This was
Hezb’allah’s war, planned and prepared for six years,
funded by close to a billion dollars by Iran, aided by
Syria. One of the great benefits to the West to come out
of this war (if they choose not to turn a blind eye to
it) is the certain knowledge that Hezb’allah is Iran’s
terrorist operational arm. It is the terrorist extension
of Iran’s expressed foreign policy.
It is not
a coincidence that Hezb’allah launched its totally
unprovoked attack across Israel’s internationally recognized
border, killing and kidnapping Israeli soldiers and dragging
Lebanon and Israel into a war which neither one wanted at
exactly the moment when the international community
had issued its ultimatum to Iran. That ultimatum was: “Cease
your efforts to develop nuclear weapons or face the sanctions
of the International Community.” Iran’s response was Hezb’allah’s
war.
Even a
cursory examination of Hezb’allah’s statements, captured
documents, the weapons it procured over six years and instantly
deployed, provides an insight into their war aims and the
battle plan to achieve those aims. Hezb’allah announced
in the clearest possible way that it was its intent to
turn Southern Lebanon into a graveyard for the IDF. This
was not mere rhetoric. It was their plan.
Hezb’allah’s
Sigfried Line
Much has
been made, and rightly so, of the arsenal of some 15,000
short, medium and longer range rockets which Hezb’allah
stockpiled for its offensive. What has gone largely unmentioned
is the equally impressive number of anti-tank weapons Hezb’allah
not only acquired but deployed throughout its system of
fortresses, strongholds in literally every village in Southern
Lebanon.
Hezb’allah’s
spin was that it built this Siegfried Line-like series
of fortifications to defend Southern Lebanon from an Israeli
invasion. The truth is both Hezb’allah and
everyone else in the world knew perfectly well that when
Israel left every centimeter of Lebanese soil in 2000,
it did so with the intent never to return. It not
only had no designs on Southern Lebanon, it dreaded doing
so.
In addition Israel
had made a strategic decision to sacrifice whatever advantages
the buffer zone of Southern Lebanon offered for the perceived
advantages of international legitimacy. Now, the
logic went, should Hezb’allah attack us it will not
be an attack against our troops in their country, rather
they will be violating Israel’s internationally recognized
border and the world will have no choice but to recognize
clearly who was the aggressor and who was the victim.
To a degree,
that logic prevailed. Especially in the beginning of the
conflict, though not (of course) in the U.N. where Israel
had so painstakingly sought to achieve the legitimacy the
Secretary General so quickly ignored.
In preparing
its offensive, both Hezb’allah and Iran knew that
Hezb’allah’s terrorist army could never mount a successful
ground invasion against Israel. The advantages they
possessed for their offensive lay in their rockets and
missiles which could hit Israel’s civilian population and
inflict mass casualties, and control of its own terrain
and preparation of its own battle field. The idea
was not to fight the IDF in Israel’s territory, but to
set a trap for the IDF in Hezb’allah’s carefully
prepared and massively fortified Siegfried Line of fortresses,
strongholds and offensive positions connected by a series
of truly impressive tunnel networks and bunkers meant to
withstand and offset Israel’s air advantage.
There was
one other indispensable element to their war plan; the
centering of their offensive capability against Israel’s
civilian population within Lebanon’s civilian population. Much
has been made in the Western press of Hezb’allah’s
benign social services function in Lebanon, of the hospitals
and schools it has built.
The
Press as Hezb’allah’s Tool
Almost
no notice, however, has been paid to the large numbers
of these hospitals and schools which were built over its
military bunkers and rocket launching sites. This
was perhaps both the most cynical and barbaric disregard
for innocent civilian lives of all of Hezb’allah’s
and Iran’s strategic choices. It was also the most
successful.
The decision
was predicated not on its knowledge of its enemy (Israel)
but its true genius lay in its knowledge of the press. The
calculus was simple: launch a rocket from within a civilian
population; if you kill Jews that’s a victory. If the Jews
hit back and in so doing kill Lebanese civilians, that’s
a victory. If they don’t hit back because they’re afraid
to hit civilians, that’s a victory. Now repeat the process
until you kill so many Jews they have to hit back and in
so doing kill more Lebanese civilians. That’s the
ultimate victory, because they know that in striking just
those chords exactly what music the press will play.
The awful
truth, which the Western Press was manipulated to ignore
or downplay, was that Iran, through its terrorist operational
arm Hezb’allah, had invaded Lebanon from within. Hezb’allah
did not protect Lebanon, they occupied it and they used
those Hezb’allah-occupied territories to launch Iran’s
offensive in response to the West’s ultimatum to cease
development of nuclear weapons.
Hezb’allah’s
Military Failure
From a
military prospective there can be absolutely no doubt as
to the results of Hezb’allah and Iran’s offensive
against Israel. It was a defeat. Every part
of their war plan except the manipulation of the media
failed.
Hezb’allah
expected and planned for a massive charge of Israeli armor
into Southern Lebanon. The amounts and type of anti-tank
weapons they acquired and had operationally deployed in
their forward positions as well as their secondary and
tertiary bands of fortresses and strongholds through Southern
Lebanon attest to this fact.
They intended
to do in mountainous terrain what Egypt had so effectively
done in the Sinai desert in the Yom Kippur war. In
that war, Sinai indeed became a graveyard for Israeli armor. Hundereds
of tanks were destroyed. Whole brigades were decimated
in single battles by the Egyptians’ highly effective anti-tank
missile ambushes. In that war almost three thousand
Israeli soldiers were killed. That was Hezb’allah’s
plan. It was a good one. And it failed.
Far from
the prevailing impression in the media, the IDF was not “badly
bloodied” nor “fought to a stand still,” much less “handed
a defeat.” Just prior to the cease fire, Israel suffered
twenty nine tanks hit. Of those, twenty five were back
in service within twenty four hours. Israel suffered
one hundred and seventeen soldiers killed in four weeks
of combat. As painful as those individual losses
were to their families and to the Israeli collective psyche
which views all its soldiers as their biological sons and
daughters, those numbers in fact represent the fewest casualties
suffered by Israel in any of its major conflicts. In
1948, Israel suffered six thousand killed. In 1967,
in what was regarded as its most decisive victory, Israel
lost almost seven hundred killed in six days. In
1973, Israel lost two thousand seven hundred killed and
in the first week of the first war in Lebanon, Israel suffered
one hundred seventy six soldiers killed.
Misapprehension
of Casualties
Why then
the impression of massive Israeli casualties in clear contrast
to the actual numbers of those killed? It is because
of the uniquely inverse relationship between the Israeli
public and its army. The Israeli army is a citizen’s
army. It is made up of everyone’s child, everyone’s
brother or sister, aunt or uncle.
On its
television networks not only the names but the photographs
of the fallen and the times and places of each funeral
were announced repeatedly. Scores of reports dealing
with individual soldiers and the shattered families they
left behind were aired repeatedly. The nation as
a whole mourned the loss of its children quite literally
as if they were the sons and daughters of each and every
family.
Were I,
as an Israeli officer in the Military Spokesperson’s Unit,
to have made a statement to the Israeli press about the
actual lightness of Israel’s casualties, I would at the
least have been relieved of duties, if not also of rank. Indeed,
members of my unit volunteered to a man to go into Lebanon
under fire to help retrieve the bodies of four fallen soldiers
and make sure that reporters (who by that time were reported
to be simply driving into Lebanon) could not broadcast
pictures before the families were notified. We provided
an additional covering force as well against Hezb’allah
while medics and a Rabbi safeguarded the sanctity of the
remains of four kids, younger than my twenty two year old
son. We did so not only not under orders, but in
violation of orders, because we were all of us fathers
as well as soldiers, and these were not only our comrades
in arms, but our sons. We were there to bring them home.
That is
the emotion. But the numbers are different. They
are the lightest casualties suffered by the IDF in all
of its wars. Military historians will spend years
deciphering why exactly this was so. Was Israel’s
government and its general staff, by its refusal to commit
large numbers of forces for the first three weeks of combat,
in fact making a highly intelligent strategic choice? Possibly.
Three
Conclusions
Possibly
it was dumb luck or devine intervention. Either way
it meant three things:
1. Hezb’allah’s
ambush never happened because Israel didn’t take the bait. Instead
it used air power and then a series of probing raids, primarily
by infantry to methodically, slowly identify and root out
the enemy positions.
2. It meant
that those small numbers of troops deployed into Lebanon
in the first weeks of fighting had to do more with less
than perhaps any other Israeli fighters in any other war. Certainly
in other wars there were many individual battles in which
so much was expected of and accomplished by so few. But
no war comes to mind in which so few soldiers were deployed
across an entire front. They performed brilliantly
and with uncommon courage in the face of withering fire
from heavily fortified and prepared positions.
These were
draft-age soldiers: eighteen and nineteen year olds, commanded
on the platoon and company levels by twenty something’s,
none of whom had ever faced anything remotely like the
combat against Hezb’allah’s terrorist army. In
spite of what many see as the logistical and command failures
of their superiors, they performed brilliantly and achieved
their objectives.
3. When
the vast bulk of Israel’s force was finally deployed, made
up primarily of its reservists, these soldiers achieved
in forty eight hours what many believe they should have
been given weeks to accomplish. Despite logistical
failures, some times fighting without food or water, Israel’s
soldiers, regular army and reserves alike, handed Hezb’allah
a decisive military defeat. All of Hezb’allah’s
Siegfried Line-like system of fortresses and strongholds,
their network of command and control bunkers along Israel’s
Northern border were destroyed, abandoned or under the
control of the IDF by the end of the hostilities. Hezb’allah’s
mini terrorist state within a state south of the Litani
had been dismantled.
Israel’s
War Aims Achieved
Its a terrorist
capital within a capital in Beirut, its command and control
center and infrastructure were in ruins. In the end
it sought and accepted a cease fire resolution in the United
Nations which provided the framework for Israel to achieve
all of its stated war aims.
This last
point is of no minor consequence both in terms of what
Israel achieved and failed to achieve in the counter offensive
it waged against Hezb’allah. I can speak to
this subject with some degree of expertise since I was
one of the people tasked with putting into a simple declarative
sentence what the IDF’s mission was as handed down to it
by Israel’s democratically elected political leaders. The
sentence defining the IDF’s mission read as follows.
“To bring
about the conditions on the ground which will enable
the International Community and the government of Lebanon
to live up to their obligations under UN resolution 1559,
to end the rocket attacks against Israel’s civilian population
in the North and to bring about the release of Israel’s
kidnapped soldiers, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regeve.”
That was
the IDF’s stated mission and that is exactly what it did.
Whether
as a result of the decisions of its political leadership
and general staff, or in spite of them, Israel’s soldiers,
sailors and airmen brought about the conditions on the
ground which enabled a U.N. Resolution that, on the face
of it, provided for the implementation of the majority
of UN Resolution 1559, called for the extension of Lebanon’s
sovereignty and the deployment of its army along Israel’s
border for the first time in thirty years, and called for
a fifteen thousand troop strong U.N. force to back up the
Lebanese army and help it disarm Hezb’allah, as well
as enforce an arms embargo on its terrorist army.
France,
in recognition of its special relationship with Lebanon
would boldly announce that it would head up such a force
with thousands of its troops. Instead it landed fifty
soldiers in rubber dinghies; until shamed by Italy into
upping its ante. What of the International Community and
the Government of Lebanon, in whom Israel’s political leadership
placed so much faith to turn their words into actions? To
use the applicable Yiddish phrase: gornischt (nothing).
Just as
the Spanish Civil War was a preview of what European Fascism
had in store for the world, so do I believe, that Iran’s
offensive against Israel carried out by its Terrorist Army
operational arm, was a preview of what Islamofacsism has
in store not only for the West but for the moderate regimes
of the Middle East, which in case anyone forgot to notice,
controls the oil on which the West survives.
What they
failed to gain militarily they accomplished through the
manipulation of the Western Media, which were their willing
dupes and through the ineptitude and weakness, if not down
right appeasement of the political leadership of the International
community. This has all but guaranteed that this war will
be but round one.
The
Larger Stakes
The soldiers
of the IDF bought their country’s and the International
Community’s political leadership a chance to keep the Iranian/Hezb’allah
cancer in remission. If that opportunity is squandered,
no future Israeli political leadership will dare to limit
its war aims again to simply creating conditions on the
ground that will enable the International Community not
just to protect Israel’s legitimate rights and interests
but their own. When one is faced with an apocalyptic
fascist enemy which not only employs a terrorist foreign
legion to do its bidding, but seeks to acquire nuclear
weapons which it clearly announces will be part of its
strategy to wipe you and your country, your family and
all your loved ones off the face of the earth, there is no proportional
response.
If this
indeed was the equivalent of the Spanish Civil War, then
the world must know that what followed was one last chance
before the abyss. For the Jewish people and the State of
Israel, that abyss contains the very Holocaust which Ahmadinijad
both denies and vows to complete. We will not accommodate
the International Community by acquiescing to our own destruction.
This situation,
however, is not just Israel’s problem. We are but the Little
Satan. America and the West to the Islamofascists
are the great Satan. It would be a simple matter
indeed for Iran, in flexing its muscles against America,
to dispatch Hezb’allah terrorists to Northern Mexico.
There, equipped with little more than the very same rockets
used to target Haifa, Hezb’allah could target Los
Angeles. Now picture that scenario with even a modest nuclear
payload. It would no longer be a question of how we stop
terrorists from getting into the United States. With the
same rocketry they used against Israeli citizens, Iran’s
terrorist army would only need to get into Northern Mexico
in order to hit America’s second largest city with a nuclear
device. What then would America do? Invade Mexico?
If through
appeasement the West fails to take action to prevent the
conflagration which looms on the horizon, then let there
be no doubt that its flames will engulf us all. For its
part, this time Israel must be ready, and it must entrust
its fate into no one’s hands but its own. CRO
Dan
Gordon is a scriptwriter whose credits include major
motion pictures such as Passenger
57, The
Hurricane, Wyatt
Earp, Murder
in the First, and The
Assignment. He served as a captain in the reserves
in the Israel Defense Forces during the recent campaign in
Lebanon.
