What we don’t get
Expanded from a discussion I had on livejournal:
Someone: The IAF bombed a building because a rocket launcher was in it- they had no way to know the basement was packed with children, and had they known I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t have bombed it.
ME:
Not fucking good enough!
We are judged by our actions, not merely our intents. I keep hearing these excuses “but HizbAllah fire from civilian areas!“, “HizbAllah combatants don’t signify themselves as combatants with uniform or insignia!“, “Any other country would have done the same in the face of such threats!“
all I have to say to that is “O? Rly?”
These aren’t new tactics. We weren’t caught by surprise by them. We should be able to take them into account. We’ve been fighting asymmetrical warfare for a bloody long time.
What I expect, is that those generals sitting in TOL department in the kirya develope combat doctrines and strategies that deal with 4th Generation Warfare..! I’m talking a full-blown paradigm shift. Or gestalt switch. Call it what you will. We cannot fight Guerrilla forces like we fight conventional armies, and expect to both win and keep our moral high grounds. It’s like playing chess when your opponent is playing checkers. You can either lose or cheat. Or decide to play another game entirely.
We keep being surprised that the world at large still disproves of our actions when we clearly have such a good cause. We fail to realize that ends do not always justify the means, and any battle fought where more innocents die than combatants is considered a bloody mess, no one is going to congratulate us for fighting terror. Schiesse.
Tagged as 4gw, guerilla warfare, HizbAllah, israel, Israeli-Arab Conflict, lebanon, media, PR, propaganda, public relations, Second Lebanese War, War + Categorized as Current Events
I agree with you. I’m am supportive of Israel and I think that Israel should fight hizbollah. But I think Israel has made the mistake of making all of Lebanon a war zone, and it is not worth killing 60 civilians just to kill a couple of terrorists. That cost is just way too high. Israel should be more careful.
Yeah, well, most of the world sort of stops watching beyond things like what happened in Qana.
I agree with you that someone should have noticed that:
a) This IS Kana village – which we did have an issue with 10 years ago
b) They employed the SAME technique 10 years ago, thus causing us to fall into the same trap AGAIN.
While the Hizbullah is not committed to any international law, they can, will and are fighting dirty, but since they are always being regarded as a militia, the rest of the world is not applying the same “standard” of morality to them as they do to us.
I’ve read a couple of days ago an article by this doctor (can’t find the link) that said that morality and war are two problematic terms.
Even “Just” wars like WW2 (from the allies point of view) wasn’t really a moral one (bombing civilian population, red army raping lots of german women, dropping the A-Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, etc).
So, morality left aside, we need to do what needs to be done. While fighting a militia (even though the Hizbullah today is a lot closer to a regular army than it was 10 years ago) using fighter planes and helicopter gunships is a bit problematic and not necessarily effective, I can still understand some of the reasons that the army probably thought of using this tactic, to save soliders’ (and as we know from a study someone did here, the Israeli opinion is much more affected from the death of soliders than the death of civilians due to katyusha rockets).
Another reason was that everyone knew how much the Hizbullah prepared (and they said this did) to a ground invasion by Israeli forces and that is why the army tried to avoid as much as it can to enter by foot.
While I can understand why the army decided to walk this path, I also know that it could avoid most of this mishabs by simply thinking a bit more.
This is not 1982, the media (on all of its forms including the unofficial media such as the Internet) is all around and we need a lot of marketing folks (god knows we have more than a few of those lying around in Israel) that should provide a marketial point of view for every action the army takes.
Obviously, “Just War” is an oxymoron. When you enter a war you leave justice at the doorstep. Justice is Peace.
I’m not sure I know what we should have done instead. I’m not a military strategist. In my mind, a shiny surgical special forces op or something would have been better, but I guess those aren’t always easy to pull out of your ass.
Still, I think that’s the best all-around way to respond to these sort of threats. Hits them where it hurt. They attack and kidnap 2 soldiers? Fine, we’ll kidnap 10 Hizb’Allah top officials. Something like that.
Punishing the whole country is just, well, overkill, in my opinion. I pretty much agree on that with the criticism. We’re one of the smartest armed forces in the world, we should use our brains.
Special Ops operations are VERY tricky. I’m quite sure it took quite a while to be able to kidnap Mustafa Dirany in 1988 (2 years after Ron Arad was captured).
Trying to kidnap, say, Hasan Nasrallah will probably be A LOT more complicated (if not dead right impossible).
And this is without taking into account the fact that most of the officials there have learned a lot and are walking around VERY close circules that are very loyal. They keep communications with digital means to a minimum and its VERY hard to track them.
I know that punishing the civilian population is an overkill, but there are some factors that needs to be taken into account:
a) Something (and it doesn’t matter what or who) shot rockets over the border into Israel. This means that a sovereign state fired at another sovereign state. It doesn’t matter why this happened (unless it was a mistake) cause Lebanon MUST exercises it sovereigness over ALL of its territory.
Other states went to war of a lot less than that (and no, it doesn’t make us better or special. I’m just pin pointing random facts as usual
).
b) Hitting Hizbullah won’t force or make any change to the governmnet of Lebanon. They haven’t controlled this part of the country for god knows how long and they need to reminded somehow that this is part of their country and they should retain it as such.
c) Hizbullah ARE firing at civilian population (and they did that before even regardless of kidnapping soliders).
Some of the points above were also relevant after every single attack that was made over the border after Israel withdrew from Lebanon in May 2000, yet no one has lifted a finger to do otherwise.
I think the main problem here is what we will qualify as victory as opposed to the Hizbullah.
If we do get all the kidnappees back and drive them 1km into Lebanon, is that a victory?
Hizbullah and the rest of the Muslim world sees that the most powerful army in the middle east is having A LOT of trouble managing a small 3000-5000 soliders militia. Perhaps one of the ways the people in the army thought of overcoming that is shift the media to the bombings. Who knows.
What I do know is that its time to find another planet and move there
I know history will probably repeat itself, but at least it will be cool to visit another planet!
It’s all true, and very sad. The Lebanese government had about 1 year to assert it’s control since the Cedar Revolution kicked the Syrians out. Syria would not let HA disarm, so there was no point in even trying to exert Lebanese control over the south. There were already talks underway. We can of course say “too little, too late,” but do we really think what we do weakens HA? Honestly? I think we’re kidding ourselves.
If kidnapping Nasrallah is difficult, imagine how difficult killing him now will be. I don’t see a better “victory image” possible for us except that. Pretty much anything else means we’ve lost.