Hezbollah’s Victory: Illusion or Reality?

[bemildred]

First guy I've seen to imply the IDF lost on purpose.

JEDDAH, 21 August 2006 — Now that the 34-day war on Lebanon is perhaps over, it is imperative to decide who won. In my view, the Israeli war on Iran and Syria which took place on Lebanese soil had a completely different agenda and objectives. Yes, on one hand, we can applaud Hezbollah for destroying a dozen Israeli tanks and killing a few soldiers and we can congratulate them for winning the war based on tactical and basic assessments. Or we can see it differently based on the true Israeli objectives.

Unless we see things accurately, we can never have true and clear objectives and plant a good vision. I believe that Israel’s real objectives were to test Hezbollah’s weaponry and army strength for future plans, push Hezbollah off the blue line as far as possible and replace it with a Lebanese and international army to take responsibility, hurt Hezbollah’s fighters and damage its image in the eyes of its followers by killing and uprooting them as much as possible and most importantly take away the negotiation card (Hezbollah) that Syria and Iran have for bargaining with the US; Syria for the investigation of the Rafik Hariri assassination, as well as controlling Lebanon again because it provided very well for the Syrian regime; and Iran for nuclear reasons and Shiite prominence in the region.

I think Israel made the Arab world “illusively believe” that Hezbollah won this war for a very vital reason, to make all Arabs and especially Muslims feel proud. Yes, feel proud so that they exhaust all their frustration and think less and less of any possible immediate revenge, especially after wiping out more than 1,100 civilians from the south and uproot more than 500,000, all supporters of Hezbollah.

This feeling will be even greater when Ehud Olmert is out of the Israeli government, making the Arabs feel they won even further. In a nutshell, Israel created an “illusive” feeling that Hezbollah won the war, making the Arabs focus on the wrong objectives, while the planners of this war are triumphing behind curtains for meeting their true objectives.

Arab News

[Dover]

1. Was thinking this too, though it seems that this imagined 'victory'

is also being used by Hezbollah and their supporters to boost morale, according to some M.E. news sources.

[bemildred]

10. Neither side appears to have done much damage to the other.

In substantive terms at least, although there is plenty of speculation on the subject, and Lord Knows plenty of ordinance was expended, and lots of stuff destroyed and rubble bounced. Hezbullah did a better job of "lowering expectations" and thus comes out looking more like it did what it said it would, and that is the substance of the "victory" at this point. The extent of actual damage done may become clearer as time goes on.

[Fredda Weinberg]

2. And sometimes, a cigar is a cigar

Israel stated her objective: eliminate the threat posed by Hezbollah. When the UN offered to serve as an effective buffer, a ceasefire was agreed to - if that promise isn't kept, don't be surprised if the conflict re-erupts.

[GeorgeGist]

3. Rubbish...

[The Magistrate]

4. Full Points For Ingenuity And Creativity, My Friend

Too clever by half is the technical term most familiar to me....

Though there are some interesting features. Whether intended as such or not, the operation in the south certainly was in effect a reconnaisance by force, and probably will pay off in future engagements if studied by the staffs with clear eyes. Some of the rest of the author's second paragraph of objectives are pretty close to the fall-back positions ennunciated by the Israelis after the first flush of certainty in the early hours, and to some degree may have been achieved.

[bemildred]

6. "Drivel" is my usual choice.

It is true that the results are being studied as we speak in excruciating detail in numerous places. That is a separate issue from whether one has achieved one's military and political objectives or no. As I mentioned earlier, there is every reason to expect a second round, possibly not too far off ...

[wakeme2008]

5. Isreal lost the ground war big time as Cheney would say

There reserve Army is untrained and has poor equipment. They could even get WATER to a lot of their soldiers...

[many a good man]

7. Maybe it was meant to stop bushcheney from attacking Iran

Sy Hersh's articles hint that Lebanon was supposed to be a dry run for the planned US air assault on Iranian hard sites. Maybe Israel thought this was the only way to stop such foolish thinking.

[ChairmanAgnostic]

8. not illusion. not even close

when the Israelis agreed to work with Dick Cheney and the neocons, and took their advice/push/intel/support, they were doomed. it was their own fault. Because they received so much US support and thought they had an "honest" friend purchased through AIPAC, they also thought that they would get good advice. and good intel.

the problem with good intel is this: no matter how good your satellites, no matter how good your computer searches, e-mail internet and financial info is, no matter how accurate the data, if you have a bunch of hide-bound, self-serving, lying, cheats in charge of analysis and in charge of what intel they decide to let out, you will suffer from fucked up results.

That is the Tao of Cheney. A total fuck-up. By design.

[Lefty48197]

9. If southern Lebanon winds up being governed and secured by the Lebanese

for the first time in a generation, then that will be a defeat for Hezbollah, and a victory for the rest of the world, except of course for Syria and Iran.

[azurnoir]

13. I've gotten the impression that

Hezbollah is trying to align it self with the Lebanese army at least in appearance.

[tocqueville]

11. ArabNews is a Saudi paper

The Saudis fear the shiite Hezbollah more than Israel. And they are right about that.

[madrchsod]

16. as do the european governments

the whitehouse is still hung up on bin boys second rate gangsters while the real threat is the organiztion behind hezbollah.

[azurnoir]

18. I am not so sure

what is fed to the public and what really is are two different things. There is something more going on here, part of that could be that the "organization" or part of it has aligned with the Turks against the Kurds and is actively shelling them in Northern Iraq.

[tocqueville]

20. that was a pretty unfair comment

the real threat in the middle east is the US and its Israeli minions. The Hizbollah and Iran can be dealt with political means. Terrorism can be dealt with police means, not by flattening villages.

[azurnoir]

12. For good or ill

Hezbollah "won" maybe not in a strict military sense. What they won was enormous support and in that sense they are continuing to win. Prior to the war they were a minority party in Lebanon with about 20% support, now that support is around 85% including christians. They are putting enormous effort and money into the rebuilding of Lebanon. This "win" has implications for the future that do not bode well for lasting peace.

[Igel]

14. I read this earlier today

(Arab News being, with The Dawn, on my usual reading circuit).

It would have been funny had it not been so pathetic. It took the idea of fundamentalist auto-victimization to a new high.

We all know the symptoms, I've seen them first hand plenty of times: Any slight, however trivial, is, to a fundamentalist of a certain stripe, persecution against his/her faith. One friend dated a girl around Xmas; his fundamentalism denied Christmas, rejecting it as pagan. The entirety of the date, from his recounting, was harranguing her, trying to get her to see how un-Xian and sinful the holiday was. She didn't call him back. "It's because she denied the Truth." Sigh.

This article is the same. The conspiratorial Zionists are so clever ... they've manipulated us (poor Muslims/Arabs) into thinking we won, so that they can come and destroy us later. The perfidy! The insidiousness! And *we* are better.

Because we figured it out.

Ptooey.

[bemildred]

17. I thought Toqueville's notion as to why this was published

where it was published was worth considering too. Political paranoia often has unstated motives behind it.

[tocqueville]

21. Israel is not a direct threat to the House of Saud

Israel's role is not to disrupt the oil flood, but to secure it by its presence. But a winning Hezbollah can convince the masses to overthrow the "traitors". And the Saudi oil fields are on Shiite territory. It's damned obvious. Saudi Arabia was the first country to condemn the "irresponsible" Hezbollah for "provoking" the attack on Lebanon. They had rapidly to change their tune when the Hezbollah resistance made them into a hero even among the Sunni masses. What ArabNews is doing with the article is damage control.

[bemildred]

22. Yes, they have internal issues too.

Saudi Arabia is far from a homegenous ethnic state, and it's internal politics have been disfunctional for a long time now.

This war has been most inconvenient for the Saudis. I'm not sure how much the Saudi "masses" are up to accomplishing, but it seems clear that the prospect that they might get worked up makes the House of Saud nervous.

[madrchsod]

15. shades of grey

pretty much a stalemate. if there is a winner i would say hezbollah scored the pr victory. the idf did a pretty good job of stopping the resupply of the hezbollah fighters and hezbollah stopped the idf tanks with those russian anti tank weapons.

[FlavaKreemSnak]

19. I don't think they want people putting it like that

Saying that they lost on purpose are are wanting people to have a certain point of view about it. We don't really know what the whole plan is, of course nobody can really win against America or Israel so that is why all the stuff about oh look Hezbollah won and it has redrawn the whole region is one of those things that makes you go hm and realize that there are a lot of touchy subjects in there, and also like I said we don't really know exactly the timetable of America's plan for the new parts of the war on terror.