About that Hezbollah

Another day, another bomb

Israel Finding a Difficult Foe in Hezbollah

By STEVEN ERLANGER and THOM SHANKER
Published: July 26, 2006

JERUSALEM, July 25 — A week ago, Israeli officials said their military had knocked out up to half of Hezbollah’s rocket launchers and suggested that another week or two would finish the job of incapacitating the Lebanese militia. That talk has largely stopped.

Hezbollah is still launching 100 rockets a day at Israel, nearly as many as it did at the start of the war. Soldiers return from forays into Lebanon saying the network of bunkers and tunnels is more sophisticated than expected. And Iranian-made long-range missiles apparently capable of hitting Tel Aviv remain in the Hezbollah arsenal.

“Two weeks after Israel set out to defeat Hezbollah, its military achievements are pretty limited,” lamented Yoel Marcus, a columnist and supporter of the war, in the daily Haaretz on Tuesday.

Israeli military commanders say they are not surprised. The struggle is so difficult, they say, because Hezbollah is an organized, well-trained and well-equipped force and is fighting hard.

“Hezbollah is organized more like an army than the Palestinian militias, and they are supported with some of the best weapons systems that Iran and Syria have,” said Yaakov Amidror, an Israeli major general, now in the reserves, who headed the research and assessment branch of Israeli military intelligence.

“Never before in history has a terrorist organization had such state-ofthe-art military equipment,” from medium-range rockets and laser-guided antitank missiles to well-designed explosive mines that can cripple an advanced tank, General Amidror said.

At the same time, Hezbollah has no armor or easily visible storehouses or logistics lines, the Israelis say, and its members live among the civilian population of southern Lebanon, storing their weaponry in civilian buildings.

That is why Israel’s top commanders say this operation may take many weeks.

That is a judgment supported in Washington by Henry A. Crumpton, the former director of the C.I.A.’s campaign in Afghanistan in 2001-02 and now the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism.

Hezbollah has “been able to build pretty stalwart defenses, pretty elaborate bunker systems, and they are fighting hard right now,” he said Tuesday, adding, “So it will take a while for the Israelis to get in there and deny that space.”

At the Pentagon, senior military planners cast the conflict as a localized example of America’s broader campaign against global terrorism and said any faltering by Israel could harm the American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hezbollah “has features of a stateless terrorist organization, but it also holds territory — and is quite dug in there — and is able to hold at risk the population of the regional superpower in the way that only national militaries once could,” said a senior military officer with experience in Iraq, speaking on condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to speak publicly on the issue.

The people at DOD are fucking morons. Why the fuck would you be quoted saying that? If this article is accurate, Hezbollah is by far the best trained and led force the IDF has ever faced. The Israelis have already been surprised once. They're now facing a mobile, well-trained and armed army, and success, at least on Israeli terms, is unlikely.

By linking Israel's invasion to our war in Iraq, that gives Sadr the perfect moment to call for a Shia uprising,hell, a general uprising. These people act as if they're on the brink of success and not the chasm of failure. Who's running this country, Ferdinand of Austria? Could you choose more failed strategies? They failed to isolate Iran by invading Iraq. Now it's let's get rid of Iran and Syria through Hezbollah.

They blew to shit the only democracy they managed to create and now has turned Hezbollah into supra-national heroes.

It's as if they lost at blackjack and then went on to play Texas Hold 'Em with the same flawed betting strategy.

Bush is never wrong and Olmert seems to be following in his footsteps.

What happens when no one joins the Hezbollah hunting force? The Germans were game, but that didn't go down so well in Israel.

Israel wil survive, but the US is likely to find a cold reception for any plan to save the bombers of Beirut. In the end, the US is so weak that they can't force an agreement.