Little Satan has big teeth
By Yoel Marcus (Ha-aretz)
"Israel is winning this war and chalking up unprecedented achievements. If the fighting were to end today, we could say with certainty that the face of the Middle East has changed as a result of this great Israeli victory." Today, these boastful remarks made by Ehud Olmert at a military college graduation last week sound like they were written on ice. "How will we know we've won?" Ilana Dayan asked Chief of Staff Dan Halutz this week. "We'll feel it," he said. Now that the UN Security Council is gearing up to discuss the cease-fire plan, does anyone feel like we've won? Does anyone feel Olmert has kept his promise to defeat Hezbollah and eliminate the missile threat that looms over Israel? What made the prime minister so sure about how the fighting would turn out? Olmert may be a big expert in soccer, but an authority in military matters he is not. He gets his information from the military. But something happened that happens to generals from time to time: They prepare for the next war based on the rules of the last war.
In the early days of the operation, Israel's generals thought the war could be won by air power alone. But when it finally dawned on them to go in with ground troops, they were surprised by Hezbollah's ability to knock out tanks, carry out ambushes using state-of-the-art night vision technology and above all, bombard the Israeli home front with hundreds of missiles a day.
Hundreds of thousands of Israelis have been turned into refugees and the economic damage is possibly the worst suffered in any of Israel's wars. It's not true we didn't know Hezbollah had amassed so much power and had squirreled away thousands of ballistic missiles. We knew, or predicted, that they had long-range missiles supplied by Syria and Iran. We knew Iranian army instructors were training them. We knew about their underground bunkers. We knew everything.
The only thing we didn't know, or didn't accurately foresee, was that Hezbollah would dare to go whole hog and turn an underground guerrilla operation into a full-fledged war against Israel. Israel was right to launch Operation Change of Direction. The big mistake was in not limiting it to a reprisal raid with a time frame and specific dimensions. If we had, we might have picked up on the changes in Hezbollah and revised our thinking, taking into account the great future showdown Hezbollah was preparing.
With the situation as it is, two approaches have grown up regarding the Security Council cease-fire plan. One is that Israel can forget about any kind of crushing victory this time around. Therefore, to keep losses to a minimum, it is best to agree to a cease-fire without insisting on all our demands. The other approach is that a cease-fire without a decisive Israeli victory and without dismantling Hezbollah as a militia will leave it intact as a pro-Iranian ideological organization that will learn its lessons from the current round of fighting and surprise us one fine day with an even bigger wallop. By now, it is clear this war is not about Lebanon. Hezbollah is not a local terrorist organization but an operative arm of Iran, Syria, Al-Qaida and the instigators of the attack on the Twin Towers. Israel is not just safeguarding Kiryat Shmona, Hadera and maybe Tel Aviv. It has been forced to become a partner in the war on fire-and-brimstone Islamic fundamentalism and what Bush calls the "axis of evil" in this part of the world. So let's leave the critiques and the armchair commentary until after the war and face reality. Reality is that we need to take a deep breath and strike Hezbollah with everything we've got, on land and air, until we neutralize it as a military force on our border. It is important to achieve the upper hand by cease-fire time. We have to show them that "Little Satan" has big teeth.
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