J. R. Dunn

Another such victory and we are undone.” —Pyrrhus, after the Battle of Asculum (279 B.C.)

One of the few useful methods of judging the results of a war is whether you are better off at the end than at the beginning.

It’ll be some time before the chips stop falling, but the outline is clear enough: the Hezbollah War is an unmitigated disaster for Israel, the U.S., and the West at large.

This doesn’t mean Hezbollah has won – though that’s how it will be played throughout the Arab world. It means simply that the only rational goal of the war – the destruction of Hezbollah as a military power – has not been achieved. Hezbollah still exists, it still has a large fraction of its weaponry, it remains a threat to both the legitimate Lebanese government and Israel. It also has gained the prestige that comes from fighting a powerful enemy to a standstill.

Israel, on the other hand, has not only been stalemated on the battlefield for the first time, but has also suffered a stunning economic blow, with most of her northern cities emptied out and close to a million refugees to care for. The Israelis blew off the propaganda war completely, allowing themselves to be painted worldwide as child-killers while tossing aside their first-ever expression of sympathy from the major Arab states. Their military has been exposed as a clown act, their political system as completely dysfunctional, unable not only to rise to meet a crisis situation but even to recognize it. Their enemy remains, fully-armed, on their northern border, and their security has become the ward of the UN, that notorious New York-based child prostitution and bribery ring.

It didn’t have to be this way. The Israelis opened the war with a series of well-planned air strikes which succeeded in isolating southern Lebanon from resupply or reinforcement. All that remained was a swift attack in force in the customary Israeli style. Hezbollah, a guerilla force of small size—the number of active combat troops is uncertain, with estimates ranging from 1,000 – 6,000—with no real mobility or heavy weaponry, could not have stood up against this.

For the first week to ten days of the war, this appeared to be exactly what the Israelis had in mind. But it never came to pass. Precisely why remains unknown, beyond the fact that Ehud Olmert wanted it that way. The IDF ran into some trouble at the border with mines and fortifications, Hezbollah having been allowed to work on them for six years undisturbed, but these were little more than a shell and could have easily been pierced by combat engineers. But this was probably no more than a contributing factor.

If asked to speculate, I would point out that the IDF’s chief of staff, Dan Halutz, is an ex-air force commander. Air force officers placed in a position to affect the course of a war have a long history of claiming that their boys can do the entire job on their own with no assistance from ground-pounders (e.g., Goering in 1940, the USAF staff in 1965). What happens then is a series of limited strikes that accomplish little, followed by more and larger strikes, and then desperation raids on any conceivable target before the military settles for doing what it should have done in the first place. This narrative fits the war to a tee. Even down to the fact that, when the time came to throw in the ground forces, it was simply too late.

Time was bought by the major Arab states, who were anxious to see the radical Shi’ites bounced even if it was done by Jewish interlopers, and an all-out campaign by the U.S. to keep the UN from interfering. This offered Israel an unprecedented window of opportunity. But Israel wasted that window by consistently playing to Hezbollah strengths. Ground troops were dribbled into combat in penny packets, becoming bogged down in fortified villages like Bint Jbeil, which should have been bypassed and reduced at a later time. Even after IDF troops were ignominiously ejected from Bint Jbeil, the IDF failed to move in force, leaving the advantage to Hezbollah. The mass offensive that should have opened the war occurred only at the last possible moment, and then solely to give a jolt to the UN.

In the meantime, the air campaign had fallen victim to a well-planned Hezbollah PR operation, complete with an impresario, the notorious “Green Helmet” (who insists that he’s simply a civil defense worker doing his job, presumably with his own personal helicopter to fly him from site to site), an apparent stash of ready corpses, and a cadre of news photographers either too enthusiastic or too frightened to protest at being used as propaganda conduits.

The trap being prepared, the IAF obligingly fell in, bombing targets to little strategic purpose—a “Katyusha launcher” can be created with about $20 worth of hardware—though well aware that the Hezbollah was placing its assets at points where civilian casualties were inevitable. The result was a quick reversal by previously understanding Arab governments, a universal moan by the easily-flummoxed Western elite, and second thoughts by Israel’s allies.

All this time, the Katyushas kept falling on northern Israel in their thousands (the total is an astonishing 4,000). Hezbollah had deliberately modified the warheads for greater terror effects, adding loads of ball bearings and other forms of shrapnel. The missiles effectively cleared out the country’s northern tier, with remaining residents spending most of their days in bomb shelters. This created an image of Israeli helplessness that was both spurious and unnecessary – the original Israeli war plan would have solved that problem within a matter of hours. That image will not be forgotten either in Arab countries or in Israel itself.

The results of this war will be months in coming, and few will be good (e.g., expect to see a lot more katyushas in Iraq. A lot more.) But the most critical development is this: one of the major elements – perhaps the major element – of Israeli foreign policy is the premise that under no circumstances would Israel be dependent on any other nation for its survival. It could scarcely be any other way, the Jews being the sole existing people that the modern world once attempted to destroy. To depend on anyone else would be to invite a repetition of that ordeal. No greater responsibility lies on the shoulders of any Israeli politician than to see that situation maintained.

But now, thanks to Ehud Olmert, it is over. Israel now depends for its security on the United States and the UN. These are frail reeds. The U.S. has always been faithful, but that can no longer be guaranteed, with the Democrats now being taken over by their maniac wing. As for the UN, apart from incompetence, there’s the barely concealed contempt for Israel, bordering on blatant anti-Semitism, plainly evident in Kofi Annan and his people. The organization still believes that Zionism is racism. To depend on its goodwill is to tempt a second Holocaust.

Israel now needs to do three things:

1) The first is a purge of the IDF’s command cadre. It’s impossible to say what has gone wrong with the IDF, but that’s just the point. It has gone wrong all the way down the line. Three incidents will suffice: last year the IDF abandoned development of the Northrop THEL system, a laser cannon configured to destroy missiles of the Katyusha class that had performed promisingly in tests. The reasoning was extremely vague. The system was “too bulky”, didn’t work well if it was cloudy, and so forth. If purchased at the time, it would have been coming on line right about now. While not quite a Starship Enterprise phaser bank, the THEL is an impressive weapon that would have curtailed the panic generated by Hezbollah’s missiles in much the same way that the RAF encouraged the British people despite being unable to fully stop the Luftwaffe in the summer of 1940.

Similarly, the IAF failed to procure a reasonable supply of bunker-buster bombs even though aware that Hezbollah had six years to fortify and tunnel. Again, this would not have completely solved the problem – some Hezbollah tunnels were over 120 feet deep – but it’s still a sign of gross un-preparedness, particularly on the part of ex-air force chief Dan Halutz.

Even more troubling are reports that tanks were being ordered into heavily-defended areas of southern Lebanon with no infantry accompaniment – which is simply asking for them to be blown away. Dealing with enemy anti-tank teams has been a textbook matter since the Normandy breakout in WWII. Infantry assaults the enemy teams, creating a hole for the armor to roar through. If there’s any truth is these stories, it reveals incompetence of a criminal degree. Courts martial should follow.

2) Get rid of Ehud Olmert. The man has proven himself incapable beyond recall. Democracies have a tendency to throw up such types in times of crisis before settling on the right man. Olmert not only failed to understand how to carry out his war, he failed to understand why it was being fought in the first place. According to Israeli sources, Olmert was heard remarking that the purpose of the war was that it would enable Israel to “remove its settlements from Samaria.” This is as if George Bush had concluded that the point of 9/11 was to give Manhattan back to the Indians. Of course the alternative, the suave media figure and playboy Benjamin Netanyahu is no prize, but at this point Jojo the Dogfaced boy would be an improvement. This is a case where the parliamentary system adapted by Israel is superior to ours: they can get rid of the useless politician.

3) Target Hezbollah for annihilation by any means necessary. This means every last active combatant. Hezbollah has humiliated Israel. The country – and the Middle East, and the world at large – will not be safe until that stain is wiped out.

As for us – the rest of the world – we’ll be seeing a lot of Sons of Hezbollah springing up in the near future. Hezbollah has taken the pennant from Al-Queda, and is now the hero of the pathological sector of Muslim manhood. And of course, Al-Qaeda will have to make some effort to get the pennant back….

The first phase of the War on Terror has now ended. It could have, and should have, gone better.. As it is, we can only repeat what Grant said to Sherman, as the two of them stood in the rain the evening after the carnage of Shiloh: “Whip ‘em again tomorrow.”

J.R. Dunn was editor of the International Military Encyclopedia for 12 years. This is an edited version of an article that appeared in the American Thinker on August 14.