Israel has three great assets:
- Its air force;
- Its spies;
- America.
What it doesn’t have is a good army:
After nearly five weeks of intense fighting, Israeli soldiers have managed to enter several border villages, advancing a maximum of just under two kilometres in some areas. However, they have been unable to establish overnight positions. These forces have resorted to widespread destruction, levelling homes and mosques along the border to create “scorched earth” zones. This tactic, however, exposes Israeli tanks, making them vulnerable and preventing adequate concealment as they cautiously advance through Lebanese villages. Consequently, Israeli casualties have surged
Or, to put it another way, Netanyahu’s mouth has written checks that Israel’s ground forces can’t cash. So Israel is back to wanton destruction, mostly by air.
I’ve said for years that Hezbollah’s army is one of the best in the world, man for man, and so far it seems that judgment is vindicated.
Israeli forces are currently only engaging Hezbollah’s “spoiling attacks” within the “engagement area”. They are yet to penetrate the “main battle area,” where Hezbollah’s primary defences and “striking forces” are positioned. Hezbollah’s strategy integrates conventional and guerrilla warfare tactics, employing adaptable defences above and below ground. It focuses on attrition strategy, using mobile defence tactics to harass and weaken enemy forces before drawing them into decisive engagements. These tactics include tactical retreats that expose enemy flanks, allowing Hezbollah to strike at Israel’s advancing spearhead, systematically disrupting momentum and inflicting heavy losses.
Meanwhile Israel’s attack on Iran does not appear to have done great damage and Hamas ordered Northern Israeli villages being used as invastion staging points to evacuate, and has started hitting them with missiles and drones, leading to another couple hundred thousand Israeli internal refugees.
(This blog is for understanding the present, making educated guesses at the future, and telling truths, usually unpleasant ones. There aren’t a lot of places like this left on the Web. Every year I fundraise to keep it going. If you’d like to help, and can afford to, please Subscribe or Donate.)
But the weak suffer what they must, and Northern Gaza has spent October under complete embargo of food and water. The Israeli genocide of Palestinians continues, and the clear intention is to occupy North Gaza permanently once its residents are displaced or dead.
Indeed the Israeli way of war is now clearly “genocide uber alles” with Israel’s air attacks in Lebanon prioritizing civilian buildings, with multiple attacks on hospitals, at least one attack on an orphanage and repeated warnings that they will strike first responders who try to save lives.
Israel is attempting to break the will of civilian populations through terror. Israel’s war doctrine is mass terror, ethnic cleansing and genocide, with attacks meant to maximize civilian casualties both during and after the attack. The fewer hospitals, doctors and so on, the more people who will die or be permanently maimed.
This is a war of the cowardly against civilians, which makes sense: Israel’s occupation has left its military specialized in brutalizing civilians. It had great difficulty against Hamas, a rag tag militia with missiles and other weapons built in basements. Against Hezbollah’s ground forces: seasoned, well equipped and dug in, it has been unimpressive.
The problem for Israel is simple enough: terror from the air doesn’t win wars and doesn’t break moral. Instead it makes people more determined to resist, not less.
If Israel, after its assassinations and attacks on warehouses had declared victory, it would still look strong. But engaging with Hezbollah on the ground has proven a serious mistake.
Israel is a great example of “those who are abused become abusers.” Israel might as well be Nazi Germany when it comes to both ideology (national ethnic supremacy) and actions: genocide of a despised ethnic/religious group.
It is a sad thing to see, both for their victims and for themselves. They have become monsters, and with polls indicating over 90% support for the way the war is fought, it’s clear that this has infected the mass of the Israeli citizenry.
When Israel is finally defeated, likely in a future war, it will need to completely de-Zionised, in a way Germany was never properly de-Nazified.
This entire war is sad and stupid and based on the fundamental injustice of taking other people’s land and homes. It is pursued thru terror, mass murder, genocide and ethnic cleansing and war crimes are so routine they happen every day as a matter of policy.
Every nation who supports Israel in this is stained by Israel’s crimes. We all know genocide is happening, and our countries have supported it, made it possible and opposed all efforts to end it.
To riff on Jefferson, we had best hope that there is no just God.
What strikes me is our loss of leadership competency, from the extremely competent people who managed us through the depression and through WWII to the clowns of today.
I’ve been involved in Youtube exchanges where some idiot creates a video claiming how we “saved” the USSR in WWII via Lend-Lease. First, that is that factually untrue. The USSR saved itself; Lend-Lease was such a trickle in 1941-1942 that it had essentially NO effect on the Battle of Moscow in December 1941, and very little impact on the Battle of Stalingrad in the fall-winter of 1942. Stalingrad at the very least marks the point where “the USSR will survive and not lose” so Lend-Lease didn’t “save” the USSR. Lend-Lease did help the USSR, but the bulk of it (60 %) came in the last 10 months of WWII well after the USSR had turned the tide and driving back the Wehrmacht out of the USSR. The most important part of Lend-Lease help wasn’t the weapons we sent, nor the locomotives, nor the steel, nor the petrol, nor even the trucks (the most common ‘fact’ brought up). It was the food we sent–in 1942 42 % of the USSR’s arable land was occupied, and the USSR instituted a rationing program where soldiers, workers in essential industries, and children got first priority on food. If you weren’t one of those, you didn’t get much, and hunger contributed mightily to the USSR’s civilian death rate in the war. The FDR administration promised the USSR 10 % of US food production to help, but could only manage to deliver 3 %.
But my point in mentioning Lend-Lease is that such Youtubes miss the main reason why we did what we did in aiding the USSR. It wasn’t some act of friendship or mercy, we weren’t just ‘being nice’; we did it OUT OF ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST. George Marshall and the US military leadership were not sure we could win WWII without Soviet help; at the very least if the USSR went down to defeat and Hitler obtained access to the USSR’s resources it would prolong both the length and sacrifice of the US and UK. The military problem the US faced was war both in Europe and the Pacific, with far-flung bases and long supply lines that “ate” up manpower and required a powerful Navy and Air arm to protect. We thus couldn’t raise an army of hundreds of divisions and supply it overseas, to do the work that the Soviets were providing the West by grinding up the Wehrmacht. Keeping the Soviets in the war was quite vital; ergo Lend-Lease.
In short, Marshall and his ilk had a clear and correct notion of what the US could do, and what it couldn’t do. The manpower restrictions on ground forces meant “no land war in Asia” which meant we wouldn’t field armies in China. Instead, we focused on a ground force manpower-minimizing “island hopping” strategy where we only took relatively few key islands and just left Japanese ground forces in elsewhere stranded and cut-off from supply. The bulk of the ground forces we did raise were going be used to defeat Hitler, whom Marshall correctly identified as the biggest threat to the US, given Germany’s technological skills and industrial base.
This kind of calculation is what we’ve lost. In WWII, we knew we were powerful, in some ways relative to the world more powerful then than now, but we knew we couldn’t do everything and that we shouldn’t even try. But after WWII, inside the US spread the notion (largely spread by conservatives and the anti-communists) that we had really ‘done it all’ and won the war without much of anyone’s help. Why did we cave to Stalin at Yalta? Why didn’t we let Patton drive the Soviets out of Eastern Europe? We had the bomb after all! (cue in Henry Stimson rhetorically patting his coat pocket). WE WERE OMNIPOTENT!
The first generation who acted on this belief, a belief definitely not shared by those who planned and executed WWII, was the “Greatest Generation” who had fought it as common soldiers when they assumed leadership—JFK through Reagan/Bush I. It led to Vietnam and to interventions everywhere, because we could and should impose our will upon the world. It was exacerbated when (as you say) financial means of scoring economies replaced measures of actual industrial capacity and output, from Clinton to today. What gets me is that the US’s leadership is more arrogant and more convinced of its supremacy despite the fact by all objective measures, whatever power the US actually has is far less relative to the rest of the world than the US during WWII during Marshall’s and FDR’s time. Yet Marshall and FDR knew we weren’t omnipotent and couldn’t ‘do it all’. And I fear nothing less than a massive comeuppance will change their attitudes.
(This blog is for understanding the present, making educated guesses at the future, and telling truths, usually unpleasant ones. There aren’t a lot of places like this left on the Web. Every year I fundraise to keep it going. If you’d like to help, and can afford to, please Subscribe or Donate.)