Hizbullah and Lebanese war lessons

[Tayeb]

s3 and greetings,

It'd be interesting to include in this thread the links of the recent War on Lebanon, specially as lessons for Muslim ummah insha-Allah.

Here's a first contribution:

Wounded troops describe Bint Jbail battle as 'hell on earth'
By Nir Hasson and Tomer Levi, Haaretz Correspondents

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/743473.html

Wounded soldiers who took part in heavy combat Wednesday on the outskirts of the Hezbollah stronghold of Bint Jbail recounted their experiences from their hospital beds at Haifa's Rambam Medical Center, which received 22 of the wounded casualties of the battle.

"They suffer mostly from shrapnel and also from penetration of bullets," said Dr. Micky Hilbertal, who runs the emergency room where the soldiers are hospitalized. "Most of the injuries are in the limbs, a few of them are in the chest and stomach."

Hilbertal said the most similar experience he can recall when he was required to treat this many wounded was during the first Lebanon war. "[Back then], helicopters landed here almost non-stop," he said, noting that Rambam is working in full emergency mode.

The wounded soldiers described the battle as a bitter one which took place in a built-up setting, one where enemy forces had organized a well-planned ambush. Soldiers faced gunfire from any and all directions.

"They shot at us from 180 degrees," said one of the soldiers. Most of the dead and seriously wounded are those from the initial wave of ground troops which tried to enter one of the homes in Bint Jbail. The soldiers who suffered light wounds are primarily those who arrived on the scene to retrieve the bodies of the dead and wounded soldiers lying in the battlefield.

Some of the wounded were in an open field and others behind walls as well as inside homes. Sergeant Tzachi Duda suffered light injuries in his leg due to shrapnel.

"The battle began at 3:30 at night," he said. "Ten minutes after the first clash, we arrived to help. There was heavy fire from rocket launchers, missiles, rocket-propelled grenades. I provided cover fire for soldiers who tried to reach the wounded, and this went on for hours. Eventually, a missile hit the yard where I was standing. I was thrown back along with the wall which I was hiding behind. In my lifetime I never expected to see bodies and people with bullets in their chest."

Sergeant Ohed Shalom was wounded while attempting to recover a soldier's body which was lying behind a steel door.

"We tried to go in and break through the door but we didn't succeed," he said. "When I shot at the door, they saw me and shot in my direction."

Shalom, who sustained shrapnel wounds to his leg, said the soldiers did all in their power to prevent Hezbollah gunmen from reaching their comrades' bodies.

The soldiers also recounted feats of heroism displayed by their friends. "They carried soldiers on stretchers while simultaneously shooting at terrorists," Shalom said.

"It was hell on earth," Corporal Lior Sharabi said. "People risked their lives not only for the wounded but also for the dead bodies."

Sharabi added that Hezbollah fighters demonstrated impressive combat capabilities. "They are strong fighters, not like us, but better than Hamas," he said.

One of Hezbollah's most troublesome position from which it fired upon soldiers was the towering mosque in the village.

"There were maybe 30 terrorists [in the mosque]," Shalom said.

Staff Sergeant Avraham Dajan was hit in his arm by shrapnel. "They fired from all directions, we tried to get to the wounded," he said. "As I was about to throw a grenade, I got hit by shrapnel. After I was hurt, I couldn't do anything. I saved myself."

Some of the wounded soldiers spoke of face-to-face clashes with Hezbollah operatives. However, none of the soldiers gave first-hand accounts of such incidents. The soldiers, who serve in the 51st battalion of the Golani infantry brigades, said their stay in Lebanon extended to three consecutive days, during which they managed very little sleep.

"We lived in one of the houses and about every hour or so we would wake up out of fear that someone had entered the house," Shalom said. "Every once in a while, we would move from house to house."

"Even after a day like this, the morale is higher," said Ram Boneh, a 20-year-old resident of Hadera who was lightly wounded by shrapnel. "I want to go out and return to active duty."

"At 12:30, [Boneh] called and told us he was in Rambam and that we shouldn't worry," Boneh's mother, Heska, said. "We came here immediately from Hadera. It's very hard for me [to deal] with what is happening. I'm Dutch and I wasn't educated on the army, and it's very difficult for me to deal with the fact that he's a fighter. But I am with him and I trust him as well as the entire army."

[tbahrain]

s3 , brother.

I believe this article below do have relevance to Lebanon and also Palestine, so I am posting it here.

tbahrain

More Free Mazuma Sent to Small Criminal State
Monday August 21st 2006, 5:03 am

On the Ynet Money page, there is a photo of Israeli finance minister Abraham Hirchson, a big smile spread across his face. Hirchson is tickled because, once again, the American taxpayer, a royal chump, has come through. “The Bush administration has agreed to an Israel demand that a loan guarantee deal be extended by an additional three years, until 2011,” reports Ynet. “In 2003, the United States approved a USD 9 billion aid package to Israel in the form of loan guarantees which allow Israel to borrow money on the international market for low interest rates.”

But there is another reason Hirchson has a big smile plastered across his face: Israel is not required to pay back the loans. If anything, it pays on the interest, never the principal. Call the bank, tell them you plan to do that with your mortgage, and wait to see how long before you are homeless.

“It would be … accurate to say Israel has never been required to repay a U.S. government loan. The truth of the matter is complex, and designed to be so by those who seek to conceal it from the U.S. taxpayer,” writes Richard H. Curtiss, a former U.S. foreign service officer. “Most U.S. loans to Israel are forgiven, and many were made with the explicit understanding that they would be forgiven before Israel was required to repay them. By disguising as loans what in fact were grants, cooperating members of Congress exempted Israel from the U.S. oversight that would have accompanied grants. On other loans, Israel was expected to pay the interest and eventually to begin repaying the principal. But the so-called Cranston Amendment, which has been attached by Congress to every foreign aid appropriation since 1983, provides that economic aid to Israel will never dip below the amount Israel is required to pay on its outstanding loans. In short, whether U.S. aid is extended as grants or loans to Israel, it never returns to the Treasury.”

It is worth quoting Curtiss at length:

In an article in the Washington Report for December 1991/January 1992, Frank Collins estimated the costs of this interest, based upon prevailing interest rates for every year since 1949. I have updated this by applying a very conservative 5 percent interest rate for subsequent years, and confined the amount upon which the interest is calculated to grants, not loans or loan guarantees.

On this basis the $84.8 billion in grants, loans and commodities Israel has received from the U.S. since 1949 cost the U.S. an additional $49,936,880,000 in interest.

There are many other costs of Israel to U.S. taxpayers, such as most or all of the $45.6 billion in U.S. foreign aid to Egypt since Egypt made peace with Israel in 1979 (compared to $4.2 billion in U.S. aid to Egypt for the preceding 26 years). U.S. foreign aid to Egypt, which is pegged at two-thirds of U.S. foreign aid to Israel, averages $2.2 billion per year.

There also have been immense political and military costs to the U.S. for its consistent support of Israel during Israel’s half-century of disputes with the Palestinians and all of its Arab neighbors. In addition, there have been the approximately $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees and perhaps $20 billion in tax-exempt contributions made to Israel by American Jews in the nearly half-century since Israel was created.

Even excluding all of these extra costs, America’s $84.8 billion in aid to Israel from fiscal years 1949 through 1998, and the interest the U.S. paid to borrow this money, has cost U.S. taxpayers $134.8 billion, not adjusted for inflation. Or, put another way, the nearly $14,630 every one of 5.8 million Israelis received from the U.S. government by Oct. 31, 1997 has cost American taxpayers $23,240 per Israeli.

It would be interesting to know how many of those American taxpayers believe they and their families have received as much from the U.S. Treasury as has everyone who has chosen to become a citizen of Israel. But it’s a question that will never occur to the American public because, so long as America’s mainstream media, Congress and president maintain their pact of silence, few Americans will ever know the true cost of Israel to U.S. taxpayers.

Meanwhile, Israel is preparing a new attack against Lebanon, as they are freshly armed with “short-range rockets armed with cluster bombs” from the United States,” according to Time. Even though cluster bombs are considered “dumb bombs,” Paul Gigot, editorial director for the War Street, er Wall Street Journal, praised the latest shipment of “smart weapons” rushed to Israel. Fox’s Juan Williams asked Gigot if he happened to see “the pictures [of Lebanon],” and Gigot replied: “Thank God for the ‘bunker busters’ because they are able to get to people 100 feet down,” never mind the 300 people in the apartment building in the way.

If not for the no-strings attached greenbacks flooding into Israel, the country would be obliged to make peace with its neighbors, either allow the Palestinians to set up their own state or become Israeli citizens. Minus all the free mazuma, Israel would be another small Middle Eastern country and a lot of Lebanese, and Palestinians, would be alive right now. However, as it stands, the average American taxpayer is complicit in the murder of thousands of innocent Arabs.

http://kurtnimmo.com/?p=527

[Tayeb]

Tanks take stock

http://jta.org/page_view_breaking_story.asp?intid=4244

One-tenth of the Israeli tanks that took part in the Lebanon war were destroyed or disabled, a military study found.
According to Armored Corps data published Thursday, Hezbollah anti-armor missiles penetrated 20 Israeli tanks during the monthlong war, killing 17 crewmen. Another 13 crewmen were killed when land mines destroyed or disabled their tanks. The number of tank crewmen wounded was in the double digits.

The high toll of the war on Israel’s Armored Corps was a shock to top military brass, especially given the fact that Hezbollah has no tanks.

Some experts said the tanks dispatched to Lebanon were older, less protected versions of the locally made Merkava. Two Israeli arms firms now have speeded up work on a tank anti-missile system.

[tbahrain]

Lebanon's Incursion Costs Israel NIS 6 Billion.

They, the Israelis thought it was going to be a short war like before and initially estimated the cost to be about 2-3 billion. So what a shock it was to discover that the cost is more than double. But not to worry (or feign to worry) as sure as the surn will rise, Uncle Sam is there to provide the shortfalls. Bet you (figuratively) that the US will come to the rescue at the expense of rebuilding NO after Katrina.

tbahrain

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/753229.html

[Tayeb]

How we suffered a knockout
Reuven Pedatzur
Haaretz
08/16/2006

The United States' defeat in the Vietnam war started becoming evident when Gen. William Westmoreland, commander of the U.S. forces in Vietnam, started using body counts as an alternative to military victories. When he could not point to achievements on the battlefield, Westmoreland would send a daily report to Washington of the number of Vietcong soldiers his forces had killed.

In the past few weeks, the Israel Defense Forces has also adopted the body count approach. When the largest and strongest army in the Middle East clashes for more than two weeks with 50 Hezbollah fighters in Bint Jbail and does not bring them to their knees, the commanders are left with no choice but to point to the number of dead fighters the enemy has left behind. It can be assumed that Bint Jbail will turn into a symbol of the second Lebanon war. For the Hezbollah fighters it will be remembered as their Stalingrad, and for us it will be a painful reminder of the IDF's defeat.

Ze'ev Schiff wrote in Haaretz on August 11 that we had "gotten a slap." It seems that "knockout" would be a more appropriate description. This is not a mere military defeat. This is a strategic failure whose far-reaching implications are still not clear. And like the boxer who took the blow, we are still lying dazed on the ground, trying to understand what happened to us. Just like the Six-Day War led to a strategic change in the Middle East and established Israel's status as the regional power, the second Lebanon war may bring about the opposite. The IDF's failure is eroding our national security's most important asset - the belligerent image of this country, led by a vast, strong and advanced army capable of dealing our enemies a decisive blow if they even try to bother us. This war, it soon transpired, was about "awareness" and "deterrence." We lost the fight for both.

The concept failed again

It does not matter one bit what the IDF's true capability is. There is also no importance to the assertions that the IDF used merely a small part of its force and that its arsenal still contains advanced weapons that did not come into play. What really matters is the image of the IDF - and in fact of Israel - in the eyes of our adversaries in the region.

And herein lies the most serious failure of this war. In Damascus, Gaza, Tehran and Cairo, too, people are looking with amazement at the IDF that could not bring a tiny guerrilla organization (1,500 fighters according to the military intelligence chief, and a few thousand according to other sources) to its knees for more than a month, the IDF that was defeated and paid a heavy price in most of its battles in southern Lebanon. And most serious of all: an IDF that has not neutralized Hezbollah's ability to fire rockets and keep more than 1 million Israeli citizens sitting in shelters for more than four weeks. What happened to this mighty army, which after a month was not able to advance more than a few kilometers into Lebanon? wonder many of those who are planning their next wars against Israel.

Israel's deterrent power was based on the recognition by the enemy that it would pay an extremely heavy price if it attacked Israel. For example, Syria has not fired hundreds of missiles at the Israeli homefront - even during times of war - because it fears a harsh Israeli attack on Damascus and other important Syrian towns. But when more than 3,000 rockets are fired at the Galilee, Haifa and Hadera without Israel demanding that someone pay, Israel's deterrence is damaged. At the next opportunity, someone in Damascus may decide to fire rockets at Tel Aviv to push forward a diplomatic process, since Israel did not only fail to react severely to the rockets fired from Lebanon but also was forced to agree to a UN arrangement that leaves the rocket stockpile in Hezbollah's hands.

The Agranat Commission gave a negative connotation to the term "concept" in the context of military intelligence. The commission of inquiry that now hopefully will be set up will quickly conclude that on the eve of the second Lebanon war, the IDF - and consequently policy makers - were working with two mistaken concepts. First, over the past six years, Israelis came to believe a large-scale fight against Hezbollah would not be necessary: Any military actions in southern Lebanon would be limited and short. Second, if a war arose against Hezbollah, the IDF would dismantle the organization within a few days, break its command backbone and end the fighting under conditions favorable to Israel.

And this is how we entered the war. The army led the prime minister and his cabinet to believe that the air force would annihilate Hezbollah's fighting capability within several days and that thereafter a new situation would prevail in Lebanon. On the basis of these promises, Ehud Olmert set ambitious objectives for the war, which of course were unattainable.

Just as before the Yom Kippur war, there was a destructive combination of arrogance, boastfulness, euphoria and contempt for the enemy. The generals were so certain of the air force's success that they did not prepare an alternative. And when it became clear after about one week that Hezbollah was not disintegrating and that its ability to fire rockets had not been significantly thwarted, the IDF found itself in a state of acute distress and embarrassment. This is the reason for the hesitancy in using force and the lack of determination in the use of the ground forces.

The commission of inquiry will have to examine how the army entered the war without formulating alternative operations or plans to end the war. The failure of the government lies in its adoption of the army's proposal without examining its logic, chances of success or alternatives. The decision-making process that led to the war once again revealed the most serious defect in the formation of national security policy. Since the establishment of the state, no government has had the good sense to set up professional advisory bodies that could assist it in dealing with IDF proposals, or at least to examine them seriously. As in all the other conflicts, the army and not the government decided what Israel should do in Lebanon. The National Security Council - whose job this is precisely - was not asked to look over the IDF's plans and their implications, nor was it asked to provide alternatives.

The missing command

The arrogance and the overconfidence that characterized the top brass left the home front unprotected. If it was clear that the air force would destroy the rocket launch pads within a few days, why call on the residents of the north to prepare the air raid shelters and stockpile food? We know the outcome: More than one million people sat for more than one month in stinking shelters, some of them without food or minimal conditions. vIn this context, the inquiry commission should look into the home front command. Millions of shekels were invested in this command. A major general, brigadiers general, colonels and many other officers and soldiers man this command. And what was its contribution to the war? Warning notices broadcast over the radio and televisions about alarms and sirens. That's it. For more than a month, the entire command made do with drafting public notices about seeking shelter and staying in interior rooms. Where was this command over the past six years? Was it not its task to examine and check whether the shelters were satisfactory?

And of course, the intelligence. Once again there were surprises and failures, some of which were based on the mistaken concept of Hezbollah's capacities. The militia's success in surprising an IDF patrol and abducting two soldiers - the catalyst for the war - stems from a military intelligence failure. IDF intelligence did not assess correctly Hezbollah's fighting capability, did not know about the tunnels next to the organization's strongholds, and erred in its assessments of the deployment inside Bint Jbail, and there were many more other intelligence failures.

The navy's intelligence failed because it did not know about the Iranian land-to-sea missiles in Hezbollah's hands, and its assessments about Hezbollah's ability to fire rockets were mistaken. Hezbollah's successful handling of anti-tank missiles also revealed an intelligence failure that resembles to a large extent that of the 1973 war. The Patriot missile batteries stationed near Haifa and Safed were announced by the IDF with much fanfare. The wide media coverage given to these deployments was supposed to quiet residents' fears. Since then we have not heard a single word about that wonderful defense system. As far as is known, not even one attempt was made to knock down missiles fired at Haifa and Hadera. The commission of inquiry will also have to deal with the army's decisions about anti-missile defense. Billions of dollars were invested in the defense systems to combat missiles, but this was unapparent when it came to the test. In addition, the army's decision to stop developing the Nautilus - a laser-based anti-Katyusha defense system - must be examined.

The state allocates some 11 billion dollars annually for the defense budget. Almost 15 percent of the GNP is devoted to security. (The official figure is 10 percent, but this does not include all the investments in security issues). But when the reservists are called up, they discover that they lack basic equipment: flak jackets, helmets, vehicles and even stretchers. Entire units were forced to fight more than 24 hours without food or water. Where did the money go? This will have to be examined by the commission of inquiry. The height of the chutzpah is the hints by senior officers that the dearth of equipment is due to the defense budget cuts. This should be the chance to break the myth about these budget cuts: Not only was the defense budget not cut in the past decade, it actually grew during the years 2002 and 2005. Israel allocates to security more of its total resources than any other democracy in the world (15 times more than Japan and three times more than the U.S.). It should be checked whether there is justification for this.

The Yom Kippur war is remembered as a seminal event that damaged the public's trust in the army. Quite a few years passed before this trust was restored. It is still too early to assess whether the second Lebanon war will be remembered as the turning point at which the public awakes from the illusion about the unlimited might of the Israeli military force.

[tbahrain]

The Islamic Way of War

Muslims have stopped fighting on Western terms—and have started winning.


by Andrew J. Bacevich


In Iraq, the world’s only superpower finds itself mired in a conflict that it cannot win. History’s mightiest military has been unable to defeat an enemy force of perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 insurgents equipped with post-World War II vintage assault rifles and anti-tank weapons.

In Gaza and southern Lebanon, the Middle East’s mightiest military also finds itself locked in combat with adversaries that it cannot defeat. Despite weeks of bitter fighting, the IDF’s Merkava tanks, F-16 fighter-bombers, and missile-launching unmanned aerial vehicles failed to suppress, much less eliminate, the armed resistance of Hamas and Hezbollah.

What are we to make of this? How is it that the seemingly weak and primitive are able to frustrate modern armies only recently viewed as all but invincible? What do the parallel tribulations—and embarrassments—of the United States and Israel have to tell us about war and politics in the 21st century? In short, what’s going on here?

The answer to that question is dismayingly simple: the sun has set on the age of unquestioned Western military dominance. Bluntly, the East has solved the riddle of the Western Way of War. In Baghdad and in Anbar Province as at various points on Israel’s troubled perimeter, the message is clear: methods that once could be counted on to deliver swift decision no longer work.

For centuries, Western military might underpinned Western political dominion everywhere from Asia to Africa to the New World. It was not virtue that created the overseas empires of Great Britain, France, Spain, and the other European colonizers; it was firepower, technology, and discipline.

Through much of the last century, nowhere was this Western military pre-eminence more in evidence than in the Middle East. During World War I, superior power enabled the British and French to topple the Ottomans, carve up the region to suit their own interests, and then rule it like a fiefdom. Until 1945, European machine guns kept restive Arabs under control in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, and Palestine.

The end of World War II found the Europeans without the will to operate the machine guns and short on the money to pay for them. In the Middle East, Arabs no longer willing to follow instructions issued by London or Paris demanded independence. Eager to claim prestige and respect, these nationalists, Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser foremost among them, saw in the creation of large machine-age armies a shortcut to achieving their goals.

Placing an order for Soviet-bloc armaments in 1955, Nasser began an ill-fated Arab flirtation with Western-style military technique that did not fully end until Saddam Hussein’s army collapsed on the outskirts of Baghdad nearly a half-century later. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Arab leaders invested in fleets of tanks, field artillery, and other heavy armaments, which they organized into massive formations supported by costly air forces equipped with supersonic jets. On the ground, bigger meant better; in the air, speed was thought to signify superiority.

All of these pricy exertions yielded only humiliation and indignity. Israel—a Western implant in the Muslim world—also adopted Western-style military methods but with far greater success, subjecting the Arabs to repeated drubbings. Designed on the Soviet model, the new Arab armies turned out to be ponderous and predictable but with little of the Red Army’s capacity to absorb punishment and keep fighting. Taking the best of the German military tradition, the Israel Defense Forces placed a premium on daring, dash, and decentralization as they demonstrated to great effect in 1956, 1967, and 1973.

What was it that made the IDF in its heyday look so good? According to the punch line of an old joke: because they always fought Arabs. In 1991, the Americans finally had their own chance to fight Arabs, and they too looked good, making mincemeat of Saddam Hussein’s legions in Operation Desert Storm. In the spring of 2003, the Americans looked good once again, dispatching the remnant of Saddam’s army in a short and seemingly decisive campaign. In Washington many concluded that an unstoppable U.S. military machine could provide the leverage necessary to transform the entire region.

The truth is that U.S. forces and the IDF looked good fighting Arabs only as long as Arab political leaders insisted on fighting on Western terms. As long as they persisted in pitting tank against tank or fighter plane against fighter plane, Arabs were never going to get the better of either the Americans or the Israelis. His stupidity perhaps matched only by his ruthlessness, Saddam may well have been the last Arab leader to figure this out.

Well before Saddam’s final defeat, others, less stupid, began to develop alternative means of what they called “resistance.” This new Islamic Way of War evolved over a period of decades not only in the Arab world but beyond.

In Afghanistan during the 1980s, the Mujahadeen got things started by bringing to its knees a Soviet army equipped with an arsenal of modern equipment. During the so-called First Intifada, which began in 1987, stone-throwing and Molotov-cocktail-wielding Palestinians gave the IDF conniptions. In 1993, an angry Somali rabble—not an army at all—sent the United States packing. In 2000, the collapse of the Camp David talks produced a Second Intifada, this one persuading the government of Ariel Sharon that Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank was becoming unsustainable. Most spectacularly, in September 2001, al-Qaeda engineered a successful assault on the American homeland, the culmination of a series of attacks that had begun a decade earlier.

First in Afghanistan and then in Iraq, the United States seemed briefly to turn the tables: Western military methods overthrew the Taliban and then made short shrift of Saddam. After the briefest of intervals, however, victory in both places gave way to renewed and protracted fighting. Most recently, in southern Lebanon an intervention that began with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowing to destroy Hezbollah has run aground and looks increasingly like an Israeli defeat.

So it turns out that Arabs—or more broadly Muslims—can fight after all. We may surmise that they now realize that fighting effectively requires that they do so on their own terms rather than mimicking the West. They don’t need and don’t want tanks and fighter-bombers. What many Westerners dismiss as “terrorism,” whether directed against Israelis, Americans, or others in the West, ought to be seen as a panoply of techniques employed to undercut the apparent advantages of high-tech conventional forces. The methods em-ployed do include terrorism—violence targeting civilians for purposes of intimidation—but they also incorporate propaganda, subversion, popular agitation, economic warfare, and hit-and-run attacks on regular forces, either to induce an overreaction or to wear them down. The common theme of those techniques, none of which are new, is this: avoid the enemy’s strengths; exploit enemy vulnerabilities.

What are the implications of this new Islamic Way of War? While substantial, they fall well short of being apocalyptic. As Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has correctly—if perhaps a trifle defensively—observed, “Our enemy knows they cannot defeat us in battle.” Neither the Muslim world nor certainly the Arab world poses what some like to refer to as “an existential threat” to the United States. Despite overheated claims that the so-called Islamic fascists pose a danger greater than Hitler ever did, the United States is not going to be overrun, even should the forces of al-Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iraqi insurgents, and Shi’ite militias along with Syria and Iran all combine into a unified anti-Crusader coalition. Although Israelis for historical reasons are inclined to believe otherwise, the proximate threat to Israel itself is only marginally greater. Although neither Israel nor the United States can guarantee its citizens “perfect security”—what nation can?—both enjoy ample capabilities for self-defense.

What the Islamic Way of War does mean to both Israel and to the United States is this: the Arabs now possess—and know that they possess—the capacity to deny us victory, especially in any altercation that occurs on their own turf and among their own people. To put it another way, neither Israel nor the United States today possesses anything like the military muscle needed to impose its will on the various governments, nation-states, factions, and political movements that comprise our list of enemies. For politicians in Jerusalem or Washington to persist in pretending otherwise is the sheerest folly.

It’s time for Americans to recognize that the enterprise that some neoconservatives refer to as World War IV is unwinnable in a strictly military sense. Indeed, it’s past time to re-examine the post-Cold War assumption that military power provides the preferred antidote to any and all complaints that we have with the world beyond our borders.

In the Middle East and more broadly in our relations with the Islamic world, we face difficult and dangerous problems, more than a few of them problems to which we ourselves have contributed. Those problems will become more daunting still, for us and for Israel, should a nation like Iran succeed in acquiring nuclear weapons. But as events in Iraq and now in southern Lebanon make clear, reliance on the sword alone will not provide a solution to those problems. We must be strong and we must be vigilant. But we also need to be smart, and getting smart means ending our infatuation with war and rediscovering the possibilities of politics.

_________________________________________

Andrew J. Bacevich is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book, The New American Militarism, is just out in paperback from Oxford University Press