WarSclerotic

Beware the coming war.

The July 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah transformed both Lebanese and Arab politics. Hezbollah emerged as the heroic champion of resistance to Israeli aggression across the Arab and Islamic world. While Hassan Nasrallah claimed “divine victory”, Hezbollah lost its autonomy to operate in south Lebanon to units of UNIFEL and the Lebanese Army.

Israel lost its psychological aura of invincibility in the Middle East when its troops were unable to defeat Hezbollah in the village battlefields and rock strewn hills of south Lebanon even though the northern Galilee border is calm for the first time since the late 1960’s. Unfortunately, the balance of power between Hezbollah and Israel is unstable and the calculus of deterrence cannot last.

Israel has myriad strategic reasons to launch a preemptive strike against a resurgent Hezbollah. Despite Ehud Olmert’s brutal Dahiya doctrine, Israeli warplanes were unable to terror-bomb the Shia militia into submission, unable to kill or capture its high command. In fact, Israel’s devastating aerial firepower only turned Nasrallah into the first truly popular Arab war hero since President Nasser during the Suez war in 1956. Hezbollah’s defiance of Israel narrowed the Sunni-Shia cleavage in the Arab world created by the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

Israel has tried its best to wage psychological war against Hezbollah and its Iranian patrons. Mossad agents assassinated top Hezbollah commander Imad Mughniyeh, the mastermind of suicide bombings attacks against the US Marine barracks and the American embassy in Beirut. To add insult to injury, Mughniyeh was killed by a car bomb in the Damascus neighbourhood of Kfir Soussa, the citadel of the Syrian secret police. Israeli warplanes bombed an alleged North Korean built nuclear reactor in the western deserts of Syria in September 2007. Israeli F-16’s routinely create sonic booms over Shiite villages in south Lebanon and the southern suburbs of Beirut, the Dahiya stronghold of Hezbollah.

In fact, a Syrian-Saudi rapprochement and the procession of Lebanese leaders to Damascus five years after the Cedar Revolution only increases the probability of a preemptive Israeli attack against Hezbollah. Hezbollah is an integral component of the Sunni, Maronite and Druze coalition that now rules Lebanon, no longer a mere “state within a state” whose infrastructure could be safely bombed by the IDF. Hezbollah has rearmed since the July 2006 war. Its military arsenal includes 40,000 long rage rockets and surface to air/anti-tank missiles. Hezbollah’s M-600 rockets have the range to hit Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, not just Haifa, Tiberias and the north Galilee kibbutz networks. Nasrallah has also been defiant, vowing to destroy Israel in the next war and “change the face of the region”. To the Israeli zealots, Nasrallah and Iran’s President Ahmadinejad are the modern incarnations of Nazis.

The willingness to launch preemptive attacks and use overwhelming force against its enemies has defined the military doctrine of the Haganah and the IDF since the 1948 Palestine war. Israeli deterrence and terror bombing, however, failed against Hezbollah in July 2006. In fact, Hezbollah’s unending attacks in a protracted war of attrition had forced the IDF to humiliatingly withdrew from Lebanon in 2000, a bitter blow to a military machine whose blitzkriegs had once vanquished the Egyptian, Syrian and ordanian armies in the Six Day War. Miscalculation on either side could ignite a new war, as in 2006 when Nasrallah ordered the kidnapping of two IDF soldiers in a cross-border raid.

The Israelis violated the balance of terror when Mossad assassinated Mughniyeh and Netanyahu has publicly threatened to flatten the Dahiya. A war in Lebanon could be the inevitable consequence of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear arsenal or an Iranian Revolutionary Guard attempt to midwife an anti-US Shia coalition in the Middle East. Mired in two wars, unable to broker the peace process, distrusted by its own Lebanese and Arab allies the US is impotent to prevent another war.

The next war will differ from July 2006. The IDF will launch large scale bombing attacks against Shia Beirut, the Bekaa valley and the Shia villages of South Lebanon. A ground offensive on the northern banks of the Litani River to occupy the Nabatiyeh heights, a Hezbollah stronghold. The Sunni, Christian and Druze villages of south Lebanon will not be immune to Israeli attacks nor will the infrastructure of the Lebanese state. Hezbollah’s mobile anti-tank missile batteries will be prime targets, since they can disable even the Merkeva M4, the best armoured battle tank in the Middle East. Israeli tank columns and commonado units could even infiltrate Baalbek and the Hezbollah command nerve centres in Bekaa valley even as UNIFIL units limit Hezbollah’s ability to launch retaliatory rocket attacks against northern Israeli cities. Suicide bombing cells in Tel Aviv, Haifa and Jerusalem could wreck havoc behind the front line. The next war in Lebanon will be sudden, bloody and protracted, just like the horror show of July 2006.

This entry was posted on April 21, 2010 at 12:33 AM and is filed under Iran / Israel War. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.