Haaretz
Av 4, 5766
In the middle of the week, a close personal friend
of U.S. President George Bush, who is also a generous donor to the
Republican Party, called an Israeli friend who is a senior officer in the
Israel Defense Forces. "What's happening with you?" he asked, as angry as
he was disappointed. "The best army in the region, one of the best armies
in the world, is messing for two weeks with a terrorist organization three
kilometers from the border, and the rockets keep falling on its population
centers? We sent our army to bleed 6,000 miles from home after September
11. What's stopping you?"
Because this is the true surprise - a
surprise of statesmen and not of intelligence - of the campaign in the
north: no American red light, no flashing orange light, and not even a
mere green light, but the blaring siren of the sheriff's car sitting
behind the hesitant driver at the intersection urging him to get moving.
The global cop is recruiting Israel as a regional cop, to impose Security
Council Resolution 1559 on the government of Lebanon and dismantle the
Hezbollah army. Sun, stand still at Givon. The Red Sea parts for the
Israelites, as in Paramount Pictures, but this time there is no Moses
around, maybe because Charlton Heston is sick.
Two forces of
nature influenced all of Israel's wars: time and America. The two are
really one. Time was always pressing. To move quickly to the offensive, to
push far into the Arab territories before the world could figure out what
was going on, because the moment they figured it out the Security Council
would be convened and Israel would be halted and forced to give back the
spoils. There was no lack of reasons for the desire to abbreviate the war
- to spare lives, to free up the mobilized economy and to end the war with
enough supplies in case hostilities resumed quickly - but the supreme
imperative was to run as far as possible before the White House waved the
black flag.
This time, though, it's convenient for Washington to
have its Israeli protege whip the ward of the provocative power and even
administer a thrashing. The difference, of course, lies in the identity of
the adversary - Khomeinist Iran and not communist Russia.
Hassan
Nasrallah is the leader of the Lebanese branch of the Revolutionary
Guards, the local hand of Tehran's long arm. The hand's victory is the
arm's victory; the hand's defeat, the arm's defeat. It was not the IDF's
invasion of Lebanon and its 18-year presence there that engendered
Hezbollah, but the Khomeini revolution of 1979. Jimmy Carter, with the
self-righteousness that helped bring down the corrupt regime of the shah,
contributed to the appearance of an even greater disaster. In the eyes of
Hezbollah and its patrons, Israel is only one of the enemies. Hezbollah's
fiercest terrorist attacks were perpetrated against the Americans and the
French. Britons and others were also among the hostages who were grabbed
in the 1980s like hot pitas. This is a war of religion and culture, which
has no everlasting compromises, only tactical respites.
It is also
turning the zealous Shiites into fighters who are ready to sacrifice
themselves to sanctify the name of Allah. In 1988 Yitzhak Gershon was the
commander of a Paratroops battalion that fought a bitter battle against
Hezbollah at Maidoun. When he got back, he told his friends, "They aren't
Palestinians. It's really hard with them." Without planes, tanks or
artillery, it was hard to overcome them when the IDF, with the South
Lebanon Army (SLA), was deployed in the security zone. It is even more
costly when they are entrenched on a line from which they have decided not
to retreat.
The IDF's unilateral withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000,
without an apparatus to prevent the strengthening of Hezbollah with
steep-trajectory weapons and on the line of contact, made the resumption
of the war a matter for Iran and Syria to decide, with implementation by
Hezbollah. In the years since then, senior IDF personnel were frightened
of their image as fomenters of fear. People say that we are scaring people
for no reason, they said, so maybe we should stop portraying Hezbollah as
a terrifying monster. Now they regret not having stuck to the nightmarish
scenario.
In their defense, those who previously played down
Hezbollah's importance say that circumstances made it tricky to deliver a
preventive blow on the eve of the U.S. war in Iraq and during the "orange
revolution" in Beirut, when the Syrians were ousted from Lebanon.
Nasrallah also made a mistake, IDF personnel said this week, because the
Iranians, who were pleased by Nasrallah's provocations against Israel, are
afraid that the Israeli response, with its American backing, has weakened
Iran. Accordingly, in the evaluation of the General Staff, Nasrallah's
status in Tehran has been seriously eroded.
And not only his, and
not only in Tehran. In every war there were disagreements and weaknesses
at the top level - prime ministers, defense ministers, chiefs of staff,
commanders of corps and fronts. The public did not know, in real time,
about David Ben-Gurion vs. Israel Galili in 1948, about the unwell
Ben-Gurion and Moshe Dayan vs. Asaf Simhoni in 1956, about Yitzhak Rabin's
collapse in 1967, about the war of the generals in the Southern Command in
1973, and one could go on to 1982 and further. Now everything is
transparent, though there is still a certain restraint in reporting about
the quarrels at the top.
At the center of the dispute now is
Northern Command. In recent years the IDF has greatly enhanced the status
of the generals of the territorial commands. They are the
commanders-in-chief of the campaigns in their sectors. This tendency began
when Shaul Mofaz was chief of staff, increased under Moshe Ya'alon, and
would have hit new heights under Dan Halutz - until it encountered
reality. The General Staff is indeed supposed to deal with the big
decisions of the war and prepare the days to come, but the immediate
decisions, which are the prerogative of the GOCs (generals of command)
carry strategic implications when they come at a cost of many casualties
and affect the public mood, as a blow that lands on it between the
incessant landing of Katyusha rockets. When the General Staff orders heavy
fire to be unleashed before direct contact, and the spirit of the order
fizzles out on the way, the right address for complaints is in both the
headquarters.
The previous GOCs in the north had a local
background. The current GOC, Major General Udi Adam, has little military
acquaintance with the arena. He was a fairly random appointment, on the
verge of his retirement from the IDF as head of the Technological and
Logistics Directorate, when the intention to appoint Major General Yiftah
Ron Tal, GOC Army Headquarters (land forces) as GOC Northern Command was
held up by the military advocate general and finally canceled.
The
IDF repeatedly carried out offensive exercises under the codename of
"Magen Haaretz" (Shield of the Land) to activate multidivisional forces in
Lebanon should hostilities there resume. In the transition from exercise
to reality, Adam preferred not to implement the big plan but to make do
with limited and gradual ground activity. As such, he was a partner-victim
to the puzzling mistake of the chief of staff, who did not demarcate the
operational moves in time. It is one thing to believe that the Americans
are providing time, but a different thing to manage the fighting as though
there is no time, because at any moment something could happen and the
circumstances will change. This is the lesson that Henry Kissinger taught
in October 1973. On the way to Moscow, he reassured Israel and gave it all
the time in the world, and the next day he changed his mind and the time
ran out. Even when the government feels that Kissinger or Bush are not
exerting pressure, an army is supposed to talk in terms of days and hours
and make haste accordingly.
Adam decided - and the General Staff
pondered and ratified - to refrain from amassing all the divisions of the
big plan, and in the initial stages also to avoid activating all those
that reported for duty. That decision had a reciprocal effect in
connection with Halutz's decision not to send reserve units into Lebanon.
For days (and nights) another ground move was waiting on the threshold of
Lebanon, and for various reasons - from the weather to the climate of
opinion among the decision-makers - it was delayed. The result was the
focus on the battles of Maroun Ras and Bint Jbail, whose cost in terms of
the fallen of Maglan and Egoz, Golani and the Paratroops and the
helicopter pilots was too high for a limited achievement in the fighting
to be considered justified. What would have come across as successful, or
at least tolerable, with few casualties, will resonate as a failure in the
light of the cost so far; and therefore a greater achievement is needed.
In his attitude toward Adam, the chief of staff tread on the thin
ice of responsibility toward the operational mission, toward the defense
of the civilians, toward the fighters who are endangering their lives,
toward the GOC Northern Command himself. It is impossible tell a front
commander "No" too many times, or alternatively to urge him on again and
again, without sending him the message that his superiors have lost their
confidence in him, and without bringing about a similar outcome of loss of
confidence from below. Organizational bypasses, in the form of procedures
to authorize "OS" (operations and sorties) or the appointment of
"advisers" are too clumsy and do not foment a substantive change.
Adam is an Armored Corps officer who in the first two weeks
activated mainly brigade teams of infantry and the Engineers Corps (and
also tanks). Halutz bears the burden of proof of the primacy of air power.
In his immediate vicinity are three major generals from the infantry: his
deputy, Moshe Kaplinsky; chief of operations Gadi Eisenkott; and the GOC
Army headquarters, Benny Gantz, whose appointment states that he is also
"adviser to the chief of staff on the implementation of the land force."
Advice is not command.
Brigadier General Eyal Eisenberg, a former
commander of Shaldag, a special forces unit, and of the Givati infantry
brigade, and now commander of a reserve division that trained also for
missions in Lebanon, was asked to prepare deep-penetration operations, but
until they are authorized he became Adam's adviser on the activation of
special forces.
In order not to rely on the chief of staff alone,
Defense Minister Amir Peretz appointed Major General (res.) Gabi Ashkenazi
as the ministry's director general. The word in the General Staff is that
not all the military reports to Peretz arrive properly and in full;
rightly or wrongly, the blame for this is laid at the feet of Peretz's
military secretariat, headed by Brigadier General Eitan Dangot, whom the
IDF would be happy to replace, except that Peretz has fallen desperately
in love with him. This is part of the tensions within and between the
various echelons: there will be no big fights over glory here.
In
the past two weeks, Peretz has repeatedly convened his
political-diplomatic team, a mix of the Oslo process, the Center Party and
the General Staff of the 1990s: Dalia Rabin and Amnon Lipkin-Shahak; Major
Generals (res.) Ami Sagis, Amos Malka, David Ivri and Danny Rothschild;
Daniel (son of Lord Michael) Levy; Peretz's close assistant Haggai Alon;
Pini Meidan from the Mossad espionage agency and from Ehud Barak's bureau;
retired ambassador Avi Primor; and former Mossad man and Foreign Ministry
director general David Kimche. Meidan and Kimche also go on secret
missions abroad for Peretz.
One of the proposals that was raised
by the team: to strive for a peace treaty with Lebanon. As though there
had not been the abortive treaty with Amin Jemayel in 1983, of which
Kimche was one of the promoters. As could be expected, proposals to make
contact with the Christians in Lebanon came up again, this time with
General Michel Aoun or others. Maybe for that reason, but not only for
that reason, the scent of the pipe of Mossad chief Meir Dagan wafted
through the corridor of his office on Wednesday. Dagan closeted himself
with Peretz for a tete-a-tete, as though he were Condoleezza Rice. The
Lebanese say that in the past few months they apprehended two local Mossad
networks. If that is true, the deal to exchange abductees-prisoners will
also entail the release of the Mossad agents.
Class
matters
The high-sounding talk about an imminent breakthrough
is tempered by a tone of frustration and despair at the state of the war.
General Home Front, the Israeli civilian in the battered north, is
surviving - many people moved up their summer vacation plans - but is
exposing a problematic class society. In a meeting about the home front in
Peretz's office, a general was surprised to learn that in this year of
2006, there are hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have neither a
credit card nor a checkbook. When Major General Gershon, the GOC Home
Front, visited Maaleh Yosef, the council head reminded him that today, the
28th of the month, is a crucial day for those who receive old-age
allowances, but the mobile postal service is refusing to take to the roads
in the north and bring them the money.
When the decision-makers in
the government are frozen in their hesitations about the additional ground
move, and the tension rises between the General Staff and Northern Command
on the one hand and between the General Staff and the defense minister's
bureau on the other hand, when the casualties mount and the rockets fall,
the weight of factors that are outside Israeli control increases.
First among these is American forbearance, which will ultimately
run out in light of the IDF's performance, but equally important is the
threat that constantly hangs over the leaders of Lebanon. The Druze leader
Kamal Junblatt, the prime minister Rashid Karameh, the president Rene
Moawad, the prime minister Rafik Hariri and of course Bashir Jemayel were
victims of assassination, and it makes no difference whether the trigger
was of the machine gun was squeezed or the button of the explosive device
pressed by Iranian, Syrian or Hezbollah agents. Bashir is "murderable," an
Israeli intelligence man warned in the summer of 1982, and he was indeed
murdered and toppled the whole house of cards when he went down. Fouad
Siniora knows that, and so do those who want to count on Siniora.
"A rule of thumb in Lebanon," a member of the General Staff who
fought in Lebanon said in mid-July, "is that every operation against
Katyushas lasts approximately two weeks" - in 1981, 1993 and 1996. This
week the general was asked what happened to the rule. I guess the finger
has to be changed, he said - or whoever it's connected to.