This article is a detailed close-up of the danger that Iran, via its Hezbullah army, presents to Israel. This has been an army over twenty years in the making, and don’t think for a moment that Hamas and all the other palestinian groups are not taking note of its successes against the IDF, and modeling their own fighting accordingly. Unless Iran and Syria are stopped, and soon, Israel will be facing a three-front war against three well-trained and well-equipped armies–something that hasn’t happened in a very long time.
The much-vaunted Israeli intelligence services don’t seem to have caught this happening, or if they did, nothing was done about it.
TEL AVIV, Israel – The Hezbollah force that fought Israel to a draw in a month-long border conflict is the product of a two-decade, Iranian-nurtured program that took a guerrilla group and transformed it into a full-blown Shiite Muslim army.
Interviews with Israeli soldiers and officers as well as published accounts of battles and analyses by experts on military affairs show that Hezbollah has been able to integrate an astonishing array of military capabilities, far outstripping what many Israelis understood were its abilities.
[…] “They’ve been hiding their tracks beautifully,” said Timor Goksel, a former U.N. peacekeeper who spent 20 years in southern Lebanon and now teaches a course in ethnic conflict at the American University of Beirut. “Even I’m surprised that they were able to build all these systems.”
Not that I have much confidence in UN peacekeepers, but here’s one admitting up front that he spent 20 years in Lebanon and didn’t have a clue that Hezbullah and Iran were building up a powerful army right under the UN’s nose.
“This was a real army, a command army, well trained and well equipped,” said political scientist Gerald Steinberg, the director of the Conflict Management and Negotiation program at Israel’s Bar Ilan University. The Palestinian Hamas movement, he said, “will want it more than they ever wanted it before, and they’ll have to work harder than ever to get it. Everybody is going to be much more aware and much more willing to let Israel take action precisely to prevent a situation where Gaza turns into south Lebanon.”
The good news is that Israel is getting information from the Hezbullah fighters captured in the war. The bad news is that the organization is already so thorough that it proves the cease-fire was nothing but a boon to Israel’s enemies, as was the lack of follow-through in the ground war. Ground forces should have gone in the first week. That they did not means the next battle is going to be much more costly in terms of lives.
The Israeli invasion showed that Hezbollah, with Iran’s help, had taken hundreds of small steps to create a powerhouse. Among them:
-It acquired thousands of Russian-made anti-tank missiles from Syria and Iran, then trained its forces to use them. The missiles were startlingly effective not just against Israeli tanks but also against houses and other buildings where Israeli troops sought shelter.
-It set up a top-down, stealthy military structure that tightly controls operations and is led by a covert chief of staff whose name isn’t known to the Israelis or at least isn’t made public. Israeli military officials think that some promising Hezbollah fighters have been sent to special Iranian command courses.
-It established a combat-ready organization: a logistics branch to handle the delivery of food, fuel and munitions; a black-clad special forces unit to conduct daring combat missions and abduct Israeli soldiers; navy commandos; and an infantry that trains for complex operations and supports the other units.
-It set up a reserve system that consists of former full-time fighters who can be called back to service and “weekend warriors” who undergo regular training but generally haven’t seen combat.
So far, the IDF has been caught napping by Hezbullah. Unless Israel has a major upheaval of leadership as a result of the failures of the war, I don’t see anything good happening anytime soon.
Israeli soldiers have been stunned by Hezbollah’s first-strike strategy. First Sgt. Guy Nehama’s paratroop unit lost its commander, a lieutenant, when Hezbollah commandos fired an anti-tank rocket through the wall of a house in the village of Ait a Shaab where they were staying during the third week of the conflict. The impact sent shards of metal flying, decapitating the commander before his eyes.
“Maybe the IDF knew,” Nehama said, referring to the Israel Defense Forces. “But the people of Israel didn’t know that the Hezbollah got so much stronger.”
Goksel, the former U.N. peacekeeper, said that every Hezbollah member in south Lebanon had three changes of clothing in his closet: dress uniforms for parades, fatigues to fight in and the ordinary civilian clothes he wears by day to mask his membership.
So, how many “civilians” were killed in Lebanon again?
I am not normally a pessimist. But Israel is at an existential nexus, as is the rest of the West. If we cannot retool our armies to fight the jihadists, 9/11 is going to be the least of our problems. If Israel remains complacent about the Iran and Syria threats leveled at them through Hezbullah, Hamas, and the other terrorist groups, Israel as we know it will not survive. And the modern Muslims have never shown mercy to the Jews. An Arab/Persian victory would result in a second Holocaust, while the world tsk-tsked and wrote op-eds about how the Jews brought it on themselves for the decades of occupation.
I don’t know if Ariel Sharon would have suffered the same failures as Ehud Olmert. I suspect not; he was a general, and a good one at that. But he’s not here, and Israel needs a new leader to step up and save his country. Israel’s enemies were heartened by the failure of Israel to commit to winning this one. And clearly, an air attack is not the way to defeat a terrorist army.
If the IDF doesn’t wake up, and soon—I don’t want to even think about it.