Seems like the Give War A Chance strategy didn’t work out so well:
Scathing indictments of the way the Israeli government and its military have conducted the longest war in the nation’s history filled the country’s newspapers and airwaves yesterday, as Israelis began to feel safe enough to return to their national pastime of blistering political debate.
Israeli analysts across the political spectrum branded the war against Hezbollah fighters in Lebanon “an embarrassing defeat” for a “semi-rookie government” that should have known the goals it set for itself were “impossible to achieve.”
Wow, so they completely decimated the infrastructure of Lebanon, and Hezbollah’s still hanging around? Brilliant. And good on Condi for not calling for that immediate cease-fire a few weeks ago, since continuing the war for a few more weeks certainly brought some clarity to the situation, right?
And continuing the now-surreal nature of anything this administration does, President Bush celebrated that “Hezbollah suffered a defeat in this crisis.” And further down the rabbit hole they plunge.
… Related to this, and to the terrorism/law enforcement theme I discussed yesterday, is the armed forces’ better-late-than-never reassessment of how to win a counter-insurgency:
In classrooms, on training bases, and even on the battlefield, military scholars and combat veterans are struggling to teach the world’s most lethal military force how to calibrate its immense firepower and avoid the kind of heavy-handed tactics and cultural insensitivity that have engendered so much ill will and helped fuel insurgencies in Afghanistan and, especially, Iraq.
At the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., nearly half the curriculum this fall is focused on guerrilla warfare and tactics to counter it, marking the biggest academic overhaul in decades, according to military officials. A heavy emphasis is being placed on the foreign cultures where analysts believe US forces may find themselves operating in the coming years: failed states in Africa, the Middle East, and central Asia that may become breeding grounds for terrorists.
Man, what a bunch of !@#$#@! pansies. Cultural sensitivity my ass! Oh, so we should all start speakin’ A-RAB now! We should just bomb ’em back to the stone age! You Osama-loving liberals at the Army War College don’t understand — we’re at WAR!
Oops, looks like if you want to win and keep your country safe, you kind of do have to think about what people think of you. Cheney even appealed to that concept in saying we’d be greeted as liberators. Too bad he didn’t make sure that was going to be the case. A more sophisticated cultural approach might have done wonders for us.
Maybe, just maybe this November, we might find out that the public does have a limit to how much Soviet-style, top-down viciousness and stupidity they’re willing to put up with when it comes to defending our country from attack. They did re-elect Bush, unfortunately … but gosh, he really does give ignorance a bad name.
now, do you think that we will ever see a washington democrat have the cajones to suggest that we spend way too much on military blunt objects, instead of . .
-intelligence building
-diplomatic initiatives
-humanitarian aid
-hiv/aids prevention
-clean energy development
-schools
-roads
-healthcare
-piping plovers
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“Wow, so they completely decimated the infrastructure of Lebanon, and Hezbollah’s still hanging around?”
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I’m going to ask you a question that I’ve asked my other liberal friends who’ve also voiced disapproval towards Israel over the past month: What would you have Israel do differently at this point in military, tactical terms?
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Its all well and good to say that you oppose the deaths of innocent civilians. I think everyone on these boards would agree with that. But the right wing pundits in Israel are criticizing the government for not going in with ground forces and rooting out Hezbollah. The left wing is, in my opinion, Monday-morning-quaterbacking the fight by calling the government a “rookie-government,” whatever that means.
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So, is your beef they didn’t go in with groundtroops, causing an unneccessary, and perhaps over the top use of air power? Or are you objecting to the use of force period?
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Because, in my mind, comparing Israel to the Bush administration isn’t really fair to Israel. While there was no real threat in Iraq, there was a real threat in Hezbollah. And I’m not making more of it than it was. It’s Hezbollah – bombs and kidnappings. But hey, if its your neighborhood getting bombed, it’s a threat. Whereas, with Iraq, well, we all know what that was all about…
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By the way, your other post about law enforcement and military tactics is right on. I just don’t think its fair or accurate to lump the Lebanon situation in with the Bush administration’s ineptitude.
I don’t. I’m totally mystified. Projecting American power?
I think I was going for “less than justified.”
There’s an excellent editorial in this week’s New Yorker about the sad state of affairs we have come to over Iraq.
… in this particular case; but it seemed pretty clear that it wasn’t targeted. And it would seem that indeed, a ground invasion would have been more effective.
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Read Sy Hersh’s article — Hezbollah is scary indeed, but Israel didn’t/doesn’t know how to deal with it. It’s a false choice to say that if they didn’t do what they did, then they shouldn’t have done anything. That’s not at all what I’m suggesting.
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I have a longer comment below in response to David’s similar question.
Not Monday-morning quarterbacking — I’ve been concerned about this strategy for weeks.
I just had dinner with a friend who spent the last three weeks in Israel. Her view of Israeli public sentiment was, shall we say, different. A lot of the intra-Israeli “scathing indictments” referred to in the article are along the lines of the military having waited too long to begin the ground offensive, and having agreed to the cease-fire too quickly. Don’t just assume that everyone there now thinks the war itself was a bad idea. They don’t. I’ve asked her whether she wants to write something up for posting here. We’ll see what she says.
As you say, the article I linked to listed critiques from both the left (war was bad idea to begin with) and right (war wasn’t followed through to the end). And in fact, I have little doubt that most Israelis agree more with the right’s version.
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That being said, I stand by the headline: the way the war was carried out was a botch. They didn’t disarm Hezbollah; it would seem, in fact, that they handed them an enormous PR victory, both through their inability to crush them militarily and in the apparently-needless “collateral damage” they inflicted on the whole of Lebanon. They weren’t doing and didn’t do what they needed to do.
That they didn’t give war enough of a chance? That to get it right, they should have ignored the mounting hue and cry from the “international community,” pressed on with a ground offensive, and refused even American calls for a cease-fire?
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Or that they never should have gone in at all, allowing Hezbollah to continue arming itself to the teeth and firing rockets at Israel with impunity, eventually turning itself into one of the strongest armies in the region openly dedicated to the destruction of Israel?
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What were they supposed to do?
… if irrelevant now. All caveats of my obvious non-expertise apply, but IMHO what they should have done was to try to isolate Hezbollah politically as far as possible — and to try to strengthen the hand of the Lebanese moderates. War may well have been inevitable, given how much Hezbollah was dug in, but if it wasn’t imminent, so much more reason to use diplomacy with Europe, the West, and other Hezbollah-phobic Arab countries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt) first. IOW, small-scale operations first, with the threat of worse to come. Don’t just decimate the country.
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Instead, how about this from Sy Hersh, my emphasis:
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Persuade them. By bombing them. Right.
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As for the Kosovo analogy that was floated by Olmert and co, here’s Wes Clark:
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By the way, the big point of Hersh’s article is that this was a dress rehearsal for the US and Iran — once again, cooked up by crappy intelligence stove-piped to — you know who — Dick Cheney.
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So here’s the graph that points up the lunacy of the Give War A Chance attitude:
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And the last paragraph, the most powerful:
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Yeah, I’ve never liked that “definition of insanity” phrase because i think it really doesn’t mean anything. BUt the rest of his point is well taken. Personally, I think I’d define insanity with that carpet bombing military plan.
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I’ve been as vocal a supporter as you’d probably find around here of Israel’s “right to defend itself,” and for some measure of accountability on the part of Hezbollah for starting the latest fracus. But that strategy would have even me speaking out against it.
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I’m not opposed to force. I’m not even opposed to excessive force. But planning the deaths of innocent civilians to try to win them over in order to root out Hezbollah is just wrong.
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But that kind of brings us to the question everyone has been dancing around. We assume that extreme force used in the area would not serve to win over the Lebanese factions, but only push them closer to Hezbollah. The flip side of that assumption is that there is some way that we could win them over, which I don’t think is true.
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I’m reminded of two pop culture references. One is Bonnie Raitt’s “I can’t make you love me,” and the other is Mikey and Rob’s conversation at the very beginning of “Swingers.” (“You can’t do anthing to make her wanna come back. You can only do things to make her NOT wanna come back…”)
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My point is this: You can’t MAKE anyone love you. Could David MAKE EB3 love him? No, not gonna happen. You can only make them fear you. Israel can’t make the Lebanese love them, either by bombing them, or through the olive branch. The Lebanese are just going to have to figure out that life with Hezbollah just sucks. And in the meantime, Israel gets to destroy Hezbollah targets until their hearts content.
I can’t make EB3 love me?
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whimper
Should they just continue while those same moderates passively allow bombs to be rained upon them?
In order to get reelected, one needs to get elected in the first place. Let’s not legitimize the 2000 coronation.
Don’t let your guilt affect your ratings judgment!
I didn’t go so far as to say, as many have, that Bush wasn’t elected in 2004, either. The Ohio vote fraud case is still in the courts. Won’t change the outcome, of course, but it would be a slap in our collective face if it turns out Bush shouldn’t have been given Ohio’s electoral votes…
I had never before used a zero, no matter how pernicious I found the comment. I am a guest here, and try to restrain myself to praise, and the occasional ‘4’.
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But that comment is a clear-cut misstatement of fact, and worse, not germane to the subject at hand.
I had never before used a zero, no matter how pernicious I found the comment. I am a guest here, and try to restrain myself to praise, and the occasional ‘4’.
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But that comment is a clear-cut misstatement of fact, and worse, not germane to the subject at hand.