Good game Israel... Good game...
Israel did the best job it could but it's lack of coordination and intelligence finally came back to haunt it (and the UN). (I tried to find a USAToday link but this article is, curiously, not on their website)...
Annan used the phrase, "Apparently deliberate" and Olmert has expressed his "dismay" at that choice of words. I don't think anyone in the world thinks that "The UN Observer Post was targeted". What Annan seems to be implying is that, "A location was targeted that happened to be a UN Observer Post". The distinction is an important one. The first implies that Israel targeted Neutral UN Observers intentionally. The second implies that there was some kind of miscommunication or mistargeting.
Either way, this is going to bring renewed pressure on Israel to stop. Israel had a somewhat defensible position when they could claim with some credibility that they were targeting terrorist locations. This bombing will bring the inadequacy of their targeting into stark relief. People are going to ask, "How many other neutral sites have been bombed?" and rightly so.
This war is yet another example of the failure of conventional warfare in battling terrorists. The real issue is, "How do we fight them effectively?" and the world needs to come up with an answer quickly.
In the meantime, I give Israel 48 hours before they're forced by us and the UN to stop, at least temporarily. But I expect Israel to make it a very deadly 48 hours.
3 Comments:
The UN will ask Israel to stop but rather than force them to (we won't either) they will send in their own forces for the purpose of locating Hezbollah. They won't find them easily but at least it will create a cease-fire. I think the biggest shock here is that Iran and Syria didn't just come out and declare war on Israel and then all hell would have broken loose.
Nick, I was a bit surprised Israel kept things up for so long. But I hardly expected that Iran and Syria would declare war. Israel could easily crush Syria, Lebanon, and Iran simultanously. Iran sucks at war; it lost 1 million people and half a trillion dollars in its eight year war with Iraq, and gained zero territory. Plus Israel would probably be ecstatic if Iran declared war. It would give Israel carte blache to destroy Iran's nuclear program, their missile (and other weapons) manufacturing that supplies Hezbollah, and perhaps all of Iran's oil pipelines and other infrastructure.
In response, Iran has little ability to project power. They have a very small navy (which would be destroyed within 24 hours of declaring war), and Iraq and 100,000 US troops stand between Iran and a land attack.
Bottom line, Israel cannot lose any forseeable conflict militarily, even if every country in the Middle East joined in. But it's unclear if they can "win" military, either.
Mike,
I never said I thought Iran and Syria were smart to attack, I was just surprised they didn't. I have thought for a while they viewed their own power as greater than it really is. If anything I was surprised (at the time) they didn't attack because I think they would have thought it would have drawn in other Muslim countries, forced us to do something that we didn't want to do, destablaized the region more than it was already, taken our Middle East support (Qatar and Bahrain, where our Iraq War bases are) away from us if we militarily supported Israel, created an upswell of young militant Muslim men intent on "death to Israel," bogged us down even more in Iraq trying to defend from all sides and within etc etc etc. I never said it would be smart for them to do, just that I was surprised they didn't do something more than what they did which was nothing.
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