Goed verhaal van een Libanees:http://cedarsawakening.blogspot.com/2006/07/99-red-balloons.htmlHassan Nasrallah is clearly in his element. He was ecstatic during his last interview. He wanted mayhem, he got mayhem. Nasrallah's speech could be summarized like this:“this is what we've waited for, this is it boys, this is war”.
At some point of the second Gulf war, Saddam Hussein ordered an armored division to take the highway and move to the southern city of Basra. The tanks never arrived to Basra, they had a big “shoot me” sign sticked on them. Hassan Nasrallah will not do the same mistake. Hezbollah’s specialty is asymmetrical warfare. The militiamen are hiding and Israel is hitting everything except its primary target.
Those who think that this war is against Hezbollah should check the facts twice. I would support a war against Hezbollah, but according to Naharnet on more than 150 attacks, only 10 directly targeted Hezbollah. I can support a war against Hezbollah, but not against my country. Israel has bombed Jounieh, an area where the population used to offer food to Israeli officers in the 80's. Batroun, Halat, Tripoli and the North have also been atacked. There’s no Shias in these areas, let alone Hezbollah fighter - not that the presence of Shia in a neighborhood is sufficient to make it a legitimate target.
A commentator wrote:
The IDF's intelligence on Hizbulla is weak at best - unlike Hamas, they are not present on the ground so it is harder to infiltrate Hizbullah and to collect the information. That's why they are bombing terrorist" bridges and runways, instead of focusing on the real target.I agree. Israel’s failed to get reliable intelligence on Hezbollah is flagrant. They can’t target Hezbollah, so they are pressuring the Lebanese government to do something by targeting the infrastructure.
Hezbollah is said to possess 10,000 to 15,000 rockets. A typical rocket is several meters long and you can’t hide 10,000 of these in your closet; you need large but hidden facilities to store them. Hezbollah maintains secret arsenal(s) in this country, secret jail(s), training facilities(s) and plenty of safe houses for party officials, who are always on the move. Israeli intelligence has not been able to identify a single serious target, unless you consider bridges and lighthouses military targets.
Israel has shelled Hezbollah position in the South. But they were evacuated before.
Israel has bombed Hezbollah's HQ, if such a thing exists. It was empty.
Israel has bombed Nasrallah's house. Nasrallah rarely sleeps there
Despite Olmert's claims about crushing the Shia militia, history has shown that an air campaign is not very effective against Hezbollah.
It is not true that the sea blockade will prevent Hezbollah of transfering the 2 soldiers to Iran. If Nasrallah wanted to hide them in Iran, which is doubtful, he would have sent them through Syria. There are plenty of dirt roads between Lebanon and Syria, so bombing the highway is totally useless.
I also wish they had made better strategic military moves. One commenter noted that the airport and roads are strategic targets, which is true. However, the Israelis have not bombed the illegal roads between Syria and Lebanon used by Hezbollah, Palestinian militants, and smugglers. They have not bombed the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine's tunnel networks on the border with Syria in the Bekaa.
[...]
At the beginning, the Western and Israeli media portrayed Israel's bombardment of the South as merely strategic. Journalists kept reporting that Israel did not want the kidnapped soldiers taken north. However, they didn't bomb the strategic routes out of the south. Plenty of villagers who lived on the border with Israel moved through the Bekaa and into the mountains over Beirut. That's the exact kind of route Hezbollah would use to take the soldiers. In fact, from the Bekaa, they could have taken them anywhere in Lebanon, into the Palestinian cave networks, or into Syria. LPIt is not true that the airport is used to smuggle missiles. Hezbollah's weapons are transported from Syria to the Bekaa, in the Eastern half of Lebanon.
There's no need for the IAF to bomb convoys of refugees, especially when the airplanes are dropping leaflets telling people to evacuate – which is already hard enough considering the state of the roads. Hezbollah is a guerilla, they don't fight in an open terrain, they don't move in convoys. If there’s a big spot on the radar, it won’t be Hezbollah.
Israel’s strategy is to target the infrastructure and inflict economic damage to the country. Israel thinks that it can 1) force the Lebanese government to act against Hezbollah 2) make the cost of any future escalation so high that Nasrallah will think twice before going to war. That assumes that Hezbollah actually cares about the cost of its actions but I wouldn't bet on that, especially if Iran is willing to fight until the last Lebanese.
I doubt that this strategy will work. I think that the scale of the Israeli offensive is an error (see my previous post). Normal citizens like me feel like pawns in a bigger game and are fed up of seeing their country hijacked by a pro-Syrian militia. All we can do is to count our deads and to wait for the storm to pass.
# posted by V @ 7/16/2006 07:21:00 PM
This, however, is a passing nightmare; in time the earth will become again incapable of supporting life, and peace will return.
-- Bertrand Russell
Glasnosteraar=Godslasteraar