U.S. Army Analysis of the Lebanon War:Not Easy Reading, but It Helps Explain What Happened

Some Israelis remain angry over the conduct of the Lebanon war in 2006. Reservists believe they were poorly equipped, trained and led. Residents of the north felt they were abandoned and believe today that they’re still not protected from Hizbullah rockets. Many Israelis were hoping that the Winograd Commission report on the Lebanon war would give voice to their concerns. But the Winograd report was so sidetracked by domestic Israeli politics and publicists’ spin that relatively little was distilled from it.

A new study by the U.S. Army's Combined Arms Center, We Were Caught Unprepared: The 2006 Hizbullah-Israeli War by Matt M. Matthews, helps provide a clear picture of what led to the war and of its failures. Matthews also presents his study as a warning to the U.S. Army [blue sections below are excerpts from Matthews’ study]:

After years of conducting successful counterinsurgency operations against the Palestinians, the Israeli military encountered substantial problems in shifting its focus to major combat operations against Hizbullah. As with the IDF prior to the 2006 war, the U.S. Army, at least for the last three years, has focused almost exclusively on irregular warfare. For the IDF, these operations seriously dulled ground maneuver combat skills, particularly among tank crewmen.

Matthews presents analyses of Hizbullah’s development, Israel’s hasty retreat from Lebanon in 2000, and Hizbullah’s planning for the 2006 war. One section cites Hizbullah’s “13 principles of war,” revealed over a decade ago by veteran Israeli analyst Ehud Ya’ari. They were relevant in Lebanon in 2006; they’re relevant today in Gaza, too.

Hizbullah’s principles of war were specifically designed to defeat a relatively fixed, technologically advanced enemy:

1. Avoid the strong, attack the weak—attack and withdrawal!
2. Protecting our fighters is more important than causing enemy casualties!
3. Strike only when success is assured!
4. Surprise is essential to success. If you are spotted, you have failed!
5. Don’t get into a set-piece battle. Slip away like smoke, before the enemy can drive home his advantage!
6. Attaining the goal demands patience, in order to discover the enemy’s weak points!
7. Keep moving; avoid formation of a front line!
8. Keep the enemy on constant alert, at the front and in the rear!
9. The road to the great victory passes through thousands of small victories!
10. Keep up the morale of the fighters; avoid notions of the enemy’s superiority!
11. The media has innumerable guns whose hits are like bullets. Use them in the battle!
12. The population is a treasure—nurture it!
13. Hurt the enemy and then stop before he abandons restraint!

Matthews describes the incredibly complex and unrealistic defense doctrine, “Effects-Based Operations (EBO),” adopted by chief of staff and former Air Force commander Dan Halutz. The doctrine confused Israeli commanders and led inevitably to battlefield failures.

According to [Israeli reserve officer] Ron Tira, the new doctrine inflated the “focus on the cognitive side of war and the media war. Instead of killing the bad guys like in the good old days, they wanted to create a ‘consciousness of victory’ on our side and ‘cognitive perception of defeat’ on the other side.” Commanders need to speak in a simple accessible manner, composed essentially of two things: what do we occupy and what do we blow up. This is understandable.

One of the major problems within the IDF, Tira explained to Matthews, was “the over-zealous embrace of the American effects-based operations (EBO) idea. EBO’s aim is to paralyze the enemy’s operational ability, in contrast to destroying its military force. This is achieved by striking the headquarters, lines of communication, and other critical junctions in the military structure. EBO [was] employed in their most distinct form in the Shock and Awe campaign that opened the 2003 Iraq War. However, the Americans used EBO to prepare the way for their ground maneuvers, and not as an alternative to them.”

Matthews details the massive Hizbullah construction of 600 bunkers across Lebanon. North Korean engineers were involved in the construction, Matthews writes, a possibility suggested by this author last October in a Jerusalem Post article, Mining for Trouble in Lebanon.

Although the Israeli intelligence community believed Hizbullah’s defensive network was based on “Iranian military doctrine,” another source suggests the elaborate system was based on “a defensive guerrilla force organized along North Korean lines.” In fact, the same source concluded that “all the movement’s underground facilities, including arms dumps, food stocks, dispensaries for the wounded, were put in place primarily in 2003–2004 under the supervision of North Korean instructors.” Evidence further suggests that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard was also heavily involved in the construction effort. Intelligence sources concluded that Hizbullah was “believed to be benefiting from assistance provided by North Korean advisers.

It is very apparent that the new Israeli Chief of Staff, Gabi Ashkenazi (pictured), retains much of his tough Golani Brigade esprit de corps. That means he sees the battlefield with boots-on-the-ground and not just from 30,000 feet. Israel’s defense minister and former IDF chief of staff, Ehud Barak, also knows the smell of cordite. Infantry and armored corps reservists are once again being equipped and trained.

Have Israel’s other politicians learned the lessons of the Lebanon war? The on-and-off operations against Hamas in Gaza do not yet provide a clear answer.

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Shiite Happens in the West Bank and Gaza

Israeli forces killed four top terrorists in Bethlehem yesterday, including Mohammed Shahade (pictured), a senior leader of PIJ – the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Get this straight: While Hamas receives Iranian support, PIJ is in effect Iran’s militia among the Palestinians -- just as Hizbullah serves Iran in Lebanon.

“Muhammad Shahade and the Islamic Jihad in Bethlehem were in direct contact with the Islamic Jihad leadership in Syria from which they received operational orders,” according to the IDF spokesman.

In this case, “leadership in Syria” means Iran.

Shahade was so close to Hizbullah that he was wrapped in a Hizbullah flag at his funeral. Veteran Israeli analyst Ehud Ya’ari reports that Shahade had converted to Shiite Islam. That’s an important development.

Palestinians are traditional Sunni Muslims. For many years suicide was not a prominent factor or religious element in the PLO’s terror war against Israel.

Ironically, Israel itself helped push the Sunni fundamentalist Hamas organization to adopt the Shi’ite Hizbullah’s suicidal and homicidal methods. In 1992, Israel deported some 400 Hamas members to Lebanon. There they were welcomed by Hizbullah who shared their theology as well as their expertise in constructing car bombs and deploying suicide bombers. Under international pressure and after a UN Security Council denunciation, Israel permitted the Hamas terrorists back into the territories after several months, and the Palestinian terror campaign took a more vicious turn.

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The Mercaz Massacre -- Three Thoughts

1. Pity the poor police patrolman who was one of the first to arrive at Yeshivat Mercaz Harav but failed to engage the terrorist. The inexperienced cop stood at the Yeshiva’s doorway with his handgun drawn, apparently frozen with fear. What dread he must have felt hearing the hundreds of shots from inside, listening as the terrorist executed his victims one-by-one. Maybe the cop reflects Israel’s national leadership, frozen by fear and inexperience when terrorist rockets fell on the citizens of Israel’s north during the 2006 Lebanon war or as rockets rain down today on civilians in Sderot and Ashkelon.

2. Virginian Tech student Seung-Hui Cho was undeniably mad and deranged. His bloody shooting spree through the halls of the university last April had no rational rhyme or reason. Only rage and madness. For the parents, friends and families of the 33 victims of the massacre, the grief is compounded by the unanswerable question, “Why?”

No one needs to ask why Alaa Abu Dheim massacred eight young Jewish students last Thursday night in Mercaz Harav Yeshiva in Jerusalem. Abu Dheim apparently went from one wounded victim to the next to shoot them in the head to “confirm the kill.” Unlike the Virginia Tech parents, the relatives of the Mercaz students know exactly why their loved ones were killed: Pure hatred drove Abu Dheim, not madness. Hatred is not a mental disease; nor is it readily curable, especially when it is a decades-old hatred of Jews and Jewish sovereignty fed by poisons imbibed in great quantities in Palestinian mosques, schools, radio, newspapers and TV. We are reluctant to call this hatred “Palestinian mothers’ milk,” but when Palestinian children in nursery school exalt suicide bombers and babies are dressed as bombers, perhaps the description is suitable.

Greg Sheridan, the foreign editor of The Australian, has an important conclusion that few journalists have realized: “In recent months Hamas has shown how willing it is to sacrifice its own people in order to pursue its war against Israel. However, it is wrong to imagine that Hamas is in any sense a mad group. Its strategy is rational. It is also difficult for the Western mind to grasp because of two elements: its genuinely religious foundation, and its willingness to inflict any suffering not only on its enemies, but on its own people.”

It is certainly no “comfort” for the families and friends of the Mercaz eight to know why they were killed, but the knowledge that a determined and murderous enemy is behind the massacre may provide them a fortitude and strength to fight and vanquish the forces of hate.

3. The doors. It always seems like the final defense against terrorists takes place at the doors. Virginia Tech professor Liviu Librescu, an Israeli and Holocaust survivor, blocked the doorway to his classroom to keep the gunman from entering. He died in the struggle, but his students fled out of windows and survived. In 1972 in Munich, Israel’s Olympic wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg and weightlifter Joseph Romano were killed as they bravely fought armed terrorists at the door, thus allowing other Israeli athletes to escape. And on a Friday night in December 2002, 23-year-old Noam Apter was doing kitchen duty in the Otniel Yeshiva when terrorists entered the kitchen. Under fire, Noam ran to the door separating the kitchen from the dining room, locked it and hid the key. By locking himself in with the terrorist he saved 100 students on the other side of the door, but he died in the struggle.

Why was there no fight at Mercaz Harav’s door? Perhaps it was carelessness that there was no private guard stationed at the school. The fact is, however, that hundreds of nurseries and schools in Israel cannot afford to post guards.

So why didn’t the policeman engage the terrorist at Mercaz? Like the planners of the Summer 2006 Lebanon War, maybe he thought the Israeli Air Force would handle the problem.

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More from Jimmy Carter: Pays for Students’ Trip to “Occupied Territories” and Preaches Pure Anti-Semitism in Church

Did anyone notice that 11 Brandeis students took up Jimmy Carter’s challenge to ““visit the occupied territories for a few days to determine whether I have exaggerated or incorrectly described the plight of the Palestinians?” To top it off, Carter reportedly picked up a large chunk of the trip’s $28,500 cost.

The students’ itinerary was published in the Brandeis “community newspaper,” The Hoot: “The delegation spent their first three days in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, where they toured Mt. Zion, the Jewish Quarter, and the Armenian Quarter, and visited Brandeis’ sister school, Al-Quds University and its Center for Political Prisoners’ Affairs. Continuing through Bethlehem, Hebron, Mas’ha, and Ramallah, the delegates then slept with host families in the Deheisheh refugee camp and met with Palestinian Authority presidential runner-up Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, Amal Jadou, the U.S. foreign policy advisor to PA president Mahmoud Abbas, and Omar Barghouti and Jamal Juma, both involved in the Palestinian boycott/divestment campaign. The trip concluded with a two-day stay in Neve Shalom, a mixed Jewish-Arab border community called the ‘Oasis of Peace.’”

Carter’s Center is known as the recipient of millions of dollars from the governments of Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, and Oman and from several prominent Arab leaders, foundations and families, including the “Saudi BinLadin Group.” Did Carter really shell out for the trip, or did he ask one of Saudi buddies to spill out some pocket change?

Carter’s Church Preachings against the Pharisees, Israelis, Jews and Israelites

Carter’s infamous book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid generated widespread debate on whether Carter was an anti-Semite. His anti-Semitism and anti-Israel credentials are now proven in the recently released CD audio series Sunday Mornings in Plains: Bible Study with Jimmy Carter. Published by Simon and Schuster, the CD records Bible lessons over the last 10 years. In a S & S video promo, Carter explains that his lessons relate current events to the Bible.

The following is a recent press report with Carter’s quotes:

“So with impunity, and approved by the Pharisaic law, they [the Pharisees] could avoid taking care of their needy parents by a trick that had been evolved by the incorrect and improper interpretation of the law primarily designed by religious leaders to benefit whom? The rich folks. The powerful people.”

During another Bible lesson Carter discussed the Jewish attitude toward non-Jews. “[‘Uncircumcised’] was an epithet, a highly discriminatory phrase… How would you characterize from a Jew’s point of view the uncircumcised? Non-believer. And what? Unclean. What? They called them dogs, that’s true.”

Michael Miller, a former activist for the Anti Missionary Institute, found that at times Carter actually conflates ancient and modern Jewish history by mistakenly calling Israelites Israelis or Judea Israel. In one example, Carter says, “God would save the Israelites, they would sign a firm commitment or contract or covenant. The Israelis would what? Violate the covenant, break their promises to God. They would be punished.”

More analyses of Carter’s preachings, including his references to Jews killing Jesus, can be found here.

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