HOW HEZBOLLAH DEFEATED ISRAEL

PART 1: Winning the intelligence war

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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.

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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.

Asia Times

Mods: WRT "fair use", I took one question and answer. I hope that is OK.

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Aljazeera.net: Was Israel defeated by Hezbollah during the war?

Efraim Halevy: I do not think that Israel was defeated by Hezbollah during the war. I believe that Israel did not achieve all of its objectives. In my view, the following are the indications that Israel did succeed in seriously damaging Hezbollah in Lebanon and limiting its freedom of action:

i) Hassan Nasrallah has publicly stated that he misjudged Israeli reaction to his incursion across the international border on July 12 when his forces killed eight Israeli soldiers and kidnapped two soldiers from within Israel territory. He has publicly stated that had he had the faintest indication as to how Israel would react, he would not have mounted the operation.

ii) From almost day one of the Lebanese war of summer 2006 Hezbollah and Iran and Syria, its mentors, daily appealed for a ceasefire. A winning force does not appeal for a ceasefire but accedes to requests of others.

iii) Initially, Hezbollah strongly objected to the entry of an international force into Lebanon with the mission of aiding the regular Lebanese army to deploy along the UN recognised Lebanese-Israeli international border. It also objected to Lebanon accepting the other provisions and stipulations of UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution 1701 which lays the blame on Hezbollah for starting the recent conflict. This resolution was unanimously approved by the UNSC and Iran and Syria are obligated to honour it.

iv) Nasrallah has been forced to order his remaining men in the south not to parade openly with their weapons and for the moment is respecting the letter of the ceasefire.

v) UNSC resolution 1701 calls for the total disarming of the Hezbollah. Nasrallah and his forces are defiant in their refusal to abide by this decision and, as a result, are flouting the wishes and demands of the entire international community, including the major states in the Middle East and the Arab world.

vi ) Hezbollah is now engaged in an intense internal struggle inside Lebanon. It has labeled Fuad Siniora, the Lebanese prime minister, a traitor and is calling for the replacement of his government with a national unity government. This demand has been rejected.

The result of the war is, therefore, a unique one. Israel may not have won the war as it hoped, but Hezbollah clearly lost it by its own testimony.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/DBE9528E-9F0C-4641-923C-80966237504A.htm

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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.

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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.)

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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."

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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.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HJ13Ak01.html

Jerusalem, Israel (AHN) - Lebanon's parliament speaker, Nabih Berri, insists that Hezbollah will remain fully armed despite international agreements and will resume attacks on Israel if the disputed Shebaa Farms area is not surrendered.

In an interview with the British newspaper Guardian published on Wednesday, Berri stated that international demands and the presence of U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon will not prevent Hezbollah from driving Israel off lands Lebanon claims as its own.

Hezbollah has used Israel's control over the Shebaa Farms as justification for attacking the Jewish state over the past six years, despite Israel's full withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000. The U.N. confirmed that withdrawal, and ruled that the Shebaa Farms are part of former Syrian land in the Golan Heights.

U.N. Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the summer's war between Israel and Hezbollah, reiterated the international community's demand that Lebanon disarm the terror group and end its ability to dispute control of the Shebaa Farms through violence.

http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7005152831

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Army sources believe that Halutz will avoid publicly removing officers from their commands, but will ensure that they do not advance in the ranks - thereby essentially forcing them out of the army. Deliberations on new command appointments are scheduled to take place later this month.

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In the armored reservist division commanded by Brigadier General Erez Zukerman, which fought on the eastern front, mainly during the last week of the war, criticism of the division's functioning by reservist officers was described as "deadly." Among the issues raised were confusing orders, frequent changes in missions and serious shortcomings in the operation of the divisional headquarters. The poor performance of the division's tank brigade was also discussed.

In the probe of the reservist infantry division commanded by Brigadier General Eyal Eisenberg, a great deal of attention was given to an incident in which nine soldiers were killed by antitank rockets fired against a home in the village of Debel. Another issue discussed was the delay in deciding how to evacuate the injured - on foot or by helicopter.

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The navy: The investigation of the missile strike against the destroyer INS Hanit, in which four soldiers died, has been completed. The main controversy is over the warnings that Military Intelligence gave the navy about Iranian surface-to-sea missiles in Hezbollah's arsenal. The failure to operate the INS Hanit's defensive mechanisms while it was operating 17 kilometers off Beirut was severely criticized.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/773462.html

It is just too bad that Sharon was not alive and still Israel's PM during this misguided preplanned Neocon venture to take down Hezbollah, which is not a terrorist organization, but the military arm of an Islamic political entity. As everyone knows, Hezollah developed in direct response to Sharon's first invasion of Lebanon when he killed over 17,000 Shiite Moslems, who have lived in southern Lebanon for centuries, and Palestinians living in refugee camps in the same region including southern Beirut. That carnage undoubtedly instilled in the southern Lebanese their own version of "never again."

What is most shameful is that the US was fully in cahoots and possibly the prime instigator, so that now America bears the shame for the useless killing of over 1,000 Lebanese and a few hundred of both Israeli and Hezbollah soldiers, while setting Lebanon back twenty years.

Given the lessons of Iraq, just how did Lebanon also backfire? The Lebanese PM now believes that Hezbollah is needed to defend Lebanon. If history will record anything about the Neocons, it will be that they seemed to lack any capacity for foresight or prediction. And now they actually want to take Iran down. I suggest that the lack of a capacity to learn is another Neocon trait.

I had not considered the notion of Jabba still being in charge when this debacle was set in motion. Of course, it is possible that Jabba would not have went ahead with it, he was a much sharper fellow than Ehud is, or he might have handled it differently.

The neocon's problem is simple, they reason from articles of faith, not from observation, and hence "reality" keeps hitting them up side the head; "reality" does not care a fig about their deeply held beliefs. You cannot learn when you already know it all ...

Neocons are incapable of learning from experience. Hopefully we have only two more years left of this nightmare and will get back into progressive-liberal diplomacy and resume our lost friendships around the world.

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Timeline of Hezbollah Violence http://camera.org/index.asp?x_context=2&x_outlet=118&x_article=1148

Hassan Nasrallah: In His Own Words http://camera.org/index.asp?x_context=7&x_issue=11&x_article=1158

Hezbollah's Manifesto
http://www.ict.org.il/Articles/Hiz_letter.htm

For the sake of honesty, and of their respective victims - if you are to label Hezbollah a terrorist organization, what are the IDF?
I see far more Palestinians terrorized than I see Israelis, as a result of these 2 organizations.

Long piece, just selected a few bits from it.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Asia Times

The Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) said Thursday that a rally planned for Sunday to commemorate the victims of an October 1990 Syrian offensive in Lebanon "is not an attempt to display the FPM's strength, as some parties claim."

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"This year's celebration is of great importance, with the return of General Michel Aoun and his colleagues from their exile," said Nasrallah.

Nasrallah said that Sunday's gathering would be held under three slogans: "A salute to the martyrs of great Lebanon"; "We will remain here"; and "The state of partnership."

"There is no state without a true partnership ... A partnership which should be reflected in a new electoral law ... A partnership in the executive authority through the creation of a national unity government," Nasrallah said.

http://www.terra.net.lb/wp/Articles/DesktopArticle.aspx?ArticleID=310237&ChannelId=4

"Nothing will stand in the way of the investigation into the murder of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri," a key US State Department official vowed late Wednesday. At a press conference in Washington, Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs David Welch added that UN Security Council resolutions 1559 and 1701, in addition to all the resolutions concerning the murder of Hariri, "are a clear message to Syria expressing the concern of the international community over Damascus' performance. Syria is expected to abide by all international resolutions." Welch said Syria's performance is "below expectations, especially since it continues to sponsor a number of terrorist organizations." In an interview with Al-Hora television, Welch also called upon Syrian President Bashar al-Assad "to stop interfering in Lebanese internal issues."

http://www.terra.net.lb/wp/Articles/DesktopArticle.aspx?ArticleID=310234&ChannelId=4

Beirut, (SANA)-President Emile Lahoud of Lebanon on Wednesday renewed calls for forming a national unity government in the country as it is "the only solution to face the current political situation".

"There is an opportunity nowadays to rebuild the state, and this should be done on strong and transparent bases through a national unity government which assumes responsibility to settle different issues and rebuild what has been destroyed by the Israeli aggression," President Lahoud added during a meeting with a delegation of Democratic National Assembly.

In another meeting with President Lahoud, former Minister Abdul-Rahim Murad said that in light of the ongoing political conditions, the only way out of the dilemma is forming a national unity government.

SANA

there's no question that the IDF didn't function as well as it should, especially in regards to preparedness. There's also no question that Israel's political leadership set unrealistic goals at the beginning, and, worse, that it set extremely muddled (and constantly changing) goals for the IDF over the course of the war.

However, there are two points which should be remembered. First of all, while many pundits claim Israeli deterrence was damaged by the war, in point of fact Hizbullah's leader admitted publicly that had he known of the response, he would not have carried out the operation. In that respect, ISrael's deterrence was strengthened by the war - it's self-evident it wasn't sufficient prior to it.

Also, while the goals set at the beginning of the war were unrealistic, if you look at the UN cease-fire resolution, you'll see that it actually grants most of the goals Israel has been trying to achieve since the withdrawal - in particular, a beefed-up international force. It's still early, of course, to determine whether or not the new force will be effective or not, but that will be the primary determinant of who won this round.

Of course a good deal depends on how you set the context for the discussion. These people in the OP, for example, have a clear bias in how they frame the discussion. Nevertheless, their argument hangs together, at least, which is better than much of the drivel one sees, and they seem less prone to make bald assertions and prognostications, and to use loaded language, than some, although the edge in not clear. It is interesting to compare with the statements of the former MI fellow.

It is not at all the case that I think this story cannot be criticized. I put it up because it has some new stuff in it, mainly.

I tend to favor lines of thought based on who achieved what they set out to do and who did not, but one has to avoid inflating things beyond their true import. It is doubtful that this war, aside from the destruction, will do more than accelerate or reverse trends already in place, and of course there are political consequences on both sides that are still working themselves out. But, it doesn't have the look of some sort of major watershed, so far.

It does seem clear that the war was counterproductive from an Israeli point of view, at least that's the way it looks to me, at present.

WRT Nasrallah and his statement(s), I give them no credence at all, one way or another, it is just noise, like Olmert when he starts blathering about peace and his good will towards Palestinians. I would say Nasrallah is clearly a formidable politician and opponent, and I am quite curious as to what he is up to now. I have been watching Lebanese politics and Syrian affairs to see whether these fellows are right about the effects of the war there, and that is my primary interest now.

Peretz: Gaza won't be Lebanon

Following a weekend of heavy fire in Gaza, Defense Minister Amir Peretz appeared before the Knesset Defense and Foreign Affairs Committee and said that he had instructed the IDF to intensify operations in the area, in order to prevent arming of terror organizations.

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"We will not allow Gaza to become southern Lebanon. As far as we're concerned, the time has ended when we check the postmark of each and every missile that lands in Israel. We will target all terrorists."

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IDF sources posited that Palestinian terror organizations would try to arm themselves with anti-tank missiles, aided by Iran and Syria. Chief of the Shin Bet Yuval Diskin warned several months ago that the arming of these organizations was a strategic threat that much be addressed.


"If we don't deal with this problem properly, in a few years, the reality will be like that in Lebanon. We don't need to wait three years and then investigate what went wrong," he said at the time.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3315587,00.html

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without reaching the conclusion that the Second Lebanon War didn't go well from the POV of the Israeli government.

Lebanon's top Shi'ite cleric: UN force only protects Israel

BEIRUT - Lebanon's top Shi'ite Muslim cleric said on Monday a reinforced international force on the Lebanese border was only there to protect Israel.

Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah said United Nations peacekeepers were doing little to stop Israeli violations of Lebanon's sovereignty and urged the Lebanese to treat the force, UNIFIL, with caution.

"The widening of the scope of Israeli violations in the south and other areas in Lebanon and their repetition within the sight and hearing range of UNIFIL forces that don't interfere to stop these violations... affirm that these forces have come here to protect Israel not Lebanon," a statement from Fadlallah said.

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Statements such as that of German Chancellor Angela Merkel who linked Berlin's decision to send a naval force to prevent Hezbollah from rearming by sea with Germany's "special responsibility for Israel's right to exist", have also upset many Lebanese politicians and officials.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/775472.html

Moscow tells Israel it will tighten its export controls on weapons

Moscow has told Israel that it intends to tighten its export controls on arms. The statement follows Israeli claims that Russian weapons reached Hezbollah during the war in Lebanon.

The Russian statement, couched in very general terms, acknowledged a need for stricter arms export controls to ensure that weapons reach the designated end user and no one else.

For all intensive purposes, the order is directed mainly against Syria, and intended to prevent the transfer of Russian arms to Hezbollah and other terror groups.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/775411.html

which somewhat support you POV about 1701 being a win for Israel, which I agree with in a general way. As you point out, the eventual result of 1701 is uncertain. And I would not put a lot of weight on Russia's good intentions.