So, terror bombing appears to have won the Gaza war. Israel’s ground invasion was pathetic, Hezbollah’s troops proved their reputation is deserved, but Hezbollah has agreed to a ceasefire.
That’s what Israel needed: that’s a strategic victory. Without Hezbollah missiles and drones hitting Israel, a ton of the pressure is off, especially economic pressure. Now Israel can concentrate on Gaza and Hamas. Without Hezbollah, they’re doomed and the genocide and ethnic cleansing of, at least, Northern Gaza will be successful.
This is why I always felt that Hezbollah, Iran and the Iraq militias needed to put much more pressure on, especially back when the Israeli army was concentrating on Gaza and Hamas still had most of its troops.
There’s a good chance this ceasefire won’t hold, of course, but if it does it’s an Israeli victory. Anyone spinning it any other way is full of shit.
If there’s going to be another round, then Iran needs to get serious anti-air to Hezbollah, because with terror bombing having worked, the Israelis will do it again.
bruce wilder
I am old enough to remember when the policy of Arab and Islamic neighbors to Israel was proud, romantic hostility, completely unrealistic about military capabilities, but full of the willingness to use force in the service of attempts at altruistic punishment. Now the neighbors seem to accept that military inferiority limits their practical options severely. No one is willing to irrationally bear the severe economic costs of war with a mad regime of genocidal maniacs.
The maniacs are willing to irrationally bear the economic costs of war, which are severe even when destruction is not raining down on their heads and Americans are paying the out-of-pocket. They seem unaware of the moral costs.
I have a hard time wrapping my head around this outbreak of cynical realism in conflict with corrupt insanity.
mago
Walking down a stream side trail one summer day I heard a persistent low level cheep cheep cheep. Parting the grass I saw a small snake with a still living downy bird in its maw, trying to swallow it alive.
Another time while driving along a level one lane mountain road a red tail hawk flew past, level with my windshield carrying a five foot writhing snake in its talons, probably plucked from a rock where it was sunning.
Israel reminds me of both the snake in the grass and the hawk in the air.
Predators are gonna be predators. There’s no end to the death and torment. There will be no peace.
Alex
What was pathetic about the ground invasion? If it’s based on the land occupied during the campaign, how do you know that this was the goal? We know for a fact that
* the casualties were reasonably low, compared to the Gaza campaign and to self-reported Hezbollah casualties
* Hezbollah didn’t manage to invade Israel
* The terms of the ceasefire is reasonably favourable for Israel
One indicator of whether the ceasefire is taken seriously would be whether the Israelis evacuated from the border area would return.
Bill H.
The nations in the middle east who would prefer to end Israeli terrorism know that Israel has nuclear weapons, and they know that Israel is rabid enough to use them. No one dares to say it, but that’s why inferior Israeli military can perform genocide unpunished.
marku52
Yup. Big strategic loss by Hizb. Astonishing, actually. In the last war ISR bombed the crap out of Beirut, the assumption should have been they’d do it again.
And Hizb was completely unprepared. I saw a Stinger or two fired, but that’s nothing.
So ISR can get back to the Gazan genocide unmolested.
There will be lessons learned from the 2020’s:
Financialized countries/economies don’t win wars (This one from RUSSO/NATO)
And Air Defense is essential to state survival.
bruce wilder
one set of lessons learned would surely involve the broader and deeper ability to obtain excellent intelligence combined with utter ruthlessness in applying kinetic force on that basis.
assassination as a tactic is sometimes underappreciated for its strategic effectiveness. applying it frequently and broadly (and with ruthless disregard of ethical consideration of collateral losses) may be something new in that sufficiently good intelligence work at scale is new and enables frequent, deep and broad applications: maybe close to an order of magnitude
revulsion at the more prosaic practice of ethics-free tactical targeting of aid workers and journalists can obscure the broad overall strategy and its effectiveness to date. The headline-grabbing assassination of well-known “names” in Hezbollah and Hamas has been combined with operations that had surprisingly broad and deep reach in Hezbollah hierarchies. An organization famed for its conscious cultivation of a replaceable leadership was seriously shaken when hundreds of assassinations occurred and the collateral damage attending the taking out of some bigger fish took out whole neighborhoods. Swimming in the sea when the sea itself becomes afraid can be a problem apparently.
I do not think Israel can put a period at the end of this run-on sentence. That this is the path that Israel’s doctrine of escalation dominance has taken may be due to a combination of the Israeli polity’s moral decay and a global evolution of technological possibilities, but the evolution of surveillance and military technologies at least will continue. Israel has been at the center of the development of some of the technologies and that may have advantaged them in their recent application, adding an element of surprise.
I am skeptical of the proposition that strategic (or tactical?) nuclear weapons are a trump card for Israel. Strategic nuclear weapon use is a logical cap on the Israeli ladder of escalation options in this game of escalation dominance that Israel’s demented leadership insists on playing. So, since escalation dominance is Israeli doctrine, they have to hint they have such weapons just as Israeli leaders have to play homicidal madmen on teevee. The doctrine requires both madmen and nukes as a matter of logical necessity. Israel is too small to chance use of a nuclear weapon in or adjacent to its own territory. Madmen invite commitment to the asylum of nations.
Oakchair
What was pathetic about the ground invasion?
—–
That in a conventional war Israel’s ground military can’t even beat a non-state militia from an impoverished 3rd world country that has been bombed to the ground.
Carborundum
It should be noted that the ceasefire, though widely described as being between Hezbollah and Israel, is between Lebanon and Israel, with the expectation being that LAF is going to occupy terrain in phases and keep Hezbollah from operating as the IDF withdraws. I have my doubts that this operational concept will go well. LAF are not a high performing force, but it’s the option the Israelis have unless they want a repeat of the decades-long sucking chest wound that Grapes of Wrath produced. (We in the west would all have to be a lot more collectively insane than I think we are to write a more interventionist UNIFIL-on-steroids-like cheque.)
The notion that IDF ground force performance has been poor seems to be a widely held belief / talking point, but I don’t see much real evidence for that interpretation beyond the usual talking heads making their usual points. They appear to have operated pretty much at will within the area they wanted to operate within and have made significant inroads in reducing Hezbollah military infrastructure and destroying stockpiles that have taken two decades to build. They don’t appear to have attempted to occupy nearly as much area as they did in ’06, but their performance seems to me to have involved fewer dumb casualties. There are definitely limits to what they have achieved, but that looks to be by design and to have produced a decent ROI. It certainly doesn’t “solve” anything, but the overall campaign has put them in a materially different position than they were previously and the ground ops do seem like they reduce the risk of al-Aqsa Flood type operations.
Feral Finster
Israel always was going to win, because Israel need only beckon and its American thug would come running to the rescue, a pack of loyal poodles in tow.
If it wanted any chance at victory, Hezbollah was foolish not to have jumped Israel when it was preoccupied with ongoing fighting (as opposed to simple ethnic cleansing) in Gaza.
bruce wilder
I am skeptical that anyone has sufficiently good information to score the fight as a fight. My own comment about the strategic effect of the assassination tactic is very thinly based, in my own opinion, offered only because I think it worth considering that it might have had a decisive effect without thinking that we know that it did have a decisive effect. And because technical possibilities are genuinely scaling up even as the narrative meme of “attacking decision centers” gains momentum .
When we know so little objectively and so much is interjected into the stream solely to reinforce propaganda narratives, one substantial risk is that many go with priors furnished by partisan affiliation or sympathy, motivated by a taste for certain narratives, while more rational and realistic minds keep quiet on the grounds that “nobody knows nuthin”.
Jorge
I have assumed since Oct 7, 2023 that the Hamas strategy was to goad Israel into doing something so insane that the “Arab Street” of the surrounding countries would force a common invasion of Israel, with the intention of pushing it into the sea. Dunkirk style.
One possible action would be if Israel destroyed the Al-Aksa mosque, which sits on the rubble of the First Temple, and is the most important real estate in the Religions of the Book. The thing is: someone else could do it and pin it on Israel as a false flag.
Anon
Israel went into Lebanon to obscure the fact that this phase of the war was won mostly through terrorism.
samm
Carborundum:
“The notion that IDF ground force performance has been poor seems to be a widely held belief / talking point, but I don’t see much real evidence for that interpretation beyond the usual talking heads making their usual points. They appear to have operated pretty much at will within the area they wanted to operate within and have made significant inroads[…]”
Thanks for your thought provoking post. However, you are missing that the Israeli’s stated goals include pushing Hezbollah past the Litani River, and they have repeated this goal many times:
https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-827371
Below is a map Israeli incursions into Lebanon, and it is quite clear they have not only failed to push Hezbollah across the Litani, they barely have made it past the border.
https://x.com/MenchOsint/status/1860114305695514943
That’s the reason all the “usual talking heads” have been “making their usual points.” It doesn’t take some kind of specialist or elite interpreter of “facts on the ground” to see the Israeli ground invasion was a bust.
Forecasting Intelligence
Israel has won. I called it right.
And now Iran has to focus on Syria where the Assad regime appears to be collapsing. Advantage Zionism.