Confused and half-hearted strategy hampers Israel’s offensive against Hezbollah? Plus more Bint Jbail.
Israel has bungled much of its offensive against Hezbollah, both politically and militarily, writes Bret Stephens in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. It certainly seems as if things have not only been going not ccording to plan, but the plan itself is a muddle of uncertainty and erroneous assumptions. Now that Israel is in for penny, it is in for a pound. Failing to dislodge Hezbollah from southern Lebanon at this point would, correctly, be seen as an enormous set back and a boost for militant forces in the Muslim world.
I strongly believe that Israel must not cut back on its aerial campaign in order to further reduce Lebanese civilian losses. Hezbollah is deliberately deploying rocket launchers, anti-aircraft guns and other military assets among civilians to increase civilian losses in an attempt to turn world opinion even more aganinst Israel than it already is. That kind of savagery should not be allowed to help produce military victories.
Ralph Peters expresses his dismay over Israel’s ham-fisted approach in a column in New York Post:
So far, the Olmert government has been a disastrous aberration in Israel’s history of wartime Cabinets - and a gift to Hezbollah. Israel needs leadership, not Clintonesque equivocation. President Bill Clinton’s weakness led to 9/11. Olmert’s weakness led to Qana.
A certain segment of the Right just can’t find faults without finding President Clinton, just like the Left can’t find faults without finding President George W. Bush. My thinking is that people in the Middle East are perfectly capable of screwing things up royally without any help from either President Clinton or President Bush.
As far as the war goes, I still believe in a strategy of aggressive attrition.
The Boston Globe has an article from Bint Jbail on Hezbollah’s fighters. They clearly feel they kicked IDF’s butt.
According to the men’s account, Israeli soldiers infiltrated and eventually took up positions in a large house on Tel Masoud, the high ground overlooking Bint Jbail from the west. The two-story house was surrounded by a tomato patch and a high wall.
“Immediately, we started to attack,” Hussein said. The Hezbollah fighters had Kalashnikov machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and a few antitank missiles, he said, to confront the heavily armed Israelis and their armored vehicles.
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Fighters communicated by hand-held radio, ordering strikes from Hezbollah mortar crews, Hussein said. He estimates that about 35 Israeli soldiers and 30 Hezbollah militiamen took part in the battle for the hilltop. Hezbollah attacked, he said, before Israel had time to send in more soldiers.
Weekly Standard’s blog quotes from an article in the London Sunday Telegraph on the fighting in Bint Jbail. The account, based on interviews with Israeli soldiers, does not differ much from that in the Globe:
When the men of C Company entered a 50-metre-square olive grove, surrounded on all sides by three-storey apartment blocks, they had walked into a killing zone. “Everything was very quiet,” Dahan said.
“But the Hezbollah were in buildings all around.” They were also behind a wall which ran around the grove, from where the attack began.
“Grenades started coming over the wall,” Dahan said. “One rolled right up to me and the guys next to me but I kicked it away at the last second.”
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With explosions all around, the men of C Company returned fire, but could not locate their enemies. Then small arms fire erupted from every direction, as the fighters of the “Party of God” fired from the upper floors of surrounding buildings.
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As the battle intensified a fierce debate raged at headquarters, with commanders loath to send attack helicopters to provide air support, for fear of flying into a second, missile-borne, trap. Eventually, however, the situation was so desperate that Cobra and Apache helicopters were sent in, tipping the battle in Israel’s favour and allowing the injured to be evacuated.
That strikes me as a poorly thought out battle plan. Perhaps the Golani Brigade, which led the charge on Bint Jbail, assumed there would be no more than token resistance? Why else would you draw up a plan where the fire support was held back because enemy resistance was so fierce? There is something strange about the battle for Bint Jbail and it’s not that Arabs fought hard, as some commentators are suggesting. After all, Fedayeen fighters managed to pin down Marines for a full day in al-Nasiriyah in southern Iraq during the invasion in 2003, partly because of an indecisive US commander.
