Zombie Pirate Ninja Monkey

Hezbollah and Israel

The media are notably bad at assessing how military campaigns are progressing.  Everyone will, I am sure, remember the prognostications of doom from CNN and the BBC (less so from Sky, whose coverage was more balanced) during the liberation of Iraq, when we were told that the offensive was stalled and that Baghdad would be the West's Stalingrad, inflicting tens of thousands of casualties upon the struggling infidels as the Fehdayeen and elite Republican Guard fought house to house.

So when the media says that Israel's military is rocked by the fierce resistance they are meeting from Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, it is worth asking what the strategic aims of Israel are.

Israel's goals are not territorial aggrandisement.  They don't want a bunch of fly-blown villages and rebellious donkey-powered farmers.

Nor do they particularly want a strip of demilitarised land in Southern Lebanon, whether that is patrolled by themselves, te Lebanese or the UN.  They will accept such a measure, but it is a tool, not an aim.  Particularly given the fact that a 20-mile-wide strip would not prevent the use of 70-mile-range rockets.

What they want is the neutralisation of Hezbollah.  Luckily, that is what the USA, the UK, the Saudis, Egyptians, Jordanians, Iraquis, Turks and every other non-terrorist state in the region wants.  Only Syria and Iran - who almost certainly made the mistake of provoking this conflict using their Hezbollah stooges, in order to divert focus from their nuclear program, which a few weeks ago was beginning to come under extreme focus - wish otherwise.  Iran wanted, probably, to offer a ceasefire from Hezbollah in return for concessions over the nuclear issue.

And why is this relevant to whether things are going well for Israel?

Well, the nightmare scenario for Israel would have been Hezbollah melting away ahead of them.  They are an irregular force, and Israel could have expended much money and international opinion shelling empty buildings and levelling villages to no avail had Hezbollah simply retreated ahead of them.  This is what the Vietnamese did after they worked out that irregular non-Western troops cannot fight a Western army, and it worked.  Leave your superior opponent punching at air and connecting with civilians, all the time declaring your love of peace and sympathy for those suffering around you, and you have the makings of a successful terrorist force.  Lenin would have told them that, amd he would have told them, also, that trying to pick stand-up fights was reckless egoism that a revolutionary cannot afford.

So the Israelis must be delighted that they are getting a chance to do what they came to achieve: Hezbollah fighters are apparently standing and fighting, which doubtless means that they are dying in large numbers.  If they become too few, the problem will not be the Israelis - the moderate Arab world can only give Israel so long to do their dirty work for them against the Islamists - but rather the host country, who may despise the Israelis, but will also undoubtely know who brought the storm down upon them.