FrontPageMagazine.com
| August 10, 2006
Jerusalem, Israel (Aug. 9, 2006) – The debate raging in Israel
these days is how far and how fast to push into Lebanon, and how to
define victory once the phase of intense military operations is
over.
The government of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has already
changed military strategy twice in four weeks of fighting. On
Tuesday, they assigned an “over-seer” from the general
staff to second-guess Maj. Gen. Uri Adom, the operational commander
in the north. None of these are signs of a well-planned war.
The Israeli press is full of reports of disputes within the General
Staff, disputes within the Cabinet, poorly-planned operations, and
pulled punches. Some have suggested publicly that Israel is losing
this war.
Former Mossad Chief Efraim Halevy said Tuesday that Israel will
ultimately emerge as the victor. "But we have to make sure that our
enemies will not be able to project the image that they are similarly
successful. This is very important for Israel's deterrence image. We
must engrave in the mind of the enemy that it has suffered a serious
setback,” he said.
But even this measure of victory may be beyond Israel’s grasp.
Israel’s enemies will claim victory no matter how stunning
their defeat. If the Arab states had any understanding of military
realities, they would have conceded defeat in 1948 and gone on to
make their own deserts bloom. Instead, they have poured a colossal
fortune down the drain – trillions and trillions of dollars in
oil revenues – to pursue a doomed jihad against a Jewish state
whose existence they can never accept, even today.
So let’s step back from the depressed news coverage that
suggests Israel is losing this war - because Israel will never win
the propaganda war: ¬Ýnot against the Arabs, the
Islamo-fascists, or the Europeans.
Here is a short list of what Israel has accomplished after one month
of fighting. These are not perfect achievements. Nor are they
complete. (There is no complete victory against terrorist forces, as
Ariel Sharon learned after smashing the PLO in Lebanon in 1982.) But
real capabilities have been destroyed and these are important
victories.
¬ The massive arsenal supplied to Hezbollah by Iran has been
almost entirely wiped out.
While some news agencies have mis-reported that Iranian rockets
continue to hit Haifa, in fact, as
Israeli police spokesman Mickey Rosenfeld told
me¬Ýafter
Sunday’s deadly rocket strikes that killed 15 Israelis, “only
a handful” of Iranian Fajr-3 rockets have hit Israel during the
entire conflict.
What happened to those Iranian rockets? Israel took most of them out
on Day One of the fighting, senior military officials say.
Through good intelligence, they managed to identify the location of
the launchers before they could be used. “We made this our top
priority,” a military intelligence source told me.
While Hezbollah most likely has a strategic reserve – and can
still pull off surprises – this means quite simply that Iran
lost in a single day of Israeli airstrikes an investment that has
cost them hundreds of millions of dollars and six years to build.
The arsenal Hezbollah still retains are mostly shorter-range rockets,
which Israel can take out in ground operations up to the Litani
river.
¬ Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah has been turned into a
fugitive.
Sure, Nasrallah may be hiding in the basement of the Iranian embassy
in Damascus, and he will manage to give pre-taped interviews to
Hezbo-TV for the conceivable future. But his public speaking days at
mass open-air rallies are over. He steps out of his bomb shelter, and
an Israeli missile sends him to Allah. Welcome to life underground
with Osama.
¬ Iran overplayed its hand.
Guided no doubt by Nasrallah’s inflated analysis of Israeli
weakness, Iran gave the operational orders to Hezbollah to launch the
July 12 attack on Israel during face-to-face meetings in Damascus the
day before, as
I have previously reported.
Iran believed that Israel would collapse under a steady barrage of
rocket-fire against its northern cities, towns and villages, and sue
for peace. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his hojjatieh
religious mentors were convinced that Israel’s humiliation
would pave the way toward their avowed goal of destroying Israel and
America, by hastening the return of the Shiite Muslim messiah (the
Mahdi) and ushering in the end times. Instead, it’s their own
demise that is near.
¬ Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards Corps has been
humiliated.
Revolutionary Guards officers, assigned to Hezbollah missile units in
Lebanon, have been killed on the battlefield in Lebanon and sent back
like dogs in Syrian caskets to Iran.
To disguise the losses (and Iran’s direct involvement in the
fighting), the dead Iranians were put in civilian caskets, and taken
to Syria in convoys of refuges. This is a humiliation and a wake-up
call the Revolutionary Guards have never endured.
¬ The Islamic Republic has failed to divert international
attention from its nuclear weapons programs.
The timing of the war was no accident: just days before the G-8
summit in St. Petersburg, Russia. Initial plans for the summit placed
Iran’s nuclear weapons program at the top of the agenda.
Iran’s goal in provoking this war was to divert international
attention from its nuclear weapons program at the summit; and
initially, it appeared that Iran was successful. Iran was stunned
when the UN Security Council passed a resolution two weeks later
giving Tehran a hard deadline to accept the U.S.-backed take-it or
leave-it offer to suspend all enrichment and reprocessing activities,
in exchange for Western goodies. In response to that UN action, Iran
has thumbed its nose at the international community, and indicated
last week that it would reject the offer. But the UN deadline
holds.
In other words, Iran’s efforts to game the international
community have failed, and failed miserably.
Each day the fighting continues, Hezbollah grows weaker.
Each day that Israel that bombs Hezbollah command and control
bunkers, and destroys Syrian and Iranian and Chinese-built rocket
launchers, the future threat to the citizens of northern Israel
diminishes.
Israel has made clear that it will not accept a ceasefire in Lebanon
until Hezbollah is effectively disarmed and some arrangement is made
to prevent Hezbollah from returning to southern Lebanon.
In the fog of war it is often difficult to recognize victory or the
beginnings of victory. Israel still has a ways to go to defeat
Hezbollah and prevent it from becoming a future threat. But it has
reached a tipping point. From here on, the losses are going to be
overwhelming one-sided, in Israel’s favor.
Most important of all, however, has been the message sent by Israel’s
civilian population to the leaders of Syria and Iran.
Until this war, Iran believed it could deter any Israeli military
action against it – in Lebanon, or in Iran – by the
threat of massive rocket attacks, essentially using Israel’s
civilian population as hostages.
By playing its hand too early, Iran has lost that deterrent. That may
be Israel’s greatest victory of all.
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