This item in Salon http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/07/28/hezbollah/ (you must watch [i.e., click through] an ad to read) says “Israel claims it’s justified in bombing civilians because Hezbollah mingles with them. In fact, the militant group doesn’t trust its civilians and stays as far away from them as possible.”
Is there a second (and third, and fourth, ad nauseum) confirmation of this? To the uninformed like me and probably everyone who’s not part of an armed conflict, this seems like a logical, sensible argument. It also seems impossible to refute on an intellectual level, and very likely most arguments will be of an emotional type.
Do you think that the Hezbollah fighters sleep in barracks? Do they train in military bases? Is there any advantage to a guerilla to hide among civillians now and then? And if so, do you think that someone who is willing to target civillians would foreswear such an advantage?
It hinted that Hezbollah was holding back photogenic hostages
More blatantly it interviewed refugees and kept referring to an obvious Hezbollah official who was hovering around.
It might be an idea asking exactly who Hezbollah are ?
are they really from the Lebanon ?
Israel has put in a fair bit of effort to ensure that photogenic non-combatents are not amongst the bodies.
It remains to be seen whether the non-Hezbollah citizens of Lebanon will be so ‘photographically correct’ when they kill their old enemies as they retreat from the South.
The really interesting thing is what will happen to the non-combatants.
In Great Debates I sardonically suggested that they could be shipped to Iran
The last time this happened the ‘real’ Lebanese had a field day killing ‘Palestinian invaders’
Personally If I were a Hezbollah male in North Lebanon, I would be taking elocution lessons, dressing in Western (Armani ?) suits … and sport a French moustache.
It is nice to see things being done efficiently for a change.
Hizbollah is universally recognized by all western governments as a full-fledged terrorist organisation. Yet it doesnt engage in terrorism, according to this salon article, it only engages in “activities”. Its members are not terrorists,–they are only “political activists” who are totally innocent and have nothing to do the shooting of missles taking place in their own back yards and with their full support.
Let’s use a little logic here: of course, a few of the terrorists don’t mix with some of the local population because they are afraid of intelligence leaks . But a lot of the terrorists DO shoot missiles from the back yards of private homes, where (as the article itself states)they are enthusiastically supported “just about everyone”.
Hezbollah plays a wicked PR game. As an organization it sees itself as a government, legitimized by the support of the people. It’s often nigh-impossible to separate Hezbollah from the people, much like it’s quite difficult to separate (say) France from the French population.
The article in Salon read more like an opinion piece and less like actual reporting, IMO.
It’s known that Hezbollah is heavily supported by Iran, so it would seem likely that there are Iranians present among the Hezbollah fighters in Lebanan. The real question is, how effective are these tactics and can Israel attack Hezbollah w/o alienating their supporters? It looks to me like Hezbollah has been planning this for quite some time and Israel walked right into the plan.
Guerilla wars cannot be won w/ military force, this should be very obvious by now.
Of course, it’s a basic tactic of all guerilla fighters, but does that justify killing civilians to get at them? The same thing happened in VN, “destroy the village, to save the village!”. That was supposed to have been the justificaton at My Lai, among other incidents during the VN war. It was wrong headed thinking then and it’s wrong headed now. The situation it inevitable whenever political leaders think they can defeat an insurency using conventional military tactics. In the end, they only create more support for the forces that they are trying to defeat.
An imperfect analogy. Israel’s isn’t trying to “save the village” in Lebanon; they’re trying to save their own villages that are getting shelled by Hezbollah from across the border in Lebanon.
I was referring to the immorality of the misguided logic. The logic in VN was that certain villages were hiding/supporting the enemy, that made them enemies of the So. VN gov’t. and therefore it was OK to punish/kill the inhabitants. The analogy has the same validity as the actions in Lebanon, but I’m not here to argue semantics. As I’ve said, the use of conventional military tactics is counterproductive against an insurgency.
So what do you do? If you declare that fighters embedded with civilians are off limits, you are simply validating the tactic. The reason they do it in the first place is because the tactic works. And of course, if you refuse to engage them you give them a huge advantage and make it impossible to stop them from attacking you.
It’s not just civilians. U.N. outposts become magnets for Hezbollah, because they know that if they are attacked there and the U.N. people are hit, there will be an outcry. A Canadian at that outpost that was hit last week sent an E-mail before he was killed that said the area around them was swarming with Hezbollah.
In WWII, we did not hesitate to destroy entire cities full of civilians if it was the only way we could take out the enemy’s war-making capability.
Israel didn’t start the war. They’ve announced terms under which they are willing to cease fire, and those terms happen to match UN resolution 1559 - disarming of Hezbollah, and a return of their soldiers. If Hezbollah did that tomorrow, the fighting would stop.
To begin, I surely don’t pretend to have the answers needed to solve the middle east problems. I was responding to the OP and confirming that Hezbollah is certainly using civilian/UN personel to shield themselves. I further stated that this is a very effective tactic. Israel made a classic blunder when they responded to the capture of three soldiers by launching an attack on So. Lebanon, a mistake which the Bush administration supported and encouraged. As I type this, I’m listening to the BBC who are reporting that Sec. Rice has announced a plan, for a cease fire, which she is returning to Washington with. I seriously doubt it will be that easy, but the Bush admin. seems to be fond of declaring success where none exists. I’d guess that this shows that Israel has finally realized they can’t win this latest adventure, either militarily, or politically.
If there is ever to be a lasting solution in the middle east it will come from diplomatic/political efforts, not military force.
The fact is that Israel is not targetting noncombatants. If Israel decided to target noncombatants, the Lebanese people could kiss their a**es goodbye. Which is what Hezbollah would do to Israel if they had the capability.
I have no problem with the fact that entities like Israel and USA are held to much higher standards than the scumbags they fight. But let’s not pretend that organizations like Hezbollah are not targeting noncombatants and using noncombatants as shields.
You are correct that Hezbollah is using civilians/UN personel to shield them. You are correct that it is effective. But the main reasaon it is effective is because of the attitude that you and others hold (no snarkiness intended. I’m not really sure where I come out n this, but it seems that if you take a long view, and that we made eradicating emplacements* wherever they were* and accepted collateral damage as standard operation procedure, that the tactic would lose much of it’s effectiveness. Of course this would be done with an effort to minimize civilian deaths, but at the same time accept them. Think of the result of not doing so. You empower any group of murders and terrorists to carry out their killing from within civilian enclaves with impunity. If there was less hesitation to go after enemies who use shields, the tactic would become less effective. It might even cause civilian populations themselves to demand that the fighters stay away from civilian positions.
You miss my central point. Military force is largely ineffective against guerilla fighters. They exist because of the
support of the populous. The focus must be on removing the reasons for that support, when that is accomplished, they will be defeated. There are many ways to accomplish that, but military action is almost always counter
productive. That’s especially true if the military force is supplied from an outside source.
First of all, a guerilla war isn’t the same thing as an insurgency, and vice versa. Guerilla warfare is a rejection of battle lines resulting in small unit tactics with emphasis on ambush and structure hitting. On the other hand, an insurgency is a political movement, counter to the prevailing politcal structure in a given region. An insurgency may employ guerilla warfare as a tactic, or it may just be a bunch of vaguely politically-oriented criminals kidnapping people, setting off little bombs, and stealing stuff.
Second, the idea that conventional forces can’t fight either a guerilla war or a counter-insurgency is demonstrably wrong. I can only surmise that it’s a mass media conviction that infested the western psyche at the end of Vietnam. In fact, guerilla fighters and insurgents have the same biological needs and vulnerabilities as the rest of us. When those needs are denied and those vulnerabilities are exploited, they die as easily as everyone else. The Romans, the British and yes, even the Americans, have all repeatedly and successfully used conventional forces in guerilla warfare and counter-insurgency roles.
Third, not once have I heard a person eager to assert that ‘conventional forces don’t work on guerillas’ offer a single workable alternative other than retreat. This does not surprise me.
The supposedly logical reasons for the propagation of the “conventional doesn’t work” meme aren’t logical. They are moral. The unwillingness to tolerate the moral cost of such operations is not indicative of their lack of effectiveness. It is instead indicative of a society’s unwillingness to tolerate the loss of the moral highground in exchange for the actual highground, and being so unwilling, the stupidity, cruelty and futility of engaging the enemy in the first place.
Military tactics against an insurgency may not work, (even though I believe it can)
but that’s not what’s going on. It is an invasion from another country/government, by any account.
Guerilla ‘wars’ are not as quantifiable as people like to believe. No one can say what is an effective countermeasure. Any wars can be won. Israel doesn’t seem to be a really workable test case, because there is always so much interference in their countermeasures. It would be interesting to see what a directed bombing of the population would do in the area. Kind of a quid pro quo thing.