For Israel, 2006 Lessons but Old Pitfalls

[groovedaddy]

JERUSALEM — This time, Israeli military commanders are leading from the front, not trying to direct the infantry from television screens. This time, the military has clear plans, in stages, drawn up with a year’s preparation. This time, there is no illusion about winning a war only from the air. This time, the military chief of staff has kept his silence in public, all cellphones have been confiscated from Israeli soldiers, and the international press has been kept out of the battlefield.

In these and many other ways, Israel is applying the lessons it learned from its failed 2006 war against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon to its current war against Hamas in Gaza. But Israel’s failure in Lebanon also stemmed from a political and diplomatic inability to decide on clear objectives for the outcome of the war, and here the lessons of Lebanon have been not so well applied, according to senior Israeli military officials and political analysts.

And then there are the sudden events that can throw off so many careful calculations and come to symbolize the horrors of war — like the deaths of civilians from Israeli munitions in Qana, Lebanon, both in 1996 and 2006, and the reports on Tuesday evening of as many as 40 people, including children, killed as they sought shelter in a United Nations school in northern Gaza.

While accounts of exactly what happened were unclear on Tuesday night, with Israeli officials suggesting that the school compound was used to fire mortars, the deaths will inevitably turn stomachs all over the world and increase pressure on Israel for an early cease-fire.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/world/middleeast/07military.html?_r=1&th&emc=th