A front page story in Monday's Washington Post declared Hezbollah "" and noted that, "As the declared U.N. cease-fire went into effect Monday morning, many Lebanese -- particularly among the Shiites who make up an estimated 40 percent of the population -- had already assessed Hezbollah's endurance as a military success despite the devastation wrought across Lebanon by Israeli bombing."
And they're right. Israel has accepted a truce that falls far short of its original war aims, failing to establish control over their border with Lebanon, let alone deliver a crushing blow to Hezbollah. As many of us have argued from the moment Israel launched this campaign, there was no way a modern state, constrained by a Western moral code and the pressures of a democratic society, would achieve these incredibly ambitious goals. Failure to achieve one's political objectives in a war, by definition, constitutes defeat.
, a retired Army intelligence officer and author, argues that Israel was done in by a hostile media that simply doesn't understand the nature of war and feckless politicians who lacked the will to use adequate force, especially ground troops, from the onset of the campaign.
These constraints, however, are part and parcel of asymmetric, panoptic war. A good number of us understood that from the get-go; surely, the Israeli security apparatus, with far more experience in such matters, knew, too. But politicians faced with the pressure to "do something" did the wrong thing the wrong way.
Peters does not believe we can win "Eastern wars with Western values."
[...]
I would argue just the opposite is true. ...
[Read the whole thing . H/T .]
Contributed by Bill Faith on August 14, 2006 at 08:22 PM in , , , , |