Hersh strikes again. A must read.

WATCHING LEBANON
Washington’s interests in Israel’s war.
by Seymour M. Hersh

In the days after Hezbollah crossed from Lebanon into Israel, on July 12th, to kidnap two soldiers, triggering an Israeli air attack on Lebanon and a full-scale war, the Bush Administration seemed strangely passive. “It’s a moment of clarification,” President George W. Bush said at the G-8 summit, in St. Petersburg, on July 16th. “It’s now become clear why we don’t have peace in the Middle East.” He described the relationship between Hezbollah and its supporters in Iran and Syria as one of the “root causes of instability,” and subsequently said that it was up to those countries to end the crisis. Two days later, despite calls from several governments for the United States to take the lead in negotiations to end the fighting, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said that a ceasefire should be put off until “the conditions are conducive.” The Bush Administration, however, was closely involved in the planning of Israel’s retaliatory attacks. President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney were convinced, current and former intelligence and diplomatic officials told me, that a successful Israeli Air Force bombing campaign against Hezbollah’s heavily fortified underground-missile and command-and-control complexes in Lebanon could ease Israel’s security concerns and also serve as a prelude to a potential American preëmptive attack to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations, some of which are also buried deep underground.

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Some commentaries on Hersh's commentary:

Israel Kills 38 Civilians on Eve of Ceasefire
Hersh: Israeli Campaign Dress Rehearsal for War on Iran
250 Hizbullah Rockets Slam into northern Israel, Kill 1
by Juan Cole

Let me say this loud and clear, drawing on Pat Lang. Any US attack on Iran could well lead to the US and British troops in Iraq being cut off from fuel and massacred by enraged Shiites. Shiite irregulars could easily engage in pipeline and fuel convoy sabotage of the sort deployed by the Sunni guerrillas in the north. Without fuel, US troops would be sitting ducks for rocket and mortar attacks that US air power could not hope completely to stop (as the experience of Israel with Hizbullah in Lebanon demonstrates). A pan-Islamic alliance of furious Shiites and Sunni guerrillas might well be the result, spelling the decisive end of Americastan in Iraq. Shiite Iraqis are already at the boiling point over Israel's assault on their coreligionists in Lebanon. An attack on Iran could well push them over the edge. People like Cheney and Bush don't understand people's movements or how they can win. They don't understand the Islamic revolution in Iran of 1978-79. They don't understand that they are playing George III in the eyes of most Middle Eastern Muslims, and that lots of people want to play George Washington.

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Israel's failed 'field test' for a possible US attack on Iran
by Helena Cobban

If so-- and Hersh makes a good case that this was indeed the reason for the generous diplomatic and military support that the Bushites gave to the Israelis throughout the assault-- then the spectacularly unsuccessful politico-military results of the field test, from the US-Israeli perspective, must have left the Iranian mullahs sleeping much more comfortably in their beds...

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Listening to Sy
by Billmon

But like the JCS staffer, I also suspect that failure in Lebanon has badly eroded whatever slim chance remained that war could be avoided. I say that at least in part because of Commander Codpiece and his demonstrated tendency to treat any unexpected reversal or failure as a personal rebuke. It's almost as if he can hear the voice in the back of his head saying: "Well, Junior, it looks like you screwed up again." And the only way to make Babs shut up is to reject reality and plunge on into an even deeper disaster -- like trading Sammy Sosa.

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Another couple from Robert Fisk. As an aside, I'm still wading through his The Great War for Civilisation. He is the rare reporter that actually has a fucking clue as to what happened to get us to now. And the rare reporter that has actually been on the ground -- for decades.

Tea and rockets: café society, Beirut-style
This week: A close shave in downtown Beirut and why you'll never find our man in a flak jacket
by Robert Fisk

In the early hours, motor-cycle riders have been racing down the Corniche outside my home. Petrol is cheap for motor-cycles, and at first I curse the roar of their machines. Then I realise that their insouciance is a form of resistance. In their special way, they are denying the war, refusing to be cowed.

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As the 6am ceasefire takes effect... the real war begins
by Robert Fisk

The real war in Lebanon begins today. The world may believe - and Israel may believe - that the UN ceasefire due to come into effect at 6am today will mark the beginning of the end of the latest dirty war in Lebanon after up to 1,000 Lebanese civilians and more than 30 Israeli civilians have been killed. But the reality is quite different and will suffer no such self-delusion: the Israeli army, reeling under the Hizbollah's onslaught of the past 24 hours, is now facing the harshest guerrilla war in its history. And it is a war they may well lose.

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The Agonist has had some excellent commentary:

A Government is What a Government Does: Hezbollah Chapter

Imagine

One of the things that constantly amazes me is the inability of some people to imagine themselves in the shoes of a Hezbollah supporter and to whinge about how Hezbollah doesn't respect Lebanon's authority. The fact that Hezbollah is not under Lebanese government control is indeed a problem for Lebanon. But then, when Israel invaded, the other Lebanese didn't help the Shia in the occupied territories, did they? And what did the Lebanese army do? You can't separate these things from history. Other groups may worry about Hezbollah, but Hezbollah knows that they are the only thing defending their people. I really don't understand why people have such a hard time understanding this.

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Israeli/Hezbollah Pre Post Mortem

Let's deal with the Israelis first. First of all - clearly their intelligence service fell down on the job. They had no idea what they were facing - a dug in series of hardened positions with underground networks supporting them, manned by elite troops. They thought they could use aerial interdiction of supplies, and didn't realize they were fighting a light infantry force that could fight a long time without mechanized resupply. Second, their army has been corrupted by occupation. Martin van Crevald likes to say that if you fight the weak, you become weak. 30 years of occupation "warfare", of killing weak Palestinian militants and civilians, has made the Israeli army from a battlefield supremacy army based on the German blitzkrieg model, into a force suited for protecting bulldozers and blowing away armed rabble.

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The Twilight of the Decapitation Military

If it turns out to be both copyable and scaleable, it is indeed a revolution in military affairs. A military with complete air supremacy, artillery and an armored corp, was unable to just bypass light infantry. In blitzkrieg warfare they would have created pockets and then crushed the out of supply pockets. In Lebanon, cutting off light infantry doesn't put it out of supply - but extending yourself in a pocket creation maneuver creates interdictable supply lines that the infantry you just left behind can cut. And your tanks definitely cannot survive without their fuel.

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Pat Lang has become a regular read. He is a retired Colonel who was in Military Intelligence and the Green Berets. An interesting perspective.

Bad Tux on IDF Performance
by Pat Lang

"I would be very careful about coming to any conclusions about weapons that HA is using based upon IDF sources. The IDF has a natural desire to hype up HA's weaponry as an excuse for their poor performance. It is unlikely, for example, that HA possesses many Kornets. Syria bought around 1,000 Kornets, but the chances they gave HA many of those Kornets is slim -- they need the Kornets as a deterrent against Israeli armor for their own defense. Iran itself does not have Kornets in any great quantity (if at all), they are relying on their Sagger, Spandrel, and TOW clones, which they reverse-engineered or licensed and produce cheaply in their own factories. Iran is very careful about their arms purchases in order to get the best bang for the buck, and if they can make effective weapons locally (and the above-named are plenty effective if deployed in sufficient quantity and provided with upgraded warheads and guidance systems), they do not buy, they build.

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A Lebanese View
by Pat Lang

Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Foreign Minister said in 1914 that the treaty that protected Belgian neutrality was "a scrap of paper." What he meant was that treaties are observed when they serve the interests of the parties to them. Israel wants to destroy Hizbullah. It has not done that as yet. Hizbullah is a home-grown Shia force. As "Lubnani" says they will go home if there is peace and wait to fight another day. Hizbullah has not yet been defeated.

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"Conclusions" by GaW
by Pat Lang

-the leading cause of modern Islamic terrorism is 60 years of bad foreign policy by USA/UK...or to put it more bluntly, when you go into other peoples countries at will to interfere, you only make more people angry at you - I read that Osama founded Al-Qaeda in 1982 because he saw on TV the Israeli devastation of Lebanon. How many new Al- have been created by the last month's events, I wonder. (I am not excusing religious fanaticism, but more than religious differences are required to motivate suicide bombers, there has to be perceived "unjust" action from the other side too

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