Israel-Lebanon War

Paul Rogers of the Oxford Research Group has been following the Israel-Lebanon War with report at OpenDemocracy.net.  The latest is An unfinished war 08/14/06.  He writes of Israel's announced plan for an early withdrawal of ground troops from Lebanon:

Israel's belief in the value of an early withdrawal is underpinned by knowledge that Hizbollah remains highly effective; if the ceasefire were to break down with up to 20,000 IDF personnel embedded across much of southern Lebanon, the result would be a situation where the IDF would suffer heavy casualties while Hizbollah would still retain most of its missiles. This is just one more indicator of the problems facing the Olmert government, now that calls for Olmert's resignation are increasing.

More generally, it is indicative of the concern among neo-conservatives and other pro-Israeli groups in Washington that Israel has failed to use the political and military support offered by the United States to decisively defeat Hizbollah (see "The US and Israel: a marriage under pressure" (7 August 2006).

The concern in Washington is mirrored in criticisms in Israel that the Bush administration actively encouraged the Olmert government to take action against Hizbollah. While the United States did not specifically urge Israel to respond to the Hizbollah border raid, this was little more than an incident that set up a pre-planned operation. Moreover, at a key meeting between Bush and Olmert at the White House on 23 May, seven weeks before the start of the war, Bush is reported to have made clear his support for Israeli military action against Hizbollah (see Robert Parry, "Israeli Leaders Fault Bush on War" Consortium News, 13 August 2006).

Rogers talks about how eager the neocons and nationalists in the Cheney-Bush administration are to go to war against Iran and warns, "The guns of August might yet become the bombs of October."

In Why Israel is losing 08/09/06, from last week before the ceasefire and whose link doesn't seem to be working right now, he wrote about the ways in which the reputation of the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) had already taken a big hit:

The sense in which Israel is the loser is that it has focused its security over many years on deterrence through the threat of overwhelming military force - and that is failing.

He also wrote:

There are strong suspicions that Israel's own capabilities are being backed up by the much larger American space-based systems, yet another way in which this is a proxy war ...

A further issue that has come to the fore is the relative significance of Syria rather than Iran as a source of Hizbollah's arsenal.  Israel and American hawks have been instent that the real enemy is Iran, but IDF data now indicates that Syria is more important than previously believed (see Robert Wall, David A Fulghum and Douglass Barrie, "Harsh Trajectories", Aviation Week, 7 August 2006).