Pat Lang on the 33-day war

Pat Lang, who has forgotten more about the strategic realities of today’s Middle East than most of us ever knew, has been consistently clearheaded in his analysis of the 33-day war between Israel and Hizbullah.
He recently wrote this:

    Apologists for Israel’s failure in this campaign will try to spin the surprise suffered by Hizbullah [at the ferocity of Israel’s response on July 12– which Nasrallah has of course, already admitted to. ~HC] to mean [Hizbullah’s] defeat.
    It is nothing like that. In fact, the surprise of the ferocity and persistence of the Israeli riposte makes even more significant the Hizbullah recovery under extreme pressure and the quality of the defense they mounted.
    Claims for Israeli “victory” in the Lebanon campaign continue to puzzle me:
    – Strategic Victory? Israel did not force the Lebanese government to carry out the “tasks” that it had in mind for it. It is not disarming Hizbullah. It is not preventing re-supply of Hizbullah.
    – Diplomatic Victory? The multinational force is there, but doing little that the Israelis would want. This time the French have brought tanks with them. Do you think it is the Lebanese Army or Hizbullah that inspired that deployment? No. The French have long experience of what the IDF has done with tanks vis a vis UN Forces.
    – Operational Level Victory? (campaign level) The Hizbullahis still have a lot of rockets and are still in southern Lebanon where they could start shooting into the Galilee. The Hizbullahis fired more rockets into Israel on the last day of the war than on any previous day. Conclusion: The Israelis did not succeed in stopping rocket fire into Israel.
    – Tactical Victory? Where?
    Israeli and associated political warfare is trying to spin this set of defeats into victory. Good luck to them.

I have made many of these same points on JWN (e.g. here) and I develop them further in my upcoming article in Boston Review. Col. Pat just makes them more succinctly…
I do wonder, though, why the Israelis and so many of their friends are so intent on spinning the results of the 33-day war in this way, when if they have any intel capabilities left at all they must know that strategic planners from many Middle Eastern countries are now attentively studying the secrets of Hizbullah’s victory in order to learn from them. What do they gain from this attempt to deny reality? I suppose the answer is that they must be desperate to try to darn together the now-tattered cloth of the credibility of their “military deterrent”. And maybe we should be happy to let them do that for a while, since the credibility of a deterrent capability that was so rudely shattered by the bombs of July and August, has now been re-established– by both sides… And as a result, South Lebanon and northern Israel are for the present quiet.
Which gives all interested parties a good opportunity to restart the only kind of peace negotiations that can assure a stable longterm peace in that region– that is, all-party negotiations aimed at the speedy conclusion of a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace.
So why on earth aren’t the Israelis leaping at that opportunity?

15 thoughts on “Pat Lang on the 33-day war”

  2. Minnesotachuck, thanks for that link. It looks, in general, like an interesting analysis.
    However, based on what I know, this statement seems to me to be highly inaccurate: In truth, the abduction of the two Israeli soldiers and the killing of eight others took the Hezbollah leadership by surprise and was effected only because Hezbollah units on the Israeli border had standing orders to exploit Israeli military weaknesses.
    My own account of what happened is here. It’s based on some good, detailed reporting from July 12 and from subsequent comments made by Nasrallah.
    As I understand it, the two-pronged cross-border operation that Hizbullah launched that day was quite deliberate. (One prong for the abduction of IDF soldiers; the other for diversion– which was v. successful.) The israeli (not-so-hot) “hot pursuit” op that they describe came an hour or so after the abduction…
    As i understand it, it was Israel’s large-scale and sustained Blitzkrieg against all of Lebanon, undertaken in response to the abductions, that Hizbullah’s leaders found surprising– not the abductions themselves.
    From everything I know about Hizbullah, their fighters are far too disciplined to launch an operation as recognizably significant as a cross-border abduction on the basis only of “standing orders” and in response to the presentation of a “target of opportunity”. And indeed, Nasrallah himself has discussed the thinking and planning that went into the operation at some length.
    Don’t know why Perry and crooke got it so wrong. disappointing.

  3. Rationally, it is hard to explain why Israel isn’t “leaping” at the peace opportunity.
    But then these things are often irrational. Rationally, Israel should also be leaping at the opportunity to negotiate a peaceful settlement with Syria, rather than running away from it.
    I assume that Israeli planners are still in thrall to the idea that given their dominence in the ‘balance-of-terror’ equation, their interests are best served via conflict rather than peace.
    Again rationally, there should be some rapid recalculating going on, with some new conclusions reached. This may take some time. A similiar process occurred after the Yom Kippur War. Maybe it will again.

  5. Well, let’s allow the Lebanese people to speak for themselves, okay Truesdell? We wouldn’t want to paternistically think it’s up to whitefolks or other outsiders to speak for them, would we?
    They have done so in a number of different ways recently…

  6. Michael, if Israel had ever wanted peace it would have had it long before now. When it comes to peace, Israel has never missed an opportunity to turn up its nose at an opportunity. I will leave it to you to figure out why that is.

  7. Shirin, I guess I’m hoping for some post-’73 kind of reality check (limited as it was) from the Israelis. You know, when they belatedly realise that the recent conflict was a wake-up call they shouldn’t ignore.
    Mitigating against that is the way the Israelis have perceived the conflict. I’m just re-reading Eqbal Ahmad on Vietnam and it’s interesting to see how the Israelis continue to suffer some of the same kind of misconceptions that Ahmad outlines. Basically the Israelis are unable (or unwilling) to acknowledge that Hizballah exists because of acute grievences within the population that it is seen to legitimately address. In the ‘counterinsurgency-experts’ view, the group maintains its position via coercion or manipulation of the population. Hence when the group can’t be beaten,the ‘logic’ is to widen the target areas, causing suffering to the broader population who then will blame the group for their plight, isolating them. As Ahmad points out, it’s inevitable that the exact opposite happens – as it did in Lebanon. The next part of the misconception is that the local group, Hizballah, is only as an instrument being used as a proxy by greater outside forces, in this case, Syria and Iran. And the next logical step in this delusion is to take the fight directly to them, just as some now urge.
    So that’s the balance sheet, in my view. Can the Israelis recognise the local acute grievances that exist and address them, or does it battle on against the ghosts of outmoded ideas that present issues in a mostly technical light, ie. the issue is to discover the correct quantitity and type of force to apply, and where to apply it, and this will solve the problem.

  8. When it comes to peace, Israel has never missed an opportunity to turn up its nose at an opportunity.
    like the Peel Commission proposal (1936), the UN Partition Plan (1947), Arab Khartoum Summit rejection of restoring pre-June 67 borders aka “Three Noes – No recognition, No Negotiation, No Peace” (1967), the Carter-Sadat-Begin 5-year Autonomy Plan for the Palestinians(1979), the Clinton brokered Camp David final settlement plan (1980) – answered not with a Counteroffer but an Intifada, etc.

  10. The problem being, of course, that Israel’s potential partners for peace–Hamas, Hezbollah, Fatah, al-Qaeda, PFLP, Syria–all call for the eradication of the state, and some of its people, while the nations with which it IS at peace Jordan and Egypt, are one heartbeat away from control by the Ikhwan al-Muslimin and al-Qaeda.
    No Western-oriented nation has yet lost deterrence against a foe determined to destroy it and insensitive to casualties, Israel must stop its slide into weakness or it will be interesting to see if the mullahs can restrain their desires for Tel Aviv and Tehran, Qom, Mecca, Medina, etc. to sprout mushrooms.

  11. “Israel’s large-scale and sustained Blitzkrieg against all of Lebanon….”
    Just a point:
    Apart from the statement being inaccurate (with the exception of the last day of the war, Israel’s advances into Lebanon were largely small, slow and incremental – hardly a “Blitzkrieg”), the idea of a “sustained Blitzkrieg” is an oxymoron. But it does have a nice Germanic ring to it.

  13. Why isn’t Israel “leaping at the opportunity” for peace?
    Maybe because Khaled Mashall said that Israel was a “cancer that needs to be removed.” Maybe because Ismael Haniyeh said they would “Never Never Never” recognize Israel.
    Maybe because one day after Bashar Assad says he’s willing to make peace with Israel, he turns down Shimon Peres’s offer to come to Jerusalem.
    Maybe because, despite Helena’s attempt to twist reality, there is not much of an opportunity to leap at.

  14. Blowback: thanks for the heads-up on the links, which I think I’ve now fixed. Mistake was due to using unfamiliar Apple computer. Re Blitz and Blitzkrieg, I was referring to the Blitz, under the not completely faulty impression that that term of deep English popular memory was short for the longer German term “Blitzkrieg”. I think the Wikipedia definition of Blitzkrieg is too restrictive and specific.
    Anyway, a lengthy bombing of urban and other civilian infrastructure targets… that’s what I was referring to. Didn’t work against London. Didn’t work against Dresden. Didn’t work against the Dahiya or other other areas of Lebanon that were subjected to it. Didn’t work against Tokyo. Did, however, “work” in the (non-lengthy) atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki…

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