In recent days we have witnessed a wave of
declarations and articles boasting victory in the silly, needless war in
Lebanon.
“We reached all our objectives as early as the first
days of the war”; “We destroyed the Zelzal missiles”; “Nasrallah’s declaration
that he would have refrained from abducting the soldiers had he predicted
Israel’s powerful response is testament to the blow he suffered” – those are
random examples of the idle cover-up chatter that the defense establishment and
its emissaries in the media impose on us.
We must not under any circumstances buy into this
flawed merchandize, and not only because it’s fundamentally false, but mostly
because it joins a series of cover-ups and deception that goes back to the
first Lebanon war and continues to this day.
If we fail to break this chain of denial and
self-deception, we can expect a catastrophe of a much greater scope in the
future.
The bitter truth must be told: Since the 1973 Yom
Kippur War, the IDF has been unable to reach a military victory in any
conflict. Moreover, even if our opponents failed to win, we ended up with an
embarrassing draw in the first Intifada and we lost the al-Aqsa Intifada and
the second Lebanon war.
This assertion is based on a paradoxical fact: Each
one of the conflicts featured an immense gap in our favor in all major aspects,
both qualitative and quantitative. Despite this, we failed to bring the
Palestinians to surrender in the first and second Intifadas and were forced to
withdraw from Lebanon with our tail between our legs after many years of
pointless fighting against an organization that emerged thanks to our invasion.
The recognition that the Intifada has no military
solution and the acceptance of a ceasefire without military victory in Lebanon,
as much as those were justified both diplomatically and morally following long
years of basing our actions exclusively on military strategy, constitute a
subconscious acknowledgment of our failure.
We did even worse in the second Lebanon war. During
the 33 days of fighting, missile attacks on northern Israel did not cease.
Meanwhile, Hizbullah’s fighting ability and spirit were almost unscathed and
according to all indications its ability to rehabilitate will enable it to
regain its previous strength within months. If this isn’t a failure, what is? The
political echelon should be paying the political price for embarking on this
war of deception, and the way to punish the leadership is through public
protest and through the ballot box – not through commissions of inquiry.
If the politicians remain in place, there will be no
significance to the political result test of the democratic process. However,
the central thing that a commission of inquiry can expose and recommend a
remedy for is the government’s preparatory work and its decision-making
process.
As to the military leadership, rolling heads there is
not enough, as justified as this may be. The time has come for an in depth
examination of fighting theory, extracting ourselves from the technology cult
that has failed time and again in low-intensity conflicts, and severing the
umbilical cord tying policing and occupation acts to the building of our
military power and fighting theory.
That is, we must remove IDF soldiers from
checkpoints, settlements, and Palestinian towns and reintroduce a regime of
training and operational preparations.
The time has come to bring back strategic and
tactical creativity and leadership that combines the values of integrity and
maintenance of the “purity of arms” and morals during fighting, as well as
strategic ingenuity and the ability to lead combat maneuvers. Mostly, the time
has come to disconnect the IDF from politics and minimize the defense
establishment’s control over the formulation of policy.
Only a political leadership able to put the IDF in
its place as a servant of foreign and defense policy and not as a replacement
for it, alongside military leadership that recognizes the limits of power and
is able to build a fighting theory and optimal military force in the framework
of these constraints, can lead Israel to substantial diplomatic achievements –
and to military accomplishments if needed.
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