So why all the long faces in Israel? Certainly, tactical mistakes were made, as they are in all wars. Some forces got ahead of supply lines and had to make do with little food and water. An oft-repeated criticism is that troops shouldn’t have been sent into Bint Jbail. And there was confusion in the closing hours of the war when forces were ordered to attack, then ordered to halt, then ordered once again to attack (perhaps needlessly).
Nevertheless, the kill ratio among combatants was about seven to one in favor of Israel – only slightly lower than that of the Yom Kippur War. Nasrallah himself said in a recent interview that had he known what would happen, he never would have kidnapped the two soldiers. In most countries, such an outcome would earn a general a medal and a fat book deal.
And yet, in Israel’s ferociously self-critical culture, there is a gnawing sense that something went wrong. The country bet heavily on air power, and air power alone couldn’t make the bad guys stop shooting the Katyushas. Not since 1948 have Israeli citizens been forced into bomb shelters for so long.
There’s a strong measure of hindsight in all this. Everyone knows that air power alone can’t win a war, except that in 1999 NATO air power alone defeated the Serbs. And don’t believe the idea floating around that Israel fought as it did because the chief of staff is a career pilot. As reported by Ronen Bregman of Yediot Aharonot, the air strategy was decided upon three years ago by a national security committee headed by former justice minister Dan Meridor. The findings were supported by then-Chief of Staff (and career paratrooper) Moshe Ya’alon.
What happened was not mistakes, but choices. And what really needs to take place is a fundamental debate about those choices. The question is very simply this: are the lives of civilians more important than the lives of soldiers? Put bluntly, do you take more military casualties in order to take fewer civilian casualties?
Israel could have sent a massive land force into Lebanon and flushed out every last Katyusha from every last basement. But that would have cost the lives of 500 Israeli soldiers. The Katyushas only claimed a fraction of those lives. Do you opt for the strategy that claims the fewest lives? Or do you send in the soldiers because that’s their job, because civilians come first and because it’s intolerable to have people sitting in bomb shelters for weeks on end?
I don’t envy the person who has to make that decision. That’s why I believe the people who make the hard choices are entitled to every benefit of the doubt.
Everyone in Israel is clamoring for a commission of inquiry. If past experience is any guide, I can write the report now. It will read “Everyone should have known what was going to happen, so everyone has to resign.” Sacking a general, or a politician, is a drastic result that should only be taken under the most extreme conditions. These people have dedicated their lives – and in many cases shed their blood – for the State of Israel. They shouldn’t be ruined because we all wish the war had turned out better.
This is all the more true when an analysis of the facts leads to the conclusion that the right decision was made. Suppose Israel had gone into Lebanon on the first day and pushed the terrorists all the way to Tehran. Would the situation be better today? Yes – but not by much. Hizbullah would, with time, have reconstituted itself. What was needed was a Lebanese solution and an international solution. Some new force to step in, take responsibility for security south of the Litani River, and put Hizbullah out of business once and for all.
