August 8, 2006
Eventually, they would have to start asking this sort of question: why are the local European supremacists not beating the brown people? Isn't this what we pay them for? How come they're not doing their job? According to The Guardian this morning, 57 Israeli soldiers have died. The latest estimate for Hezbollah deaths, meanwhile, is 53. The latest estimate for civilian deaths in Lebanon, meanwhile, is 933. Yes, the Israelis have never found any especial difficulty in slaughtering civilians, but why can't they beat what they confidently assured the world was a 'rag-tag' army? The New York Times tries to provide some answers. The casual reliance on Israeli military intelligence is to be expected. Essentially, the NYT boils it down to Syria and Iran. They gave um weapons n everything. It's not fair. Oh, there's some interesting information in there: Hezbollah's use of tunnels, their targeting of the houses that IDF soldiers hide out in, the use of 'part-timers' who supply logistics and weapons. Of course, it's hard to realistically assess this, since the Israelis speciously use the latter claim to legitimise their targeting of civilian areas. Indeed, the NYT repeatedly suggests that Hezbollah are hiding out in civilian targets, something well-known to its reporters to be false.
The theme is similar elsewhere. The Washington Post reports that its all weapons, weapons, weapons. And Hezbollah, mark you, is in possession of night-vision goggles. I shit you not. In that article, Israeli officials admit that they've only killed a small fraction of Hezbollah's fighters: evidently the claim that they have killed hundreds and hundreds of them is wearing a little thin, and now they are obliged to account for their lack of success by making Hezbollah out to be a Levantine Godzilla. And they're playful too, the Party of God:
"Most of the time we only see them when they want to draw attention to themselves, then they kick us from behind," said Tyler, who was resting with his battalion at a lakefront hotel near Tiberias after a week in southern Lebanon. "It's horrible, yes. You feel -- not weak, but how do you say it, threatened? There is always, always uncertainty."
It's almost like a Marx Brothers skit: "Oh, yoohoo!" "Whassa..?" Blam! "I'll teach you to kick me!" "You don't need to teach me, I already know how!" Boof! Another toe up the arse. What's the difference between Hezbollah and Clint Eastwood? Clint Eastwood will make your day, but Hezbollah will make your hole weak.
The IDF has its own account, reported by Haaretz: "Our missions are unclear, our combat equipment is antiquated". I don't understand this. Israel is spending billions of dollars each year on its military equipment, and its mission in Lebanon is surely perfectly clear: to drive out the civilian population, occupy it and annexe it while siphoning off water from the Litani if they can manage it. The soldiers complain that Hezbollah has been training for six years: well, armies will tend to train. What has the IDF been doing when not tearing up Palestine and making regular incursions into the blue zone?
The answers that might be given as to why the IDF are not winning are: 1) motivational, inasmuch as the IDF's "mission" is unclear to its soldiers, whereas for Hezbollah the goals are obvious and compelling; 2) technological, because Hezbollah has some gear that the IDF did not expect to confront; 3) tactical, because Hezbollah has managed to outwit the IDF all along, hiding in underground tunnels and steering well clear of areas likely to be bombed by Israel (civilian areas); 4) strategic, because the resistance forces are not divided by sectarian animosity and work toward a common goal; 5) training, because the IDF have evidently had it too easy while ravaging civilian areas in Palestine. I'm not sure how much weight to attach to each of these factors, but those are the commonly cited ones.
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