WASHINGTON, July 27 (UPI) -- Prime Minister Ehud Olmert seized a strategic opportunity to change Israel's image from vincible to invincible, as the country had done in the 1967 Six-Day War with the kind of brio that elicited the admiration of the world. Hezbollah guerrillas had captured two Israeli prisoners, killed eight others, and gave Israel the track it sought to crush Hezbollah's state within the state of Lebanon.
This would also allow the Lebanese government to restore its sovereignty over the entire country and dismantle all militias, completing the implementation of last year's U.N. Resolution 1559, which sent the Syrian army packing after its nearly 30-year occupation. Even the Arab world's moderate, pro-Western governments in Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia were loath to criticize Israel. Islamist extremists, like Hezbollah, are a threat to all of them. But the promising scenario quickly became a victim of poor Israeli intelligence.
Some 5,000 Israeli air sorties pulverized Hezbollah strongholds in high-rise apartment buildings and much of the infrastructure in south Beirut, Sidon and Tyre and slapped an air and sea blockade on the entire country. But air bombardment didn't make a dent on Hezbollah's rocket and missile storage sites. Almost 3,000 of these Iran-supplied, Syrian-moved weapons impacted kibbutzim and towns in northern Israel, all the way down to Haifa, Israel's third-largest city. That left an estimated 10,000 more in Hezbollah's current arsenal.
The IDF offensive that kicked in after the aerial bombardment soon bogged down as Israeli soldiers met stiff resistance from guerrillas concealed in a maze of tunnels and spider holes. Each house in each village was a mini fortress. Hezbollah fighters and civilians were indistinguishable. Shiite Muslim fanatics, they wanted to die fighting an enemy concerned with minimizing casualties. Several hundred men from the elite Golani Brigade assigned to take over the town of Bint Jbeil suddenly found themselves in the middle of a Hezbollah ambush. The battle lasted from dawn to mid-afternoon when the Israelis managed to get the dead and wounded out.
The IDF lost 13 men in the Bint Jbeil ambush. It was the equivalent of the United States losing 1,650 soldiers in a single engagement in Iraq. Israeli editorials and military commentators began asking what had gone wrong. The original Israeli position that it would clean out southern Lebanon to a depth of 11 miles was quickly scaled back by Olmert to 1.2 miles, which would be meaningless against Hezbollah missiles with a 30-mile trajectory.
At the same time, Arab media in countries friendly to the West began hailing the prowess of Hezbollah -- and Israel's strategic plan was looking leaden. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, on his first visit to Washington, thanked the United States for assisting in the birth of a new Iraqi democracy, but declined to criticize Hezbollah. At the 18-participant Rome summit (United States, Russia, European and Arab states), convened to discuss a cease-fire, Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora didn't pull his punches against Israel. He accused the Jewish state of "barbaric destruction" for the billions of dollars worth of damage caused by air raids, which have killed over 400 civilians.
United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan also denounced the "deliberate" shelling of a U.N. outpost (despite 10 phone calls to warn the Israeli side), which killed four blue helmets (Finn, Austrian, Canadian, Chinese). Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, by declining to go along with the majority view for an immediate cease-fire, bought Israel another week or two of fighting. Later that same day, Israeli fighter-bombers began extending their attacks as far as 30 miles north of Beirut where they hit a Lebanese army base, the same army Israel demanded replace Hezbollah in the south.
Belatedly, Israeli intelligence may be concluding the Lebanese army is heavily infiltrated by Hezbollah sympathizers and has been helping move weapons re-supplied from the Syrian border to caches in northern Lebanon.
The Rome summit also insisted on including both Syria and Iran (Hezbollah's sponsors) in future discussions and negotiations about dismantling Hezbollah. So the deployment of an international force in southern Lebanon, headed by NATO commanders, as the United States wishes, under a U.N. flag, as the others insisted, and an end to the fighting is still in mirage mode.
