smooth wombat's Journal: How Hezbollah defeated Israel

While there has already been one story on Slashdot on how Hezbollah was able to defeat the IDF, there is a three-part story on Asia Times Online which outlines in a very detailed and explicit manner, how Hezbollah won. Be warned that you should turn off javascript before visiting the site or use the NoScript extension for Firefox as clicking on a link will force a pop-up.

I am not in any way, shape or form a military expert. What I know comes from reading everything I can get my hands on about military history, watching shows on the same, and my own research. With that said, the opinions I reached while watching the unfolding events in Lebanon were nearly the same as what are now being written. Which begs the question: If I knew what was really taking place on the ground from only listening to news reports, just like I knew that Iraq had no WMDs, then how could the experts not know? Or, like Iraq, was it all political spin to pander to a certain group?

I would urge you to take careful note of what is said in Article 2 regarding ground operations. Had you been listening to the reports from the media you too would have known that the conflict was all but over ten days into operations.

Without giving away the ending of the story I will summarize in my own words what happened: The Israeli military failed in every conceivable way to follow basic military doctrine in regard to planning, intelligence gathering and combat implementation. At no time was any military objective achieved. The political process took precedence over military planning and implementation.

The links to the three articles are:

Article 1
Article 2
Article 3

What will the lessons learned from this conflict mean for the future of the Middle East? As unnamed Israeli officials in the article stated: It is not a matter of "if" but of "when" Israel will go to war again.