Israeli army blamed for war fiasco

A report by Israel's parliamentary committee has placed responsibility on the Israeli military for failures in the 2006 July war against Lebanon's Hezbollah fighters.

The war, which lasted for 34 days in July 2006, killed more than 1,200 Lebanese, mostly civilians, and more than 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers.

Tzahi Hanegbi, chairman of Israel's foreign affairs and defence committee, said the military leadership "ignored basic principles of Israeli strategy, which aims to bring the battle to enemy terrain and protect the civilian population".

Hanegbi said Israeli reserve units were not mobilised early enough and that it took too long to realise that Israeli air power alone could not halt Hezbollah rocket fire into Israel.

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/73A797C6-22C4-4760-8E0B-25C5EAA96CFE.htm

The Israel Defense Forces method of fighting during the Second Lebanon War "played into Hezbollah's hands," according to a report on the war written by the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

The report blasted the decision to launch a major ground operation only at the tail end of the war, and that the tactics used until then "were afflicted with blindness and reinforced the enemy's logic."

"The lack of an approved, up-to-date plan of attack was a serious failure on the part of Northern Command," it added.

Though most of the report focused on the army rather than the government, it also included some sharp criticisms of the latter. For instance, it said, the policy of restraint toward Hezbollah that successive governments adopted following Israel's pullout from Lebanon in 2000 "reduced the army to paralysis and weakness.

Throughout the years of the containment policy, the cabinet never held a focused discussion on the implications of this policy for our deployment on the northern border."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/940325.html

This is drivel, just so you know, the old "hands tied behind our backs" excuse. But the argument is so common and universal among failed militarists that it deserves occasional attention. He repeats the fantasy about "decisive victory" too, just like the dimwits that got us into Iraq and Afghanistan. The fact is that war is a risky business, even in the best of circumstances.

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This is justified criticism, but anyone who is interested in determining why the IDF failed in the war - and from the point of view of the real national interest, this is more important than finding those who were guilty on the personal level - will find in the report, in addition to its important and painful conclusions about the army's failures, a central response: "The policy of containment in the North led the army to paralysis and weakness in the tactical and operative sphere", and: "During the years of containment, the government did not hold a focused discussion that dealt with the implications of this policy."

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Had Israel a culture of to-the-point discussions on issues of values and strategy, some of the critics would have reached the conclusion that they too were not clear of responsibility, sometimes even direct responsibility, for the policy of containment. Many people in the army and the political system, the media and public life, had supported the governments which adopted this policy that castrated the IDF.

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If anything, his decision to go to war in Lebanon could have brought about the psychological change, which would have had great strategic importance, of ending containment and bringing about a decisive victory. And had the IDF not been in a state of "paralysis and weakness", despite its tremendous quantitative and technological advantage, it would have been possible to achieve this essential move which would have changed Israel's strategic status in the region and the world.

Containment, which is merely a more elegant way of saying flimsiness and restraint, is a policy that was adopted, and not only on the Lebanese border, by all Israel's governments. And prime ministers like Yitzhak Rabin, Yitzhak Shamir and Ariel Sharon , with all their past experience that taught them that soldiers have to risk their lives for civilians and not the opposite, also adopted the policy of containment since they were not able to face the terrible crying over the soldiers who had fallen, especially those who had fallen in the Yom Kippur War.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/941160.html

Given that the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee's report on the Second Lebanon War was signed by 17 Knesset members representing the entire political spectrum, it is impossible to claim that it was politically biased. The committee regularly supervises the defense establishment, so it was natural for it to try to learn the lessons of the war. Instead of accusing it of having failed to hold the government responsible, people should read what's in the report. Its findings, like other information about the war, depict an army that has ceased to be an army.

The Israel Defense Forces failed to defeat Hezbollah, even though they had enough time (too much time, in the committee's opinion). And the IDF had public and international support, reservists who showed up on short notice, more than enough technology and weaponry, and an enemy located near the border.

The report noted that the IDF did not conduct itself like an army, so it failed to carry out the mission the government assigned it. The "strategic goal" was formulated in political language and was not translated into military targets. According to the committee, the war had three stages, but no military lessons were learned as the army progressed from one to the next. Whatever failed in Stage 1 was tried again, in a slightly different form, in Stage 2. The war was fought using Hezbollah's tactics rather than taking advantage of the IDF's large size.

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The IDF was not acting like an army even before the war: It had never readied operational plans for the possibility of war with Hezbollah. That is a shocking finding given that Israel initiated the war. The committee's conclusion that a large ground operation should have been launched at the start of the war ignores the possibility that this operation might have failed also.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/941569.html