Despite Israeli Prime Minister Ehud
Olmert's somewhat shaky grasp of military tactics
and his indecisive political leadership, Israel
has still managed to achieve most of its immediate
war aims.
The conflict has, however,
highlighted a weakness in the Israel Defense
Forces (IDF): a dangerous over-reliance on air
power and heavy armor. This has severely
restricted its ability at times to combat a
determined guerrilla force in hostile terrain.
Israel has not fought a major campaign for
nearly a quarter of a century, and this lack of
combat experience has been painfully exposed in
the unimaginative tactics and poor command shown
by some senior officers in this conflict.
These are serious problems that have
already been recognized and have to some extent
been dealt with. In the longer term, the
IDF
may well need to strengthen its elite infantry
formations to be better prepared for this type of
warfare.
More important, however, the IDF
has still proved capable of inflicting serious
damage on Hezbollah's defensive infrastructure of
bunkers and hidden arms dumps, and to disrupt its
supply routes severely. The IDF also believes it
has destroyed almost two-thirds of the
longer-range Iranian Zelzal missiles that are
capable of hitting Tel Aviv.
At least 350
of the Islamic movement's best fighters have been
killed, with the real number probably well in
excess of this figure. Among the dead are
reportedly several senior leaders, including Jihad
Atayeh, head logistics officer for Hezbollah in
south Lebanon, and Nur Shilhav, who was
responsible for coordinating the smuggling of
weapons from Syria into Lebanon.
The IDF
must be fully aware that it has not yet destroyed
Hezbollah's leadership, its control of fighting
units or its ability to fire a significant number
of missiles into northern Israel for some weeks to
come.
Indeed, despite the air strikes on
the Bekaa Valley and the main routes into Syria,
some new weapons, such as more effective
man-portable surface-to-air missiles, have been
smuggled in, as well as additional bombardment
rockets to help maintain Hezbollah's substantial
stock of about 8,000 missiles.
The Israeli
government, while announcing the acceptance of a
UN ceasefire from Monday, has still sanctioned the
IDF to push its forces quickly and very
effectively up to a defensible line along the
Litani River. About 30,000 Israeli soldiers will
now be able to seal off the whole of south Lebanon
and finally spring the trap on some 700 or more
Hezbollah fighters still thought to be in the
area.
To the IDF, the cessation of
fighting simply means stopping its offensive
forward movement, but places no restrictions on
mopping-up operations inside the greatly expanded
territory now under its control and, of course,
the final destruction of all remaining Hezbollah
resistance.
Israel has finally achieved
some sort of a military victory after prolonged
resistance by Hezbollah. Frankly, the outcome was
never in real doubt, though the IDF was certainly
made to fight hard and, indeed, for far too long
in straightforward military terms.
However, the real war has been fought in
the UN as much as on the battlefield, and here
Israel has also achieved a limited victory.
Despite the spin placed on the outcome of
the negotiations by the Arab and international
media, the result is that Hezbollah should now be
prevented from carrying out future missile attacks
and indeed be effectively disarmed in due course,
and without a long-term, politically divisive and
costly Israeli occupation of south Lebanon.
At least in theory.
On the face of
it, Lebanon and its Arab backers appear to have
recognized reality and opted for accepting a
limited defeat rather than risking the catastrophe
of Israeli forces eventually hammering on the door
of Beirut in a rerun of 1982.
The present
United Nations resolution is vague enough to allow
a deal of Arab face-saving and claims to have
"defeated" a determined Israeli onslaught.
However, whether Iran and to a lesser
degree Syria will prove to be so amenable to
common sense must remain open to some considerable
doubt.
If the UN resolutions are fully
implemented, then Hezbollah would have suffered a
significant defeat, but more important, the real
losers will undoubtedly be its masters in Syria
and Iran.
Tehran's ambitions to have a
semi-independent and heavily armed enclave on
Israel's northern border will have been thwarted.
So will Syria's and Iran's attempt to use
Hezbollah as a lever to get back into the Middle
East power game as serious players.
Both
Damascus and Tehran will have suffered a huge
setback to their long-term political plans. It is
this that makes Hezbollah's future willingness to
accept the presence of a joint Lebanese
army-UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in
Lebanon) force and eventual disarmament far less
certain.
If Iran and Syria decide to
ignore UN strictures by covertly rearming their
protege and continue funding its terrorist
activities, then the current resolution may not be
worth the paper it's written on.
Israel
could then still be threatened by long range
Iranian-built missiles fired from the Bekaa Valley
over the heads of a potentially toothless
Lebanese-UN stabilization force.
The
Israeli government is unlikely to sanction a rerun
of the current campaign and the 15,000 UN "Blue
Berets" would become nothing more than just a
useful screen for Hezbollah to hide behind.
Israel and the US could not, and should
not, tolerate the failure of yet another United
Nations peacekeeping operation. The decision to
respond would be inescapable and would inevitably
lead to a wider conflict.
The only
possible effective answer to Hezbollah's renewed
missile threat would probably be a direct and
devastating strike against those countries that
supply the militia with weapons, training and
finance: Syria and, more important, Iran.
Any failure by the United Nations and the
Lebanese government to make the new resolutions
stick, any failure to disarm Hezbollah and
guarantee Israel's security, may well lead to the
wider regional conflict they claim to fear most.
The international community has now
provided a ceasefire resolution and the
opportunity for peace so forcefully demanded by
the media and protesters worldwide. This time the
UN must not fail - it must not back away from a
probable military confrontation with Hezbollah.
Richard M Bennett, intelligence
analyst and security consultant.
AFI
Researchprovides expert information
on the world's intelligence services, armed forces
and conflicts. Contact rbmedia@supanet.com.
(Copyright 2006 AFI Research. Used
with permission.)
