Billmon:
It’s a very cold day in hell when I agree with Rush Limbaugh about anything.
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August 17, 2006
WB: Sticks and Stones
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I still come back to chess with the ME birth pangs bullshit.
I cannot recall the opening gambit names for Pawn moves, but the Dubya/Halutz move has got to be sending your Queen where a Bishop should have been.
Posted by: Cloned Poster | Aug 17 2006 18:06 utc | 1
Stratfor weighs in (via Sam Smith – so since I unfortunately don’t subscribe & there’s no link, I’ll post his entire excerpt):
ISRAEL’S BIG LOSS
[Stratfor is a pro-Israeli intelligence service]
STRATFOR – An extraordinary thing happened in the Middle East this month. An Israeli army faced an Arab army and did not defeat it — did not render it incapable of continued resistance. That was the outcome in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982. But it did not happen in 2006. Should this outcome stand, it will represent a geopolitical earthquake in the region — one that fundamentally shifts expectations and behaviors on all sides.
It is not that Hezbollah defeated the Israel Defense Forces. It did not. By most measures, it got the worst of the battle. Nevertheless, it has been left standing at the end of the battle. Its forces in the Bekaa Valley and in the Beirut area have been battered, though how severely is not yet clear. Its forces south of the Litani River were badly hurt by the Israeli attack. Nevertheless, the correlation of forces was such that the Israelis should have dealt Hezbollah, at least in southern Lebanon, a devastating blow, such that resistance would have crumbled. IDF did not strike such a blow — so as the cease-fire took effect, Hezbollah continued to resist, continued to inflict casualties on Israeli troops and continued to fire rockets at Israel. Hezbollah has not been rendered incapable of continued resistance, and that is unprecedented.
In the regional equation, there has been an immutable belief: that, at the end of the day, IDF was capable of imposing a unilateral military solution on any Arab force. Israel might have failed to achieve its political goals in its various wars, but it never failed to impose its will on an enemy force. As a result, all neighboring nations and entities understood there were boundaries that could be crossed only if a country was willing to accept a crushing Israeli response. . .
What is clear is that, if the current outcome stands, it will mean there has been a tremendous earthquake in the Middle East. It is cheap and easy to talk about historic events. But when a reality that has dominated a region for 58 years is shattered, it is historic. Perhaps this paves the way to new wars. Perhaps Olmert’s restraint opens the door for some sort of stable peace. But from where we sit, he was sufficiently aggressive to increase hostility toward Israel without being sufficiently decisive to achieve a desired military outcome.
Hezbollah and Iran hoped for this outcome, though they did not really expect it. They got it. The question on the table now is what they will do with it.
Posted by: jj | Aug 17 2006 18:37 utc | 2
It seems the French have no intention of replacing the IDF in Lebanon. President Jacques Chirac announced that he would commit only 200 (that’s two hundred) extra troops to UNIFIL + according to this story in The Guardian.
The French president, Jacques Chirac, said tonight that France will commit an additional 200 troops to a strengthened UN peacekeeping force in Lebanon.
There had been expectations that France would make a larger commitment and the announcement disappointed some UN officials.
Posted by: ClaudeB | Aug 17 2006 18:38 utc | 3
@ClaudeB – I don´t like Girac, but he has a point – what use would there be for more soldiers? The UN resolution is under chapter 6 which means no active enforcement. Then there also is nothing to enforce in the resolution unless the Lebanon administration agrees.
The Lebanon administration will never agree to anything being enforced. Why should they?
HIzbullah was the only force to try to protect Lebanon from another occupation. Why take that away. Now if my German compatriots or the French finally could commit some air defense units to protect Lebanon’s sovereingity, I am sure they would be welcome.
Paul Morphy was known for his dazzling Queen Gambit’s, generally leading to mate within several moves.
Two of the more striking examples are:
Paul Morphy vs Duke Karl / Count Isouard
Louis Paulsen vs Paul Morphy
Morphy was a childhood prodigy, an eccentric chess genius, who rose from nowhere to be the best player in the world while still a teenager — and then quit chess for good as being beneath him while still in his young twenties. He is generally acknowledged as the first modern player, and often considered the best player of all time.
He is notable to us here at MOA for his adamant anti-war stance during the Civil War. A Southerner from New Orleans, he sat the war out in Paris. Perhaps his greatest sacrifice off the chessboard, his moral stance proved highly unpopular in the South, and prevented him from pursuing a subsequent career in law.
Incidentally, another of his more famous matches is Morphy vs Cheney, where he won once and lost once. Of course, THAT Cheney knew more about strategy than this Cheney knows about pacemakers.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 17 2006 19:01 utc | 5
When it stinks so bad that even Rush can’t stand it, you know we’ve turned a new corner.
Don’t be surprised, in the next couple of weeks, to see Hezbollah take another jab at Israel. They may sense that their opponent is on the ropes. More important, they may sense that our ability/will to support Israel may be waning. If the Israel/Hezbollah dustup was indeed the test run for our Steel Cage Death Match with Iran, then the outcome surely has military leaders throughout the Pentagon scrambling to put the brakes on. Let’s hope they succeed.
morphy – a hero – yesssss – as my chess playing buddies would say –
Posted by: Noirette | Aug 17 2006 19:35 utc | 7
I need to start my own consulting firm:
Stratfor 8/17: Should this outcome stand, it will represent a geopolitical earthquake in the region — one that fundamentally shifts expectations and behaviors on all sides.
Whiskey Bar 7/24: If Hizbollah survives with any military capability at all, it wins, and wins very big. As Shrub and company once said about Iraq (before it became too funny even for their propaganda purposes) there is no substitute for victory.
Posted by: billmon | Aug 17 2006 20:35 utc | 8
Omigod! Billmon and I both refer to that great adversary as “Old Scratch” …?
…kewl.
Posted by: Darryl Pearce | Aug 17 2006 20:39 utc | 9
It also looks like Stratfor is trying to cover for the Israelis by grossly overestimating the damage done to Hizbullah. As far as I can see, Hizbullah’s units in the Bekkaa Valley came through the war virtually unscathed (except for that grocer named Nasrallah the Israelis grabbed in their botched commando raid) and except for creaming a lot of apartment buildings, I don’t see that that much MILITARY damage was done to Hizbullah in Beirut, either.
Israel’s body counts are almost certainly wildly inflated, and even if they aren’t, it looks like Hizbullah was able to hold the kill ratio to about 5:1, which is an outstanding performance by a guerrilla force in a stand up infantry fight.
Lind has better bead on it:
Israel appears to have lost at every level—strategic, operational and tactical.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men . . .
Posted by: billmon | Aug 17 2006 20:44 utc | 10
I tend to agree with billmon above.
Just do not see where Stratfor is getting this from.
The conflict never really got much further past a stage where the IDF became extremely cautious and tentative in response to Hezbollahs highly effective arms & tactics.
And looking back, its not clear whether some of the larger-scale IDF maneuvers announced in the press actually happened.
Posted by: jony_b_cool | Aug 17 2006 21:13 utc | 11
At this point, all eyes, and minds, are on planning for round two. Israel cannot let a humiliation like this stand. So they, and the US, must jump into the meatgrinder again.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 18 2006 0:47 utc | 12
From Lefti:
Quote of the Day
Orville Schell, in an article entitled “Too Late for Empire” in The Nation, nails the essence of thought control under capitalism:
The problem has not been censorship but something very nearly censorship’s opposite: the deafening noise of the official megaphone and its echoes–not the suppression of truth, still spoken and heard in a narrow circle, but a profusion of lies and half lies; not too little speech but too much. If you whisper something to your friend in the front row of a rock concert, you have not been censored, but neither will you be heard.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 18 2006 1:05 utc | 13
Actually, it would be round three. Round 2 ended in 2000.
One unshake-able fact is that defeating Hezbollah in any kind of convincing way will be at very great cost to IDF manpower.
The only end-game that could possibly justify the cost in blood would be the indefinite occupation/annexation of South Lebanon. But this represents a totally different animal from “defeating” Hezbollah.
Setting pride aside, a long drawn out quagmire has to be very close to the top of any considered list of potential outcomes.
On the other hand, theres always the Roman scorched-earth school of war.
Posted by: jony_b_cool | Aug 18 2006 1:14 utc | 14
I think Billmon is being too generous to the IDF in his post#10 with a 5:1 kill ratio. Clearly we do not know how many Hezbollah fighters were killed but reading the many first hand IDF soldier accounts of the intensity of the battle and their inability to “spot” Hezbollah fighters I would not be surprised that the ratio may even have been 1:1.
Hezbollah fighters have knocked out many more Merkava tanks and helicopters than the initial IDF press releases stated. If one pieces together reports from different news agencies on battles for territory like Bint Jbail or Khiam it seems the IDF took some major hits.
But a first person blog post by an IDF soldier on a long march across the border to “silence” rocket launchers is very instructive. 4 hrs of sleep in 4 days. Running out of water. Searching for airdrop water supply while receiving incoming fire. Blanket artillery fire from IDF batteries and occasional hits. Watching an IDF helicopter be taken down. No sight of Hezbollah fighters. Bottom line – misson not accomplished while major causalties were taken. if this battle were extrapolated to the entire front then the IDF took more casualties than Hezbollah fighters.
Posted by: ab initio | Aug 18 2006 1:16 utc | 15
And they were less than five miles from home. Wahhhhhh!
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 18 2006 1:33 utc | 16
Interesting question is what role would Merkava tanks and attack Helicopters play in any future conflict. Common sense suggests they are close to redundant for duty in the terrain & villages of South Lebanon.
The IDF has a lot of revamping to do both operationally and hardware-wise. They are looking at a long-term project.
Hence, they may focus on shorter-term goals like getting rid of Hezbollah top leadership.
Posted by: jony_b_cool | Aug 18 2006 1:37 utc | 17
Long knives all over the place now. France refusing to send more than a token force 2-400 troops to force they were supposed to lead til they get a clear mandate apparently. Germany won’t send any. UN has so far only secured committments for 3,500 troops. Bolton doing his best to undermine things, per usual, according to TWN.
Haartz front page reads more like a frat house brawl.
And Iran, consolidating power/destabilizing things by handing out unlimited cash to Hezb directly, rather than funneling it through the Lebanese government, is gloating as internal divisions come into sharper relief. Curious that all the pre-war talk was of Israel sparking a Lebanese Civil War, as it seems that Iran is doing that for them…
Meanwhile, the deployment of the multinational force is being delayed, and France is in no rush to send many soldiers. UN Security Council Resolution 1701, passed a week ago, is already on the path to becoming meaningless. While the Americans are declaring that the new forces in southern Lebanon will not allow Hezbollah to resume their positions along the border, Nasrallah is proving them wrong. His forces are patroling without hindrance in the villages of southern Lebanon (some of them not having left during the fighting); they are recording the Israel Defense Forces activities, and are giving interviews, while armed, to Arab television stations.
These developments are worrisome to the other religious groups in Lebanon that fear an Iranian-Syrian takeover in the South. Walid Jumblatt, Sa’ad al-Din Hariri and others sharply criticized Syrian President Bashar Assad for his efforts to intervene in domestic Lebanese politics. But as far as they are concerned, the real threat stems from Hezbollah’s plans to reconstruct southern Lebanon, using billions of Iranian dollars that are meant to further establish the organization in the country by pushing aside the government organs.
Posted by: jj | Aug 18 2006 3:55 utc | 18
Bottom line is the IDF csnnot use Helicopters (or low flying craft) and Armor in southern Lebanon. There was this thing I read (someplace) a while ago, that said the arabs dont consider it a military defeat, when they are out- technologied on the battlefield — that they figure it was the machines that beat them rather than the enemy itself. So what Hizbollah has managed to do, in any case is to remove in large part the IDF technological advantage, forcing them into an infantry confrontation, on their own home turf. Opinions, early on that Hizbollah was actually trying to draw the IDF into the south seem confirmed insomuch as how the ground incursion played out. Psychologically, it would also seem to confirm, from the arab point of view, that minus the technological advantage they could indeed compete — if not prevail on a “level” battlfield. For the Israeli’s this amounts to a far greater damage in the insult, following the injury. For who could ignore the profoundly chickenshit mentality that broadcasts such an unmistakable air of superiority — when compaired with, the bombs and rockets raining down anonymous death from above on the (mostly) hapless civilians below, and, what happens when they meet their neighbor face to face without their expensive new toys. Furthermore, givin the amplified and hyperventalated threat to Israel, as presented by them to the world you might assume such a threat might be gladly met face to face, givin the seriousness of the threat — and without a doubt, the intellegence to know this is what it would really take to do the job. But no, in a classic case of neo-con courage, they went all Tora Bora on it — hireing out the dirty work (in this case trying to foment civil war to their own advantage). And givin the option(s), they like the US must suffer the consequences of their true colors being revealed — as being nothing more than glorified and gutless USERS — which is perhaps worse than failing and losing one to one, if thats what it takes. Even and for sure, that the project is dillusional to begin with.
Posted by: anna missed | Aug 18 2006 5:06 utc | 19
“I’ve been in the army and reserves for 26 years and what happened this time was not merely a fiasco, it was a complete debacle. We felt like tin soldiers in a game of Olmert and Peretz’s assistants and spin masters,” said Avi, a soldier in the brigade.
“They sent us into a village they knew 15 Hezbollah fighters were holed up in at mid-day, we were like sitting ducks, it was total insanity. Two of our comrades were killed because of that. We are being used as though we were in the Chinese army, where it doesn’t matter how many are killed,” he said.
Looks like the kill ratio in this battle was reversed. I think as the true picture of this debacle for the IDF comes to light it may prove to be a major military defeat for Israel.
Posted by: ab initio | Aug 18 2006 5:58 utc | 20
Yes, regarding weaponry and battle conditions my early suspicions were all borne out. The best discusions I’ve found are at Pat Lang’s blog, several days after I posted on this.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 18 2006 6:07 utc | 21
Syria to go for Golan? (Daily Telegraph, 18 August):
The public appetite for action is just one of the uncomfortable consequences regional rulers are facing, as Arabs compare their leaders’ performances over Israel with the Lebanese “resistance”.
Or is this just more Torygraph racheting up of the “reasons” for the ME to really be pummeled next time?
Posted by: Dismal Science | Aug 18 2006 11:07 utc | 22
When you read Israel’s “body counts” and taken-out rocket launcher counts, keep in mind that they probably count much of those fleeing refugees’ vehicles, hit ambulances and agricultural workers’ trucks as Hizbullah ‘s cars, and don’t differentiate between killed local civilians, village militia and core Hizbullah fighters (this above the usual boasting).
As for the other side, though Anthoni Cordesman trusts the Israelis on Hizbollah not releasing data, Hizbullah claimed some 80 dead, while the Lebanese government usually put the group’s losses 30-50% higher during the war (I haven’t seen a report on their final figure). Reality might be a bit above the latter — say 150. Indeed close to 1:1.
I posted Cordesman’s take and Bill Lind’s on the other thread.
Both very valuable.
The arabs should be careful. Israel was beaten in war were it had to attack under various (self induced) restrictions. If Syria or any other country starts a stink now, they will be beaten like hell.
If the US/IS/EU attack Syria or Iran the best case scenario they could hope for is another Iraq on their doorstep. The worst case is Saudi, Egypt, Jordan, and perhaps Afghanistan and Pakistan falling and a World War starting. In such a case, it is doubtful that China and Russia would show much sympathy for such actions in their backyard.
The chaos is beginning to have more side effects than benefits.
Should Gazans choose they could unleash the same type of oil spill on Israel’s coast that the Israelis unleashed upon the Lebanese. There are more lessons being learned than Cordesman’s sanitized version.
I’ve been reading Cordesman’s prescriptions since the beginning of the Iraq war, and quite simply, either they are not listened to, or he is a useful civilized cover for the depredations of empire. In any event, his goals are the same as the chickenhawks now in office. We are merely arguing tactics, which we all know can change at whim.
Israel has reached the end of the legitimacy of asserting its right to exist by military domination. The same with the US. World opinion on this is quite clear. It might take several decades for this to play out, and become clear to all in the West, but the point has been reached and it is irrevokable. The EU will have to stop playing in the middle of the road or it will be unceremoniously run over. (Beep, beep!)
The highwater mark has been past. Now it is merely a question of how smoothly the air is let out of the empire. And what the new order will look like.
Posted by: Malooga | Aug 18 2006 17:41 utc | 25
And yet more whining about Hezbollah using Russian antitank missiles on the IDF. Boo fucking hoo.
If I were the Russians I’d say yea, so what?
Israel gets massively armed to the teeth by the US but noone’s allowed to assist the other side with even a tiny fraction of that?
Posted by: ran | Aug 18 2006 18:45 utc | 26