This is a question that nobody has really answered, or even asked, in the wake of the Israeli defeat. None of the capabilities that Hizballah showed in the war were new. They were the same capabilities that drove Israel out the first time, with the exception that Iran noticed that their TOW's weren't effective against Merkavas in the late 1990's, and developed a tandem warhead that would take out Merkavas and provided some to Hizballah for this one. I am reading a paper published by the U.S. Army War College in 2000 about the factors that led to Israel's defeat in that earlier war. It is very, very familiar.
What the war showed is that a detirmined irregular force can bog a modern mechanized army down into a war of attrition -- a war that a modern mechanized army is ill-suited to fight due to simple cost factors (a Merkava costs over 5 million dollars, an Iranian anti-tank missile costs maybe $5,000). But we already knew that. We knew that in 2000, when Hizballah drove Israel out the last time. We new that in 1990, when the Afghans drove out the Soviets. We knew that in 1973, when the Vietnamese drove out the Americans. We knew what the outcome was going to be this time too -- if Israel couldn't defeat Hizballah in 2000, there was no way they'd do it in 2006 after Hizballah had six years to prepare for the invasion. And we got the expected outcome -- a disaster for Israel.
Why, then, did Israel do it? I think it is because Israel is a failed state. Their internal politics is in chaos. Their economy is in free fall. All the best and brightest have fled to the United States or even back to Europe from whence they came, leaving behind mostly the dregs that the US or Europe do not want. One Israeli immigrant in the U.S. that I talk to says that in essense, Israel is now a concentration camp for the world's unwanted Jews, the Jews that nobody else will accept into their own countries. Like many failed states before them, the ruler tried to re-unite the nation by embarking upon a foreign war and getting a "rally behind your leader" effect. Who to invade, then? Why, the weakest state on their borders, of course -- Lebanon. And so they did. And, as in 2000, got driven out again, for the same reasons they were driven out in 2000 -- because a modern mechanized army cannot invade a mountainous nation and win a war of attrition against an irregular army fighting a defense in depth. The Soviets learned this in Afghanistan, and the Israelis had learned this in 2000 -- and promptly forgot it. But a failed state does not pay much attention to those "fact" thingies.
The scary thing is that this failed state has nuclear weapons. If one of the more batshit-crazy factions in Israel get ahold of those weapons as the Israeli state continues its decline...
- Badtux the Observant Penguin
" Why did Israel invade Lebanon?"
ReplyDeleteThat's easy, I'm surrounded by fucking idiots.
They want to bomb Iran but don't want to have to deal with Hamas and Hizbullah firing (or even advancing) over their borders at the same time. So a little preemption was in order. Or so they hoped.
ReplyDeleteIf Hizbullah had collapsed, Syria and Iran would now have been well and truly bombed (and perhaps Israel would be a smoking hole).
Oh, and there's the water, of course.
If Israel is going to survive it needs water from Lebanon and (cheap) oil from Kurdistan.
It is, indeed, a failed State economically. That the Arab neighbours are going to drive them into the sea is bullshit. All the Arabs have to do is sit back and wait some more and Israel will implode and push its own lifeboats out to sea.
There is already a net migration loss and it's getting worse.
Things are desperate for the Israelis. They need resources to use and sell and more land to steal and give to immigrants to keep the population swelling.
The threat to Israel's existence is economic not military and always has been.
I could have saved a lot of words and simply said, "The answer to your question is that the Israelis are desperate"
ReplyDeleteahh...but they don't have nukes...or so one would think if one watched the recent network coverage of the North Korea thing. They listed the present countries which possess nukes...all three networks omitting Israel. WTF? And...why doesn't Israel...among all the NUKULAR countries allow inspections? Beats Me!
ReplyDeleteNot only economically, griffon. Politically too. When they accepted those million Soviet "Jews" back in the 80's they weren't thinking, they were reacting from racism to fill their country with white bodies to offset the increasing number of brown bodies they saw being born within their borders. But politically it has been a disaster, because these Soviet "Jews" were about as Jewish as you or I. Being able to present forged papers showing a Yid grandmother in order to escape an imploding empire (papers easily obtainable via bribery of corrupt Soviet-era officals) is hardly the same as ever having culturally or otherwise been a Jew. The Russian "Jews" are as interested in being Israelis as they are interested in being dogs, they want to be Americans, they got sent to Israel by the Americans because America didn't want them, so they have to be "Israeli" for now, but they really want to be Americans and live the indolent and wasteful lifestyle that they think Americans live, and if they can't be American in America, they will try to be American in Israel -- indolent, apathetic, willfully ignorant, violent, and with no real democratic values.
ReplyDeleteHmm, sounds a lot like Americans there, eh? But add in the fact that these people emigrated from a socialist country and expect the same from Israel, and are demographically large enough that, under Israel's proportional representation system they must be catered to by any party which wants to obtain a majority in the Knesset, and you begin to see the magnitude of the economic disaster. They had no experience with a capitalistic society, no work ethic, no initiative, and have been nothing but a drag on Israel's economy. None of which can be officially admitted, of course. But which, I suppose, is why Israel needed a war, even one that they knew beforehand that they'd lose just like the last time...
-Badtux the Observant Penguin
oh sorry - i asked myself that quesiton
ReplyDeleteand then looking at a map
i answered it
baby bush ask israel to start moving in from the left and close the gap we needed
to take over all the oil in the region..
seriously -- look at the map
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/xpeditions/atlas/index.html?Parent=mideast&Rootmap=&Mode=d
http://www.infoplease.com/atlas/middleeast.html
ReplyDeletemsybe you can get this url
The problem, AZGoddess, is that Israel *knew* they were going to lose this war, because nothing had changed since 2000 when they lost the last time except that Hizballah got stronger. So why did they do it? Did the Busheviks blackmail them somehow into doing something they knew was foolhardy? Or was it because of the internal political pressures of an imploding failed state causing them to act in irrational and self-destructive manner? Or all of the above?
ReplyDeleteCurious penguins want to know... maybe.
- Badtux the Curious Penguin