which had not yet been taken. The report was
not true. Abu Jaafar made public comments after the end of the war.
Later on July 25, during US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's visit to
Jerusalem, the Israeli military fought its way into Bint Jbeil, calling it
"Hezbollah's terror capital". The fight for Bint Jbeil went on for nine
days. But it remained in Hezbollah hands until the end of the conflict. By
then, the town had been destroyed, as Hezbollah fighters were able to
survive repeated air and artillery shellings, retreating into their
bunkers during the worst of the air and artillery campaign, and only
emerging when IDF troops in follow-on operations tried to claim the city.
The Hezbollah tactics were reminiscent of those followed by the North
Vietnamese Army during the opening days of the Vietnam conflict - when NVA
commanders told their troops that they needed to "ride out the bombs" and
then fight the Americans in small unit actions. "You must grab them by
their belt buckles," a Vietnamese commander said in describing these
tactics.
On July 24, as yet another sign of its looming failure in Lebanon, Israel
deployed the first of thousands of cluster munitions against what it
called "Hezbollah emplacements" in southern Lebanon. Cluster munitions are
an effective, if vicious, combat tool and those nations that use them,
including every single member of NATO (as well as Russia and China), have
consistently refused to enter an international agreement banning their use.
The most responsible nation-states that use them, however, "double fuse"
their munitions to cut down on the failure rate of the "bomblets" after
they have been deployed. During the administration of US president Bill
Clinton, defense secretary William Cohen agreed to the double-fusing of US
cluster munitions and a phase-out of the "high dud rate" munitions in the
US stockpile, which was intended to cut the failure rate of these
munitions from 14% (some estimates are higher) to less than 3% (though
some estimates are lower).
While investigations into Israel's use of these munitions is not yet
complete, it now appears that the IDF deployed single-fused munitions.
Recent reports in the Israeli press indicate that artillery officers
carpeted dozens of Lebanese villages with the bomblets - as close to the
definition of the "indiscriminate" use of firepower as one can get.
The Israeli munitions may well have been purchased from aging US
stockpiles that were not double-fused, making the United States complicit
in this indiscriminate targeting. Such a conclusion seems to fit with the
time-line of the resupply of munitions to Israel on July 22. The IDF may
well have been able to offload these munitions and deploy them quickly
enough to have created the cluster-munitions crisis in Lebanon that
plagues that nation still - and that started on July 24.
On July 26, IDF officials conceded that the previous 24 hours in their
fight for Bint Jbail was "the hardest day of fighting in southern
Lebanon". After failing to take the town from Hezbollah in the morning,
IDF commanders decided to send in their elite Golani Brigade. In two hours
in the afternoon, nine Golani Brigade soldiers were killed and 22 were
wounded. Late in the afternoon, the IDF deployed its elite Paratroopers
Brigade to Maroun al-Ras, where fighting with elements of the Nasr Brigade
was in its third day.
On July 27, in response to the failure of its units to take these cities,
the Israeli government agreed to a call-up of three more reserve divisions
- a full 15,000 troops. By July 28, however, it was becoming clear just
how severe the failure of the IAF had been in its attempts to stop
Hezbollah rocket attacks. On that day, Hezbollah deployed a new rocket,
the Khaibar-1, which hit Afula.
On July 28, the severity of Israel's intelligence failures finally reached
the Israeli public. On that day, Mossad officials leaked information that,
by their estimate, Hezbollah had not suffered a significant degradation in
its military capabilities, and that the organization might be able to
carry on the conflict for several more months. The IDF disagreed, stating
that Hezbollah had been severely damaged. The first cracks in the Israeli
intelligence community were beginning to show.
Experts in the US were also beginning to question Israel's strategy and
capability. The conservative Brookings Institution published a commentary
by Philip H Gordon (who blamed Hezbollah for the crisis) advising, "The
issue is not whether Hezbollah is responsible for this crisis - it is - or
whether Israel has the right to defend itself - it does - but whether this
particular strategy [of a sustained air campaign] will work. It will not.
It will not render Hezbollah powerless, because it is simply impossible to
eliminate thousands of small, mobile, hidden and easily resupplied rockets
via an air campaign."
Gordan's commentary reflected the views of an increasing number of
military officers, who were scrambling to dust off their own air plans in
the case of a White House order targeting Iranian nuclear sites. "There is
a common misperception that the [US] Air Force was thrilled by the Israeli
war against Lebanon," one Middle East expert with access to senior
Pentagon officials told us. "They were aghast. They well know the limits
of their own power and they know how it can be abused.
"It seemed to them [USAF officers] that Israel threw away the book in
Lebanon. This wasn't surgical, it wasn't precise, and it certainly wasn't
smart. You can't just coat a country in iron and hope to win."
The cold, harsh numbers of the war point up the fallacy of the Israeli air
and ground campaign. Hezbollah had secreted upwards of 18,000 rockets in
its arsenals prior to the conflict. These sites were hardened against
Israeli air strikes and easily survived the air campaign. Hezbollah
officials calculated that from the time of firing until the IAF was able
to identify and deploy fighters to take out the mobile rockets was 90
seconds. Through years of diligent training, Hezbollah rocket teams had
learned to deploy, fire and safely cover their mobile launchers in less
than 60 seconds, with the result that IAF planes and helicopters (which
Israel has in much fewer numbers than it boasts) could not stop
Hezbollah's continued rocket fire at Israel ("Israel is about three
helicopters away from a total disaster," one US military officer
commented).
Hezbollah fired about 4,000 rockets at Israel (a more precise, though
uncertain, figure calculates the firing of 4,180 rockets), bringing its
stockpiles down to 14,000 rockets - enough to prosecute the war for at
least three more months.
Moreover, and more significant, Hezbollah's fighters proved to be
dedicated and disciplined. Using intelligence assets to pinpoint Israeli
infantry penetrations, they proved the equal of Israel's best fighting
units. In some cases, Israeli units were defeated on the field of battle,
forced into sudden retreats or forced to rely on air cover to save
elements from being overrun. Even toward the end of the war, on August 9,
the IDF announced that 15 of its reserve soldiers were killed and 40
wounded in fighting in the villages of Marjayoun, Khiam and Kila - a
stunning casualty rate for a marginal piece of real estate.
The robust Hezbollah defense was also taking its toll on Israeli armor.
When Israel finally agreed to a ceasefire and began its withdrawal from
the border area, it left behind upwards of 40 armored vehicles, nearly all
of them destroyed by expertly deployed AT-3 "Sagger" anti-tank missiles -
which is the NATO name for the Russian-made vehicle- or man-deployed,
wire-guided, second-generation 9M14 Malyutka - or "Little Baby".
With a range of 3 kilometers, the Sagger proved enormously successful in
taking on Israeli tanks, a fact that must have given Israeli armor
commanders fits, in large part because the Sagger missile deployed by
Hezbollah is an older version (developed and deployed in 1973) of a more
modern version that is more easily hidden and deployed and has a larger
warhead. If the IDF could not protect its armor against the 1973 "second
generation" version, IDF commanders must now be wondering how it can
possibly protect itself against a version that is more modern, more
sophisticated, and more deadly.
Prior to the implementation of the ceasefire, the Israeli political
establishment decided that it would "clear drop" Israeli paratroopers in
key areas along the Litani River. The decision was apparently made to
convince the international community that the rules of engagement for a UN
force should extend from the Litani south. Such a claim could not be made
unless Israel could credibly claim to have cleared that part of Lebanon to
the Litani.
A significant number of Israeli forces were airlifted into key areas just
south of the Litani to accomplish this goal. The decision might well have
led to a disaster. Most of the Israeli forces airlifted to these sites
were immediately surrounded by Hezbollah units and may well have been
decisively mauled had a ceasefire not gone into effect. The political
decision angered retired IDF officers, one of whom accused Olmert of
"spinning the military" - using the military for public relations purposes.
Perhaps the most telling sign of Israel's military failure comes in
counting the dead and wounded. Israel now claims that it killed about
400-500 Hezbollah fighters, while its own losses were significantly less.
But a more precise accounting shows that Israeli and Hezbollah casualties
were nearly even. It is impossible for Shi'ites (and Hezbollah) not to
allow an honorable burial for its martyrs, so in this case it is simply a
matter of counting funerals. Fewer than 180 funerals have been held for
Hezbollah fighters - nearly equal to the number killed on the Israeli
side. That number may be revised upward: our most recent information from
Lebanon says the number of Shi'ite martyr funerals in the south can now be
precisely tabulated at 184.
But by any accounting - whether in rockets, armored vehicles or numbers of
dead and wounded - Hezbollah's fight against Israel must be accorded a
decisive military and political victory. Even if it were otherwise (and it
is clearly not), the full impact of Hezbollah's war with Israel over a
period of 34 days in July and August has caused a political earthquake in
the region.
Hezbollah's military defeat of Israel was decisive, but its political
defeat of the United States - which unquestioningly sided with Israel
during the conflict and refused to bring it to an end - was catastrophic
and has had a lasting impact on US prestige in the region.
Next: How Hezbollah won the political war
HOW HEZBOLLAH DEFEATED ISRAEL
PART 3: The political war
By Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry
In the wake of the Israel-Hezbollah conflict, a public poll in Egypt asked
a cross-section of that country's citizenry to name the two political
leaders they most admired. An overwhelming number named Hassan Nasrallah.
Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad finished second.
The poll was a clear repudiation not only of Egyptian President Hosni
Mubarak, who had made his views against Hezbollah known at the outset of
the conflict, but of those Sunni leaders, including Saudi King Abdullah
and Jordan's Abdullah II, who criticized the Shi'ite group in an avowed
attempt to turn the Sunni world away from support of Iran.
"By the end of the war these guys were scrambling for the exits," one US
diplomat from the region said in late August. "You haven't heard much from
them lately, have you?"
Mubarak and the two Abdullahs are not the only ones scrambling for the
exits - the United States' foreign policy in the region, even in light of
its increasingly dire deployment in Iraq, is in a shambles. "What that
means is that all the doors are closed to us, in Cairo, in Amman, in Saudi
Arabia," another diplomat averred. "Our access has been curtailed. No one
will see us. When we call no one picks up the phone."
A talisman of this collapse can be seen in the itinerary of US Secretary
of State Condoleezza Rice, whose inability to persuade President George W
Bush to halt the fighting and her remark about the conflict as marking
"the birth pangs" of a new Middle East in effect destroyed her credibility.
The US has made it clear that it will attempt to retrieve its position by
backing a yet-to-be-announced Israeli-Palestinian peace plan, but
America's continued strangulation of the democratically constituted
government of the Palestinian Authority has transformed that pledge into a
stillborn political program. The reason for this is now eminently clear.
In the midst of the war, a European official in Cairo had this to say
about the emotions roiling the Egyptian political environment: "The
Egyptian leadership is walking down one side of the street," he said, "and
the Egyptian people are walking down the other."
The catastrophic failure of Israeli arms has buoyed Iran's claim to
leadership of the Muslim world in several critical areas.
First, the Hezbollah victory has shown that Israel - and any modern and
technologically sophisticated Western military force - can be defeated in
open battle, if the proper military tactics are employed and if they are
sustained over a prolonged period. Hezbollah has provided the model for
the defeat of a modern army. The tactics are simple: ride out the first
wave of a Western air campaign, then deploy rocket forces targeting key
military and economic assets of the enemy, then ride out a second and more
critical air campaign, and then prolong the conflict for an extended
period. At some point, as in the case of Israel's attack on Hezbollah, the
enemy will be forced to commit ground troops to accomplish what its air
forces could not. It is in this last, and critical, phase that a
dedicated, well-trained and well-led force can exact enormous pain on a
modern military establishment and defeat it.
Second, the Hezbollah victory has shown the people of the Muslim world
that the strategy employed by Western-allied Arab and Muslim governments -
a policy of appeasing US interests in the hopes of gaining substantive
political rewards (a recognition of Palestinian rights, fair pricing for
Middle Eastern resources, non-interference in the region's political
structures, and free, fair and open elections) - cannot and will not work.
The Hezbollah victory provides another and different model, of shattering
US hegemony and destroying its stature in the region. Of the two most
recent events in the Middle East, the invasion of Iraq and the Hezbollah
victory over Israel, the latter is by far the most important. Even
otherwise anti-Hezbollah groups, including those associated with
revolutionary Sunni resistance movements who look on Shi'ites as
apostates, have been humbled.
Third, the Hezbollah victory has had a shattering impact on America's
allies in the region. Israeli intelligence officials calculated that
Hezbollah could carry on its war for upwards of three months after its end
in the middle of August. Hezbollah's calculations reflected Israel's
findings, with the caveat that neither the Hezbollah nor Iranian
leadership could predict what course to follow after a Hezbollah victory.
While Jordan's intelligence services locked down any pro-Hezbollah
demonstrations, Egypt's intelligence services were struggling to monitor
the growing public dismay over the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon.
Open support for Hezbollah across the Arab world (including, strangely,
portraits of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah carried in the midst of
Christian celebrations) has put those Arab rulers closest to the United
States on notice: a further erosion in their status could loosen their
hold on their own nations. It seems likely that as a result, Mubarak and
the two Abdullahs are very unlikely to support any US program calling for
economic, political or military pressures on Iran. A future war - perhaps
a US military campaign against Iran's nuclear sites - might not unseat the
government in Tehran, but it could well unseat the governments of Egypt,
Jordan and perhaps Saudi Arabia.
At a key point in the Israel-Hezbollah contest, toward the end of the war,
Islamist party leaders in a number of countries wondered whether they
would be able to continue their control over their movements or whether,
as they feared, political action would be ceded to street captains and
revolutionaries. The singular notion, now common in intelligence circles
in the United States, is that it was Israel (and not Hezbollah) that, as
of August 10, was looking for a way out of the conflict.
Fourth, the Hezbollah victory has dangerously weakened the Israeli
government. In the wake of Israel's last lost war, in 1973, prime minister
Menachem Begin decided to accept a peace proposal from Egyptian president
Anwar Sadat. The breakthrough was, in fact, rather modest - as both
parties were allies of the United States. No such breakthrough will take
place in the wake of the Israel-Hezbollah war.
Israel believes that it has lost its deterrent capabilities and that they
must be retrieved. Some Israeli officials in Washington now confirm that
it is not a matter of "if" but of "when" Israel goes to war again. Yet it
is difficult to determine how Israel can do that. To fight and win against
Hezbollah, Israel will need to retrain and refit its army. Like the United
States after the Vietnam debacle, Israel will have to restructure its
military leadership and rebuild its intelligence assets. That will take
years, not months.
It may be that Israel will opt, in future operations, for the deployment
of ever bigger weapons against ever larger targets. Considering its
performance in Lebanon, such uses of ever larger weapons could spell an
even more robust response. This is not out of the question. A US attack on
Iranian nuclear installations would likely be answered by an Iranian
missile attack on Israel's nuclear installations - and on Israeli
population centers. No one can predict how Israel would react to such an
attack, but it is clear that (given Bush's stance in the recent conflict)
the United States would do nothing to stop it. The "glass house" of the
Persian Gulf region, targeted by Iranian missiles, would then assuredly
come crashing down.
Fifth, the Hezbollah victory spells the end of any hope of a resolution of
the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, at least in the short and medium terms.
Even normally "progressive" Israeli political figures undermined their
political position with strident calls for more force, more troops and
more bombs. In private meetings with his political allies, Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas castigated those who cheered on Hezbollah's
victory, calling them "Hamas supporters" and "enemies of Israel". Abbas is
in a far more tenuous position than Mubarak or the two Abdullahs - his
people's support for Hamas continues, as does his slavish agreement with
George W Bush, who told him on the sidelines of the United Nations
Security Council meeting that he was to end all attempts to form a unity
government with his fellow citizens.
Sixth, the Hezbollah victory has had the very unfortunate consequence of
blinding Israel's political leadership to the realities of their
geostrategic position. In the midst of the war with Lebanon, Israeli Prime
Minister Ehud Olmert adopted Bush's language on the "war on terrorism",
reminding his citizenry that Hezbollah was a part of "the axis of evil".
His remarks have been reinforced by Bush, whose comments during his
address before the UN General Assembly mentioned al-Qaeda once - and
Hezbollah and Hamas five times each. The United States and Israel have now
lumped Islamist groups willing to participate in the political processes
in their own nations with those takfiris and Salafists who are bent on
setting the region on fire.
Nor can Israel now count on its strongest US supporters, that network of
neo-conservatives for whom Israel is an island of stability and democracy
in the region. These neo-conservatives' disapproval of Israel's
performance is almost palpable. With friends like these, who needs
enemies? That is to say, the Israeli conflict in Lebanon reflects
accurately those experts who see the Israel-Hezbollah conflict as a proxy
war. Our colleague Jeff Aronson noted that "if it were up to the US,
Israel would still be fighting", and he added: "The United States will
fight the war on terrorism to the last drop of Israeli blood."
The continued weakness of the Israeli political leadership and the fact
that it is in denial about the depth of its defeat should be a deep
concern for the United States and for every Arab nation. Israel has proved
that in times of crisis, it can shape a creative diplomatic strategy and
maneuver deftly to retrieve its position. It has also proved that in the
wake of a military defeat, it is capable of honest and transparent
self-examination. Israel's strength has always been its capacity for
public debate, even if such debate questions the most sacrosanct
institution - the Israel Defense Forces. At key moments in Israel's
history, defeat has led to reflection and not, as now seems likely, an
increasingly escalating military offensive against Hamas - the red-headed
stepchild of the Middle East - to show just how tough it is.
"The fact that the Middle East has been radicalized by the Hezbollah
victory presents a good case for killing more of them," one Israeli
official recently said. That path will lead to disaster. In light of
America's inability to pull the levers of change in the Middle East, there
is hope among some in Washington that Olmert will show the political
courage to begin the long process of finding peace. That process will be
painful, it will involve long and difficult discussions, it may mean a
break with the US program for the region. But the US does not live in the
region, and Israel does. While conducting a political dialogue with its
neighbors might be painful, it will prove far less painful than losing a
war in Lebanon.
Seventh, Hezbollah's position in Lebanon has been immeasurably
strengthened, as has the position of its most important ally. At the
height of the conflict, Lebanese Christians took Hezbollah refugees into
their homes. The Christian leader Michel Aoun openly supported Hezbollah's
fight. One Hezbollah leader said: "We will never forget what that man did
for us, not for an entire generation." Aoun's position is celebrated among
the Shi'ites, and his own political position has been enhanced.
The Sunni leadership, on the other hand, fatally undermined itself with
its uncertain stance and its absentee landlord approach to its own
community. In the first week of the war, Hezbollah's actions were greeted
with widespread skepticism. At the end of the war its support was solid
and stretched across Lebanon's political and sectarian divides. The Sunni
leadership now has a choice: it can form a unity government with new
leaders that will create a more representative government or they can
stand for elections. It doesn't take a political genius to understand
which choice Saad Hariri, the majority leader in the Lebanese parliament,
will make.
Eighth, Iran's position in Iraq has been significantly enhanced. In the
midst of the Lebanon conflict, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld
privately worried that the Israeli offensive would have dire consequences
for the US military in Iraq, who faced increasing hostility from Shi'ite
political leaders and the Shi'ite population. Rice's statement that the
pro-Hezbollah demonstrations in Baghdad were planned by Tehran revealed
her ignorance of the most fundamental political facts of the region. The
US secretaries of state and of defense were simply and unaccountably
unaware that the Sadrs of Baghdad bore any relationship to the Sadrs of
Lebanon. That Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki would not castigate
Hezbollah and side with Israel during the conflict - and in the midst of
an official visit to Washington - was viewed as shocking by Washington's
political establishment, even though "Hezbollah in Iraq" is one of the
parties in the current Iraqi coalition government.
We have been told that neither the Pentagon nor the State Department
understood how the war in Lebanon might effect America's position in Iraq
because neither the Pentagon nor the State Department asked for a briefing
on the issue from the US intelligence services. The United States spends
billions of dollars each year on its intelligence collection and analysis
activities. It is money wasted.
Ninth, Syria's position has been strengthened and the US-French program
for Lebanon has failed. There is no prospect that Lebanon will form a
government that is avowedly pro-American or anti-Syrian. That Syrian
President Bashar al-Assad could, in the wake of the war, suggest a
political arrangement with Israel shows his strength, not his weakness.
That he might draw the correct conclusions from the conflict and believe
that he too might successfully oppose Israel is also possible.
But aside from these possibilities, recent history shows that those
thousands of students and Lebanese patriots who protested Syria's
involvement in Lebanon after the death of Rafiq Hariri found it ironic
that they took refuge from the Israeli bombing in tent cities established
by the Syrian government. Rice is correct on one thing: Syria's
willingness to provide refuge for Lebanese refugees was a pure act of
political cynicism - and one that the United States seems incapable of
replicating. Syria now is confident of its political position. In a
previous era, such confidence allowed Israel to shape a political opening
with its most intransigent political enemies.
Tenth, and perhaps most important, it now is clear that a US attack on
Iranian nuclear installations would be met with little support in the
Muslim world. It would also be met by a military response that would
collapse the last vestiges of America's political power in the region.
What was thought to be a "given" just a few short weeks ago has been shown
to be unlikely. Iran will not be cowed. If the United States launches a
military campaign against the Tehran government, it is likely that
America's friends will fall by the wayside, the Gulf Arab states will
tremble in fear, the 138,000 US soldiers in Iraq will be held hostage by
an angered Shi'ite population, and Iran will respond by an attack on
Israel. We would now dare say the obvious - if and when such an attack
comes, the United States will be defeated.
Conclusion
The victory of Hezbollah in its recent conflict with Israel is far more
significant than many analysts in the United States and Europe realize.
The Hezbollah victory reverses the tide of 1967 - a shattering defeat of
Egypt, Syria and Jordan that shifted the region's political plates,
putting in place regimes that were bent on recasting their own foreign
policy to reflect Israeli and US power. That power now has been sullied
and reversed, and a new leadership is emerging in the region.
The singular lesson of the conflict may well be lost on the upper echelons
of Washington's and London's pro-Israel, pro-values,
we-are-fighting-for-civilization political elites, but it is not lost in
the streets of Cairo, Amman, Ramallah, Baghdad, Damascus or Tehran. It
should not be lost among the Israeli political leadership in Jerusalem.
The Arab armies of 1967 fought for six days and were defeated. The
Hezbollah militia in Lebanon fought for 34 days and won. We saw this with
our own eyes when we looked into the cafes of Cairo and Amman, where
simple shopkeepers, farmers and workers gazed at television reports,
sipped their tea, and silently mouthed the numbers to themselves: "seven",
"eight", "nine" ...
Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry are the co-directors of Conflicts Forum, a
London-based group dedicated to providing an opening to political Islam.
Crooke is the former Middle East adviser to European Union High
Representative Javier Solana and served as a staff member of the Mitchell
Commission investigating the causes of the second intifada. Perry is a
Washington, DC-based political consultant, author of six books on US
history, and a former personal adviser to Yasser Arafat.
(Research for this article was provided by Madeleine Perry.)
