JUST NU: Israel anfaller Libanon [2006]

Spelar ingen roll hur välutbildade trupper man har om befälen är idioter som anfaller där fienden är som starkast.

Syria continues its efforts to transfer large quantities of war materiel, including rockets, to Lebanon, in an effort to assist Hezbollah in its war against Israel, a senior Israel Defense Forces source told Haaretz on Saturday.

According to the IDF source, the air force has succeeded in partially stemming the arms transfers, but intelligence shows that supply convoys have managed to cross into Lebanon from Syria.

Senior Syrian army and intelligence officers are involved in the arms smuggling, according to the senior IDF source, who says it is unlikely this continues without the explicit support of the regime in Damascus.

Two specific types of weapons - anti-tank missiles and rockets used to target Israeli civilians - are of concern.

The alert levels of the Syrian army, especially on the Golan Heights, is at its highest levels since the Lebanon War in 1982. The Syrian preparedness is mostly defensive, but the IDF is not excluding the possibility that Damascus will initiate a limited ground operation during the closing stages of the war.

Such an act, from a Syrian point of view, would aim at improving its position toward the end of the current confrontation and force Israel to begin negotiations on a broader diplomatic initiative that would include the return of the Golan Heights.

Part of the IDF's defensive deployment is meant to counter such a threat, including the deployment of anti-aircraft missiles in Haifa and the Sharon to intercept possible launches of Syrian Scud surface-to-surface ballistic missiles targetting Israeli cities.

In another development, in recent fighting, IDF forces uncovered the bodies of a number of fighters who appear to belong to Iran's Revolutionary Guard. No identifying documents were discovered on the bodies but tattoos suggest they belong to the Iranian force.

According to IDF sources, Iran sent several dozen Revolutionary Guard fighters to bolster the ranks of Hezbollah.

"---Halutz started this war with the bluster of an Air-Force officer. He believed that it was possible to crush Hizbullah by aerial bombardment, supplemented by artillery shelling from land and sea. He believed that if he destroyed the towns, neighborhoods, roads and ports of Lebanon, the Lebanese people would rise and compel their government to remove Hizbullah. For a week he killed and devastated, until it became clear to everybody that this method achieves the opposite - strengthens Hizbullah, weakens its opponents within Lebanon and throughout the Arab world and destroys the world-wide sympathy Israel enjoyed at the beginning of the war.

When he reached this point, Halutz did not know what to do next. For three weeks he sent his soldiers into Lebanon on senseless and hopeless missions, gaining nothing. Even in the battles that were fought in villages right on the border, no significant victories were achieved. After the fourth week, when he was requested to submit a plan to the government, it was unbelievably primitive.

If the "enemy" had been a regular army, it would have been a bad plan. Just pushing the enemy back is hardly a strategy at all. But when the other side is a guerilla force, this is simply foolish. It may cause the death of many soldiers, for no practical result.

Now he is trying to achieve a token victory, occupying empty space as far from the border as possible, after the UN has already called for an end to the hostilities. (As in almost all previous Israeli wars, this call is being ignored, in the hope of snatching some gains at the last
moment.) Behind this line, Hizbullah remains intact in their bunkers.---"

"As Israel's military bravely fires away shells and missiles to lay waste the fragile human and physical infrastructure of Lebanon, Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, waging battle on a second front to legitimize Israel's criminal aggression, bravely fires away op-eds from his foxhole at Martha's Vineyard to lay waste the fragile infrastructure of international law. These are but the latest salvoes in Dershowitz's long and distinguished career of apologetics on behalf of his Holy State.

Since becoming a born-again Zionist after the June 1967 war Dershowitz has justified each and all of Israel's egregious violations of international law. In recent years he has used the "war on terrorism" as a springboard for a full frontal assault on this body of law. Appearing shortly after the outbreak of the second intifada, his book Why Terrorism Works (2002) served to rationalize Israel's brutal repression of the uprising. In 2006 Dershowitz published a companion volume, Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways, to justify Israel's preventive use of force against Iran. It is painfully clear from their content that Dershowitz possesses little knowledge or for that matter interest in the timely political topics that purport to be the stimuli for his interventions. In reality each book is keyed to a current Israeli political crisis and seeks to rationalize the most extreme measures for resolving it. If Why Terrorism Works used the war on terrorism as a juggernaut to set back the clock on protection of civilians from occupying armies, Preemption uses the war on terrorism to set back the clock on the protection of states from wars of aggression. Dershowitz's current missives from Martha's Vineyard take aim at the protection of civilians in times of war.---"

Hizbollah tänker t.ex. fortsätta angripa de israeliska trupperna så länge de uppehåller sig i Libanon

Båda parter har sagt ja till vapenvila, men tolkar den på ett sätt som öppnar för fortsatta strider.