Bombing to Lose -- Why Israel failed in Lebanon Contributed by Bill Faith
James Joyner, writing for :
Just hours after the cease-fire with Lebanon took effect Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave a to the Knesset acknowledging "deficiencies" in the way the war was conducted. Buffeted by critics on the left and right, he added that, "We will have to review ourselves in all the battles" and pledged, "We won't sweep things under the carpet." At the same time, though, he proclaimed that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had crippled Hezbollah as a "state within a state as an arm of the axis of evil" and that the "strategic balance" in the region had shifted against Hezbollah. President Bush agreed, , "There's going to be a new power in the south of Lebanon."
Like O.J. Simpson's search for the real killer, however, Olmert's review begins with a false premise. By any meaningful measure, Israel lost this war. Wars, Clausewitz tells us, are . Intermediate military objectives—targets destroyed, enemy personnel killed, and so forth—are merely a means to an end. Reasonable people can debate whether the offensive created more terrorists than it killed, but it is beyond dispute that Israel ended up accepting a truce that falls far short of its original war aims.
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Contributed by Bill Faith on August 16, 2006 at 03:53 PM in , , , , |