From MERIA, Volume 12, No. 1 - March 2008, by Jonathan Spyer, senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, Herzliya, Israel [brief excerpts only -follow the link to the full paper]:
The Lebanon war of 2006 failed to resolve any of the issues over which it was fought. Ultimately, the war may be understood as a single campaign within a broader Middle Eastern conflict--between pro-Western and democratic states on the one hand, and an alliance of Islamist and Arab nationalist forces on the other. The latter alignment has as one of its strategic goals the eventual demise of the State of Israel. While such a goal may appear delusional, the inconclusive results of the 2006 war did much to confirm the representatives of the latter camp in their belief that they have discovered a method capable of eventually producing a strategic defeat for Israel.
INTRODUCTION
The 2006 war between Israel and the Lebanese Hizballah organization...places the United States and its allies in opposition to Iran and its allies and client organizations. Israel is part of the former camp, while Hizballah is part of the latter. ...
....This article will briefly look at the events of the war itself over which the argument is taking place and will close with an attempt to draw some conclusions regarding the strategic significance and lessons of the war.
THE COURSE OF THE WAR
The Second Lebanon War began on July 12, 2006, with the shelling by Hizballah of the Israeli border villages of Zarit and Shlomi. The shelling was intended to act as a diversion for the commencement of a cross-border raid. The objective of the raid was the abduction of IDF soldiers for use as bargaining chips ....
...The IDF carried out air and artillery strikes on targets in southern Lebanon in the course of the day. .... Over the next few days and weeks, Israeli aircraft struck at Hizballah missile capabilities, at Nasrallah's headquarters in southern Beirut, and also bombed the Rafiq Hariri International Airport and roads leading out of Lebanon.
Hizballah leaders were undoubtedly surprised by the extent and ferocity of the Israeli response. .... In the following days, the movement reinforced the border villages, moving in elements of its regular force. At an early stage, however, the Israeli political leadership chose to rule out a major ground assault to the Litani River. Instead, an intensive air campaign commenced.
Limited ground operations began only on July 17, 2006...The Hizballah units were also able to benefit from an extensive storage, tunnel, and bunker system put in place prior to the war. Due to Israel's decision to concentrate on confronting Hizballah in the villages and towns close to the border, the IDF was unable to utilize fully its advantages in terms of armor, artillery, and air power.
The result was a series of bloody encounters between Israeli infantry on the one hand and Hizballah fighters on the other. Hizballah's ability in tactical maneuvering under fire was noted, as was the creative effect with which the movement used antitank weapons in the infantry combat......
....The Israeli decision to concentrate in the first part of the war on an air campaign....enabled Hizballah to maintain a constant stream of short-range rockets onto populated areas of northern Israel. .... Hizballah would fire just under 4,000 rockets in the course of the fighting, with over 200 rockets a day fired in the final days of the war....the rockets were employed in essence as a terror weapon, designed to produce panic and disorientation among Israel's civilian population in the north. This appears to have been precisely the intention of Hizballah, which places stress on what it considers to be the weakness of Israeli society and its susceptibility to casualties......
ASSESSING THE WAR
The conduct of the Second Lebanon War, and in particular the perceived failure of Israel to achieve its stated objectives, such as the freeing of the two kidnapped soldiers and the disarming of Hizballah, led to a mood of deep disquiet in Israel in the months that followed the war....
....There was a general sense of surprise at the losses encountered by the ground forces, at the failure to end the short-range rocket attacks, and at what was widely seen as the failure of the political echelon to set a coherent, achievable set of political goals which could clearly be achieved by the reaching of a defined, coherent set of military objectives. Rather, the impression was one of general confusion among both the military and political leaderships. Demonstrations by demobilized reserve soldiers commenced in the weeks following the ceasefire, and a committee of enquiry into the conduct of the political and military echelon was appointed, chaired by Judge Eliyahu Winograd.....
....Hizballah, for its part, declared that the war represented a "divine victory" for the movement..... A statement made by Hizballah leader Hasan Nasrallah in an interview with a Lebanese TV channel shortly after the war, however, indicated a more complex response to the war within Hizballah. Nasrallah said that had the movement known of the likely IDF response to the kidnapping operation, it would have never have carried out the kidnappings.....
...Since, clearly, neither side had won a "knock-out" victory in the war, the way was open for differing interpretation and rival claims.....
....All Israeli and international accounts of the war concur that the Israeli performance contained serious problems at every level: the political planning and setting of objectives for the war, the military strategy adopted for the war, the performance of some of the senior commanders, and the preparedness of elements of the fighting troops....
....because of the mistaken belief that air power could deliver victory, Israel failed to follow through with the massive commitment of ground forces, which alone would have enabled it to conquer the area of land up to the Litani River and then to hold this land for sufficient time to clear it of short-range rocket launching teams and Hizballah fighters. The completion of such an operation would have taken several weeks and would have required a larger commitment of forces by Israel. ...Israel's ground operations for the greater part of the war consisted of sporadic operations in an area up to ten kilometers from the border. The IDF in fact began a more extensive ground operation only in the period immediately preceding the ceasefire. This more extensive ground operation made some headway, but with considerable losses, and with questionable political purpose, and was called off 24 hours before the ceasefire on August 14, 2006.....
....Since it is clear that, difficulties notwithstanding, the IDF would have been capable of carrying out a conquest and consolidation of southern Lebanon if it had been ordered to do so, the failure is not in the final instance a military one. The fact is that ultimate responsibility must lie with the political echelon for the failure to calibrate coherently military operations with political objectives--which would surely have meant a major ground operation, in terms of the stated goals of the war.....
SINCE THE CEASEFIRE
With the implementation of the ceasefire and the passing of Resolution 1701, it was noted that in assessing the final results of the war, much would depend on the implementation of 1701.....
....A year after the war, it was clear that the new arrangements put in place by Resolution 1701 had failed to prevent Hizballah from largely replenishing its strength and replacing the losses incurred in the 2006 war, although the movement's freedom of activity was curtailed in the area between the Litani and the southern border.....
UNIFIL and the Lebanese army made little effort to prevent the smuggling of arms and equipment across Lebanon's eastern border with Syria. Hizballah has thus been able to rebuild its medium- and long-range missile teams north of the Litani....
....Hizballah's rebuilding of its capabilities does not mean that the next round of fighting is necessarily imminent. Hizballah's capabilities were clearly badly damaged in the war, and the movement faces a long process of reconstruction. Hizballah has also since the war been embroiled in internal political battles in Lebanon, which have served to cost it much of the kudos it gained as a result of the 2006 conflict. ....
...Hizballah clearly wishes to justify its continued bearing of arms and to make use of the status deriving from its self-declared status as challenger to Israel. In November 2007, the movement held a three day military exercise in southern Lebanon, observed by Israel and unmolested by UNIFIL, in spite of Resolution 1701's stipulation prohibiting the organization from operating south of the Litani River.
The role of Hizballah's Iranian patrons in choosing the moment when the movement may wish to reignite hostilities should also be taken into account. Given the damage and losses incurred by the movement as a result of the kidnapping operation in July 2006, it is likely that Iran will be impressing upon its clients the need for caution and patience, as it finances and facilitates the rebuilding and equipping of Hizballah.
It is noticeable that despite Hizballah claims of massive investment in reconstruction in the areas hit by the war, the evidence of the damage caused is still very visible in the towns and villages of southern Lebanon. In Marun al-Ras, for example, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting, a section of the town remained in rubble and uninhabited a year and a half after the war. Iran is likely to be keen to rebuild and to keep its Hizballah client intact for use in line with Iranian broader policy objectives at some future date....
....In a military sense, the war revealed serious deficiencies in the IDF as well as in the political and military decisionmaking process in Israel. ..... Barak's replacement of Peretz... signaled recognition that Israel was entering a period of new uncertainty and potential conflict, such that it was essential that somebody experienced be at the head of Israel's defense establishment.
STRATEGIC INDICATORS FROM THE SECOND LEBANON WAR
While lacking in air power, armor, and artillery, Hizballah forces engaged in high intensity combat in southern Lebanon in 2006. Due to Israel's decision not to launch a large-scale ground assault and conquest of southern Lebanon, the impression was created that somehow Hizballah had succeeded in "stopping" the IDF--that is, in engaging in a frontal clash with Israeli forces which prevented the IDF from advancing further into Lebanon. Hizballah's ability to fire short-range rockets into Israel up to the ceasefire enhanced this impression. However, it was a misleading one.
The IDF's hesitant approach toward the ground combat played to Hizballah's strengths. The small, pinpointed scale of attacks enabled the organization to concentrate its forces in limited areas. Yet a small organization of a few thousand fighters would not have been able to resist a full-scale ground assault of the four divisions with which Israel fought the war. Such an assault, however, was never ordered.
The model adopted by Hizballah has been promoted in the propaganda of the movement and its backers as representing a new approach to armed conflict with Israel that maximizes the benefits enjoyed by the Arab side while neutralizing the advantages enjoyed by Israel. In the propaganda of Syria, Hizballah, and Hamas, this new model of muqawama (resistance) is constantly returned to. It derives from an ideological view according to which Israel is particularly unable and unwilling to absorb casualties and make sacrifices.....
..... This view of Israel is not new and has formed a constant in Arab nationalist views of the country, and before this in Arab views of the Jewish national movement. Ultimately, it rests on a very widespread and deeply felt ideological belief in the Arab world and among the Iranian ruling elite that Israel is a temporary phenomenon, artificially implanted in the region by Western colonialism.
Thus, the Muqawama strategy rests on an article of faith--namely, that Israel's perceived "weakness" will ultimately serve to cancel out its advantages in the fields of technology, societal organization, conventional military strength, and so on. The events of the Second Lebanon War have been arranged to fit with this view in the interpretations of Hizballah and the larger regional camp to which it belongs.
From Israel's point of view, the significant problems in the functioning of both the political echelon and the military in the war of 2006 derived from deep structural and ideological factors, which were nevertheless rectifiable. ....the political echelon seems to have failed to internalize immediately that Israel was at war. The result was a slow, incremental increase in ground operations, which achieved little. Furthermore, the political echelon underestimated the strategic importance of leaving Hizballah's short-range rocket capacity intact. At certain points, it defined ill thought out, unrealistic goals for the war, (such as the recovery of the kidnapped soldiers, or the permanent disarming of Hizballah), which it did not then seriously pursue. Since the ceasefire, Israel has observed the ongoing rebuilding of Hizballah's strength north of the Litani, which makes an eventual next round of fighting likely.
Israel will thus need in the time available to overhaul its military--training and preparing it adequately for the relevant challenges ahead. It will need to ensure that it has a national leadership that understands the capabilities of the military and that knows how to integrate this knowledge into a clear, stable national strategy with clearly defined goals and parameters, and to which it then adheres. It will need to prepare its public for the awareness that the country is engaged with an enemy pursuing a clearly thought out "long war" strategy, which may take years and may require further sacrifices--such as, for example, the inevitable cost in the lives of soldiers that would accompany a large-scale ground operation into southern Lebanon of the type which could deal a real military blow to Hizballah....
.... Crucial to all this is a factor pointed to by the Winograd Committee and other critiques of Israel's performance in the war--namely, the urgent need for a properly integrated structure in Israel for the formulation of a long-term national security strategy.....
....Ultimately, the 2006 war must be understood as a single campaign within a broader Middle Eastern conflict, between pro-Western and democratic states on the one hand, and an alliance of Islamist and Arab nationalist forces on the other. The latter alignment has as one of its strategic goals the eventual demise of the State of Israel. While such a goal may appear delusional, given the true balance of forces involved, the inconclusive results of the 2006 war did much to confirm the representatives of the latter camp in their belief that they have discovered a method capable of eventually producing a strategic defeat for Israel.
It is therefore expected that a further round of conflict is only a matter of time. Israel, meanwhile, must endeavor to develop a strategy capable of striking a blow in a future engagement sufficient to make any subsequent ambiguity untenable.
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