What they learned

They always look the same, infantry,
beat to shit and dirty.

Someone in the Hezbollah military staff is a good student of history. He learned of the Pacific War and devised a way to make casuality sensitive Israel hesitant. So they built bunkers and developed stay behind teams and loaded up on the best weapons they could get and trained to use them.

So when the IDF came north, and there was going to be a day when they did, they had a surprise for them. Well, the kind of surprise the US got when they tried to take Shuri Castle. 34 dead in two days? Over a hundred wounded?

This is a disaster. It is clear that Israel has no conventional military option against Hezbollah, much less have a chance to go to the Litani River and stay there. Because they have no Christian allies left. Their insane bombing campaign did that. Douhet's theories DON'T FUCKING WORK. People don't run from bombs, they dig in and they fight. The head of the IDF is an Air Force general.

Of course the debate in Israel is that the IDF isn't competent. Well, was the 5th Marines incompetent on Okinawa? No. They ran into a tough enemy. And that is slowly going to dawn on Israel that they cannot defeat Hezbollah and no one will fight their war for them.

It's time to get Hezbollah to join the political world, because that is the only solution which can
save Israel. The thoughtlessness of Olmert and the IDF high command, their wasteful brutality and utter failure, is criminal on so many levels. When the parents of those young IDF troopers hear what their sons faced, and how many of them died, competence will cease to be the issue.

The problem isn't the IDF's competence, although the cult of the IDF is strong in the West, but that Hezbollah has an Arab army led by merit and not politics, where tactical innovation is encouraged and they are not suicidally risky. Bush assumed that the IDF would put a hurting on Hezbollah like they did Hamas. Hezbollah is not Hamas.