– Is the Cease-Fire Doomed?

Mid-East Cease-Fire Won't Hold
By Carol Devine-Molin

"If Olmert runs away now from the war he initiated, he will not be able to remain prime minister for even one more day. Chutzpah has its limits. You cannot lead an entire nation to war promising victory, produce humiliating defeat and remain in power. You cannot bury 120 Israelis in cemeteries, keep a million Israelis in shelters for a month, wear down deterrent power, bring the next war very close, and then say - oops, I made a mistake. That was not the intention." - Ari Shavit, Haaretz, August 11, 2006

As a friend of Israel, it really pains me to consider Israel's current plight. As of this writing, just a day before the UN brokered cease-fire is scheduled to take effect pursuant to Resolution 1701, more than 250 rockets are raining down on northern Israel. Hezbollah is claiming victory, and for good reason: Israelis never succeeded in halting Hezbollah's rocket-launching spree or even significantly slowing it down. I have no doubt that Israelis inflicted considerable harm upon Hezbollah's infrastructure in Lebanon during this military campaign. But, frankly, it wasn't enough. From all indications, it appears that the Israeli forces were undermined by decisions that were out of their control.

Unfortunately, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made a royal mess of things, given two crucial errors in judgment: a) underestimating the capability of Hezbollah, and, b) over-relying on Israeli airpower particularly at the inception of fighting. To position themselves propitiously in the warfare arena, Israelis must always eschew a "minimalistic" or "proportional" approach, and hit their very dangerous enemies with everything they've got. In other words, hit hard, hit fast, and utilize coordinated air power and ground troops, which is absolutely essential when tackling entrenched enemy forces located in bunkers, tunnels and surrounded by local citizenry in towns and cities (often blurring the lines between enemies and civilians). These are basics, and I'm certainly not going to insult the intelligence of Israeli military personnel and their commanders that well understand these concepts. They are scarcely to blame for the current outcome. I believe that the civilian leadership bears much of the burden for mishandling the war effort. From what I gather, Olmert doesn't have much in the way of combat credentials. Moreover, his thinking might be somewhat askew, as I'll explain.

I'm certainly not in a position to evaluate Olmert's mental faculties, but frankly some of his public remarks have been somewhat controversial. In 2005 at the Israel Policy Forum, Olmert stated: ""We (the Israelis) are tired of fighting, we are tired of being courageous, we are tired of winning, we are tired of defeating our enemies, we want that we will be able to live in an entirely different environment of relations with our enemies." In response, Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes characterized Olmert's comments as an "ascent to Cloud Cuckoo Land" and rather "woolly-minded". I sense a somewhat defeatist, self-indulgent tone about Olmert's remarks. He has no right to be "tired", in view of the fact that Israel is fighting for its very survival. In any event, Olmert's decisions in this current war certainly thwarted Israel's overall efforts.

Now Hezbollah is gleeful, poised to regroup and rearm. Moreover, this perceived victory by Hezbollah will surely embolden that terror organization and its supporters throughout the Middle East and the world, making Israel more vulnerable to attack then ever. Hezbollah certainly has the advantage as perceived victor, having stood up to arguably the best military in the region. In the aftermath of this loss, Israelis will have to closely examine what went wrong. Clearly, the way this current war is being fought seems out-of-place among Israel's past military campaigns.

With the cease-fire countdown underway, Israel launched an expanded offensive, with triple the manpower, about 30,000 troops, now in Lebanon to finish the job against Hezbollah. Israel plans to tackle those entrenched Hezbollah terrorists, as its forces back-out from the Litani River. The Israelis expect to continue fighting for the next week or two until the UN "peacekeeping" troops are set in place. You have to ask yourself why Israel waited until the very end to address these dug-in terrorists. Again, if this campaign had been prosecuted adeptly, this would not have been a last minute effort. The Bush administration can't be sanguine about the fact that Israel didn't handle this war more effectively.

Personally, I believe journalist Ari Shavit is spot-on in his above-stated assessment: Israel is in need of new leadership. My hunch is that when Israelis really contemplate their overall circumstances, they'll realize they require a new prime minister with sterling combat credentials - a genuine warrior-at-heart - who will provide them with security and optimism through strength. Israelis are smart people, and I'm sure they know that negotiations only benefit the terrorists and their rogue nation sponsors, Syria and Iran. Besides, when has the United Nations ever been a friend to Israel? Peace with Hezbollah will only be achieved when that terror group is decimated. Israelis should ignore the "peace in our time" Neville Chamberlain crowd; a cease-fire agreement approved by the jackals is not worth the paper it's written on. That being said, it's a solid bet that Israel and Hezbollah are destined to battle-it-out once again in the not-too-distant future.

Lastly, here's something that the readership might find amusing: On the nationally syndicated Monica Crowley radio program, a caller felt that Israel's plight was somewhat comparable to that of fictional character Tony Soprano. I should explain that especially in the New York metropolitan region, the Sopranos has a cult following - People read various kinds of life-lessons into the Sopranos series for idiosyncratic reasons. Yes, the Sopranos speak to them on many different levels - go figure. In any event, the caller felt that Tony Soprano had to deck a subordinate with his fists to demonstrate that he was still a force to be reckoned with after barely surviving his gunshot wounds. In other words, in this world where brute force prevails, it was necessary for Tony Soprano to reestablish his bonafides. Likewise -- and I'm paraphrasing here -- the caller opined it was necessary for Israel to definitively demonstrate its bonefides as the premier military force in the Middle East, able to take on all challengers. As we say in New York, "real deep". Then again, there could be something to this "alpha dog" theory.