Arms and influence

Israel's failed strategy

IN THE NEWS
ZenPundit has an excellent post about Israel's war in Lebanon. His conclusion?

The only meaningful strategic goal here for Israel was the total demilitarization of Hezbollah, an objective that coincided with the national interests of not just the U.S. but that of France, and therefore, in a languidly trailing and desultory way, the EU. The key to that objective was Syria, not Lebanon, and making the hapless and ineffectual Lebanese government instead of the "strong", generally unpopular and very "targetable" Syrian regime the focus of Israeli wrath - followed by real negotiations of things Damascus is interested in talking about - was a mistake.

He also touches on an important question. It takes a bit of digging to figure out the answer to this one, so I've been delaying saying anything about this topic until now.

It's pretty clear that Israel's reliance on air strikes is counterproductive. However, it is not a unique failure in this campaign. During the second intifada, the ongoing struggle with Hamas, and even the stand-offs with Arafat in his compound, the Israeli Defense Forces have been increasing their reliance on airpower. For anyone who remembers the Entebbe Raid or has studied Israel's regular cross-border raids into neighboring countries, it looks as though Israel has swapped a scalpel for a meat cleaver as its military instrument of choice.

As ZenPundit argues, the installation of an Air Force officer as the IDF's chief of staff provides a partial explanation for this shift in operational methods. However, it's not the whole story. It's beyond my capabilities to provide a full explanation here today, but it's important to recognize the strategy for what it is--and how different it is from, say, the hard road Israel once traveled in tracking down and eliminating the Black September terrorists responsible for the Munich massacre. That operation may have fallen short of success, but it's preferable to bombing Lebanon into rubble.

It's also important to remember, back in the early days of the Global War On Really Bad People Everywhere And Nowhere, how the White House and top officials in the Department of Defense looked to Israel for lessons on how to handle counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. Given the IDF's increasing reliance on airpower, I worry that they drew the wrong lessons.

From the bayou to Beirut

IN THE NEWS
The Bush Administration has watched as two cities, New Orleans and Beirut, have been destroyed. I spent the last post talking about a moral challenge, proportionality in warfare. I'll spend this post talking about a different moral question: Which are worse, sins of commission, or sins of omission?

Sins of commission can flatten cities. One cost of the German invasion of the Soviet Union was the devastation of Stalingrad, not to mention other Soviet population centers, and millions of Soviet citizens. The German bombardment of Passchendaele created an icon of World War I, the gradual conversion of a typical Western European town into an unrecognizable collection of craters and rubble.

Sins of omission can be just as destructive. I'll spare the reader yet another recounting of the events leading to the flooding of New Orleans. Suffice it to say that, in the most generous interpretation, a city died because of warning signs ignored, preventive measures not taken, and reactions that occurred far too slowly and incompletely. A year later, New Orleans is still suffering from the indifference of the rest of the country. The next hurricane season easily could undo the partial recovery of a city that was a unique cultural treasure, not only for the United States, but the world.

Beirut, too, has fallen prey to sins of omission. In this case, the Bush Administration's foreign policy made a bad situation worse. The primary responsibility for Lebanon's tragedy lies with Hezbollah and Israel. As I've argued earlier, Israel must defend itself, but in the case of Hezbollah, its chosen methods are neither effective nor justified. Hezbollah is about as monstrously self-absorbed a political organization as you can find in the Middle East, happy to profit from a return to the chaos of the 1980s. As culpable as the two parties are (and it's probably worth throwing a couple of other regional powers, such as Iran, into the line-up of suspects), the United States deserves some blame for how this crime occurred, and how much damage it has inflicted.

This article in Slate pins the blame on the unintended ways in which the Bush Administration's Middle East strategy has helped Iran. I don't disagree with the premise, but I don't think it provides the full explanation of what happened to Lebanon. A more complete picture would include the following elements:

• Although the Bush Administration applauds Lebanon's eviction of Syrian security and intelligence forces, there is practically no American assistance to the Lebanese government.
• Hezbollah, seeing itself as a state-within-a-state, operates without any effective opposition from the Lebanese government. The support it receives from Iran emboldens Hezbollah further.
• Since Ariel Sharon left Likud, the Israel government has focused on creating defensible borders over maintaining its control over the Occupied Territories as a bargaining chip with the Palestinians.
• Returning the Gaza Strip to the Palestinians sparks debate in Israel over how safe Israel will be, once it contracts its borders.
• Hamas' kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, followed by Hezbollah's kidnapping of two more, seems to be the realization of the risks many Israelis feared the new strategy would create.
• The kidnappings, combined with other Hezbollah attacks, poses two challenges to Ehud Olmert. At a national level, he needs to respond somehow, to prove that the strategy he inherited from Ariel Sharon was correct. At a personal level, he has to show that, even without the military background most of his predecessors as Israeli prime minister had, he can handle this sort of crisis.
• Israel assaults both Gaza and Lebanon. In both cases, the Israeli objective is clearly more than just the return of the hostages. The Israeli government either wants to hurt Hamas and Hezbollah enough to deter these groups, or cripple them to the point where they present far less of a threat. In other words, Israeli strategy is trying to change its enemies intentions, capabilities, or, preferably, both.
• In Lebanon, Israel's strategy brings widespread death and destruction. Israel is may be trying to do more than just kill Hezbollah fighters. Israel may also be trying to make people in Lebanon think twice about supporting Hezbollah. The Olmert government may also be trying to drive people out of southern Lebanon, making it harder for Hezbollah to operate in secret along Israel's northern border.

Where does the United States fit into this picture? Here's a quick summary of where the United States could have done more to prevent this crisis, and imposed some constraints on it once it started:

• The United States has mired itself in an expensive, open-ended war in Iraq, reducing American leverage elsewhere.
• The Bush Administration's unilateralist approach to Iraq has made potential allies wary of supporting American initiatives elsewhere in the Middle East.
• However, in the case of Israel, the Bush Administration has chosen not to apply its leverage at all. Instead, the Bush foreign policy has, since the second intifada, given Israel more latitude than any previous Administration has granted.
• The Bush Administration also chose to discard what few sources of leverage it might have had with Iran,
• Hezbollah's chief patron. Iran, is enjoying new confidence, having benefited from the rout of the Taliban, the fall of the Iraqi Ba'athist regime, and the United States' vulnerability in Iraq.
• Iran is accruing new sources of power and influence. Aside from advancing its nuclear capabilities, Iran is also enjoying economic overtures from India and Russia, two countries that the Bush Administration has tried to build "special relationships."
• Once the Israeli assault into Lebanon started, the Bush Administration has done nothing to rein in Israel. In fact, the United States was forced to admit that it was providing Israel with new stocks of munitions while Israeli bombs were falling on Lebanon.
• During last week's multinational efforts to get Israel and Hezbollah to agree to a cease-fire, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice appeared to be interfering with these efforts, preferring to give the Israeli government more time to complete its campaign.

The Israelis suspended bombing after killing 37 Lebanese schoolchildren in Qana—certainly not the intended outcome of airpower in "urban warfare," but certainly a predictable one. In other words, three dozen dead children succeeded in slowing down the Israeli assault, where American diplomacy had failed—or did not even try.

It's disturbing to see the world's only superpower react to the devastation of New Orleans and Lebanon with a shrug. Not only does the Bush Administration's detachment not help the Lebanese now, but it also bodes poorly for the future. Sins of commission inspire people to rebuild; sins of omission cast doubts on whether rebuilding is worth the effort.

After World War I, Belgium committed to rebuilding Passchendaele and the neighboring city of Ypres. King Albert I made invested his own name and clout into the King Albert Fund, designed to attract Ypres residents back to the city. In the process, the King made the reconstruction of Ypres a national priority. Armed with pre-war blueprints, builders re-created as many of the original buildings as possible.  Today, many of the medieval buildings in Ypres may not be constructed with the original stones, but Ypres—the buildings and the people—survived the massive artillery bombardments of World War I.

Today, there is nothing like the King Albert Fund for New Orleans. While the reconstruction project may seem daunting, it's by no means impossible. In 1919, Ypres had a population of 40,000, out of Belgium's total population of 7.5 million. In 2005, New Orleans had a population of 500,000, out of the US population of 299 million. In other words, Belgium was able to rebuild a city where 0.5% of its population lived before it was devastated. The United States is certainly capable of rebuilding a city where 0.2% of its population lived, even faced with the unique challenges of the levee system.

If there is no determined effort to rebuild New Orleans, there's even less chance that the US government will be roused to help rebuild Beirut and other Lebanese urban centers. In other words, having been guilty of a sin of omission concerning Israel and its neighbors, there's little chance that the current Administration will feel the need to re-think its approach. After responding to the immediacy of current events, the Administration is more likely to shrug, yet again, and move on. 

Proportionate to what?

IN THE NEWS
The violence in Lebanon has sparked a moral debate in the blogosphere. What is the correct amount of violence to apply, against which targets, in conflicts like the one between Israel and Hezbollah?

While I'm all for clear moral reasoning in military affairs, I think a lot of this debate is fundamentally misconceived. Moral reasoning depends on a clear understanding of the situation where morality is supposed to apply. In other words, the devil is truly in the details. To use the Philosophy 101 example of this principle, it is generally wrong to lie, but most rational beings would agree that it's not wrong to lie to Nazis about the Jews hiding in your attic.

Moral questions about Israel's recent conduct, therefore, have to start with some understanding of the nature of the war itself. Unfortunately, these operational details seem to be lost on most of the people involved in this debate. The differences between conventional warfare and counterinsurgency, between conventional warfare and counterterrorism, and between counterinsurgency and counterterrorism are significant. These are three different types of warfare, each posing different strategic and moral challenges. Israeli civilian and military leaders are certainly aware of these differences, after fighting a few conventional wars against Arab armies, countless counterterrorist operations against Palestinian enemies, and a counterinsurgency war (of a distinctly urban character) in Lebanon.

However, the arguments over whether Israel's attempt to "break the back" of Hezbollah seem to miss these distinctions altogether. Here's an example from Captain's Quarters:

To use a crude analogy, if someone is stupid enought to bring a knife to a gunfight, it doesn't mean that those holding the guns have a moral obligation to fight with knives instead. Proportionality demands exactly that, and it leads to nothing but longer and more destructive wars. Part of the reasons nations build strong militaries is to deter people from committing aggressive acts against them. The United States did not build the military it has just to provide "proportionate" reponse. Such a limitation would invite any tinpot dictator or kleptocrat to attack us, knowing that we would only respond in proportion to their ability to attack. It makes every fight even-up from the beginning, odds that would encourage a lot more fighting, not less.

Of course, Israel isn't fighting a tinpot dictator or kleptocrat. It's not even fighting a state. Instead, its enemy is an armed political movement, fired by religious enthusiasms. Although Hezbollah's leaders are not lunatics, deterrence doesn't work quite the same as it once did between Israel and Egypt.

The Captain's Table also makes the outlandish accusation that "the world" (whoever that is) expects Israel to "fight with one hand tied behind its back." That statement bears no resemblance to the criticisms of the Olmert government's strategy I've read. Instead, "the world" (if by that we mean critics of what Israel is doing in Lebanon) expect Israel to fight Hezbollah as if it were not a conventional army. Blowing up bridges and power stations might injure a conventional military force, dependent on the economic and physical infrastructure in the theater of operations. The tragedies that befalls civilians living in the combat zone might be unavoidable, as they certainly were when the Allies invaded France in 1944. (The author of Sicilian Notes makes much the same point: "Nobody today complains about the thousands of dead French civilians from the liberation of Normandy and it would be self-evidently ludicrous to do so.") However, the death of innocent bystanders, and the loss of their property, has almost no bearing on the conflict itself.

However, in southern Lebanon, these same operational methods--blowing up bridges and power plants--will have far less effect on Hezbollah than it did on the Wehrmacht. These attacks also risk driving many Lebanese into the arms of Hezbollah, and creating the kind of political chaos in which Hezbollah has traditionally thrived.

In a similar vein to Captain's Table, TigerHawk argues the following:

The left claims that the powerful states of the world, especially the United States and Israel, need not fear for their security because they can use their military power to deter aggression. To a post-Cold War lefty, the magic of deterrance supposedly obviates the need to intervene preemptively, or to remove regimes that commit "petty" acts of war against us or even declare themselves to be our enemy. See, e.g., the most frequently offered reasons why we should not have removed Saddam, or should not consider military options to deal with Iran. We can, after all, obliterate any power that actually attacks us, so why worry?

What your basic anti-defense lefty does not admit, however, is that effective deterrance requires not only the capability to retaliate, but that the threat to retaliate be credible. The former without the latter is worthless.

Stripping the snide rhetoric about "anti-defense lefties" out of these statements, you're left with another argument for Israel's practical and moral need to deter potential enemies. Unfortunately, this line of reasoning violates the basic Clausewitzian dictum about warfare: it's supposed to engineer a particular political outcome. TigerHawk races from the action (retaliation for kidnappings and rocket attacks) to a presumed result (deterrence), without checking the political roadmap to see if that's where Israel has actually arrived.

Undoubtedly, people commenting on guerrilla warfare and terrorism often make the mistake of sounding as though any retaliation is bad: Military responses just set off a cycle of violence. You're just playing into the hands of the enemy. And so forth. If you listened to some of the worst offenders (who may be the "lefties" with whom TigerHawk takes issue), events like the routing of the Taliban in 2001 may be a bit of a surprise. (The problem in Afghanistan wasn't the US/NATO invasion, but the incomplete effort that let the Taliban survive, regroup, and counterattack.)

On some occasions, these warnings about retaliation are appropriate. Unless Israel plans on occupying Lebanon again, the current conflict will not wipe Hezbollah from the map. (Even if Israel did occupy Lebanon, that outcome would be doubtful.) Instead, it has created greater uncertainty about security along its northern border, particularly now that a lot more Lebanese truly hate Israel with a passion they didn't have before a few days ago. Israel has granted Hezbollah a de facto legitimacy, to the point where Hezbollah leaders can seize the headlines by agreeing to a multi-national force deployed in southern Lebanon to keep the two combatants apart. To the extent that Hezbollah acts as a proxy for Syrian or Iranian ambitions, Israel has also shown how it can be baited into an overreaction, something that both Syrian and Iranian leaders can certainly use to their own advantage.

For these, and a few other reasons I'd mention if I had more time to write this post, the action (retaliation) is not producing the political result desired. Hezbollah may have lost a significant number of its fighters, but it stands to gain politically in ways that counterbalance any manpower or material losses.

However, it's not merely the defenders of Israel who can't put the moral discussion on a firm, factual basis. A similar discussion in Kenneth Anderson's blog talks as if just war doctrine should be applied the same way to all forms of conflict. Anderson makes some excellent points, such as these:

That said, much of the comment on proportionality in Israel's war aims in the Lebanon conflict has been based around the assumption that it must be proportional to the immediate incidents which sparked retaliation - the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers as hostages and the most immediate rocket attacks upon civilians. As noted above as a matter of moral theory, the response to aggression is not predicated upon the triggering incident, but instead upon the threat presented - the evaluation of which lies in the hands of a state and its leadership.

However, Anderson gets so bogged down in just war theory that you emerge from his discussion with little sense of how you'd apply it to this particular conflict. Sure, the sporadic rocket attacks themselves don't rise to the level of a severe cassus belli, but do the attacks in toto (along with kidnappings and cross-border raids) amount to a severe threat to Israel? And, just as importantly, is Israel's strategy actually going to make it safer? If you read first-hand accounts of the war in Lebanon, such as this heart-breaking piece from Salon, you'd be a cold soul if you did not ask the obvious question: What justifies this level of bloodshed and destruction, suffered as much by civilians as Hezbollah fighters?

Crooked Timber hits closer to the mark, but this post isn't exactly a bullseye. While the "war of the flea" doesn't give guerrillas and terrorists a carte blanche, it'd be silly to take the counterargument--kidnapping and hiding among civilians--is always wrong. How different is the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers from the normal taking of prisoners in wartime? The distinction may be there, but it's not as clear-cut as some might think. How could guerrillas operate at all, if they did not, to use Mao's famous phrase, swim like revolutionary fish amidst the sea of the population? As this post from Obsidian Wings said, "I'm not certain how to best approach the problem of fighting an asymmetric opponent, but I'm certain that strengthening his strengths and shoring up his weaknesses isn't the ideal way to go about it."

Certainly, making it difficult for the "revolutionary fish" to hide is a lot different than boiling the sea until everything in it dies. Ultimately, we come back to the basic problem with Israel's strategy: it's not justified, morally or practically, for the result it's achieving. Hezbollah's "back" won't be "broken." Israel has made its case that Hezbollah is still a state-within-a-state, but it hasn't helped the Lebanese state to deal with this problem. Instead, it has done the reverse, plunged a country that had recovered from one of the nastiest civil wars back into something resembling those dark days. Lebanon has not regressed all the way back to where it was in 1983, with Druze, Shi'ite, and Christian militias warrning unchecked with one another. However, having failed to descend to the ninth level of hell doesn't make the first level of hell any less pleasant for the people living there.

Roll out the barrel

IN THE NEWS
Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like lowering oil prices should be an urgent priority for the US government. Here's a few ways in which high oil prices hurt US interests:

• Slowing the American economy.
• Increasing indirectly the ballooning federal debt.
• Worsening the American balance of trade.
• Giving hostile regimes in Iran and Venezuela a great deal more capability and confidence.
• Reducing the leverage over governments with whom we have difficult relations, such as Saudi Arabia and Russia.
• Increasing the damage that economic sabotage and natural disasters can do to the United States.
• Keeping US national security disproportionately focused on the Middle East and Central Asia.
• Retarding the political and economic development of countries where oil is a dominant export commodity. (Frequently, a country's dependence on a single commodity distorts that society in ugly ways, creating political turmoil that can be damaging to US interests.)

I'm sure I've omitted a few other significant consequences of high oil prices. Who knows, American diplomats may be working behind the scenes to deal with this problem. However, I think a visible effort is actually what's needed. Not only would it tell the world commodities market—always willing to jack up oil prices when the future looks uncertain—the direction in which US security policy is headed, but it would also give Americans something to rally around. Other than oil companies, high oil prices hurt Americans and American interests.

Yes, I'm deliberately being a little naïve here. I do have some idea why the Bush Administration and the Republican-controlled Congress are unwilling to make oil prices a cause celebre (instead of, say, flag burning and gay marriage). But what was that quote about the soft tyranny of low expectations…?

And where are the Democrats on this issue? If you go to the Democratic Party's national web site, the page covering the Party's economic strategy mentions high oil prices almost in passing. Rather than making oil prices the nail that seal's the Republicans' electoral coffin in the 2006 midterm elections, the point is lost among random comments about Alabama families, Senator George Allen, Hispanic families, tax cuts, and Indiana families. Huh? Oil prices should be at the top of the page, in flashing neon. The Democrats seem unable to hit even the slow, underhand pitches, which makes me wonder if the presumed Democratic landslide in November is really going to happen.

Russian away

IN THE NEWS
The latest Foreign Affairs has a sobering article about Russian foreign policy. To borrow the author's analogy, Russia is no longer on a distant orbit around the alliance centered on Western Europe and the United States. Russia is now trying to establish its own center of gravity, in which it pursues its own interests in Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the East Asian countries near its borders.

Fortunately, the current Russian attempt at empire has no motivating ideology, other than a jaundiced view of national self-aggrandizement. Russia's self-interest, in the eyes of President Vladimir Putin and his subordinates, won't be fulfilled by becoming a second-tier power tied to the West. That's a position that Russia has adopted since Peter the Great, so it's no surprise that, after the confused period after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the current Russian regime has reverted to a policy that tsars and commissars would find familiar.

The Bush Administration's efforts to build a special relationship with its Russian counterpart—based in part, according to Bush, on some mystical ability to see into Putin's soul, and find it pure—has largely failed. With oil and gas prices at an all-time high, and the Russian government having consolidated control of the energy sector through its corporate proxy, Gazprom, Putin sees no reason to depend on American good will. Thus far, any special relationship with the Americans has brought no substantial benefits, and in their eyes, endless hectoring about human rights. The United States has also been an active participant in the extension of NATO into Eastern Europe, and the expansion of the European Community as far east as the Baltic States. Occasional alignments with Europe, such as in the British, French, and Russian opposition to the American invasion of Iraq, also brought few tangible benefits. Meanwhile, Russia has expanded its relations with Iran, who at least seems both willing and able to make mutually beneficial energy deals.

That's not to say that Russia wouldn't respond to some Western leverage. If Putin were to go too far, either in supporting the regimes in Iran and North Korea, or in destroying what democratic institutions remain in Russia, the G-8 nations might reconsider keeping Russia as a member of that select community. However, even the harshest measures—and booting Russia from the G-8 is about as harsh as it's ever likely to get—won't change the current Russian leadership's perception that the only country that cares about Russian interests is Russia.

While there's no sign that Russia is going to turn into an actively hostile adversary, it will be a wild card in international relations for years to come. When the United States and Europe try to deal with Iran's nuclear program, they will have to consider Russia's possible countermoves. In trying to lower world oil prices, Russia will have some role in that process. Any further expansion of NATO or the EU will definitely have to take Russia into account. Even on counterterrorism, the Russians may smile and welcome Western assistance with Chechen separatists, but do practically nothing to help the US and Europe deal with their terrorist problems. In short, Putin's strongest diplomatic card is his ability to make Russian foreign policy hard to predict, while appearing willing at a moment's notice to create a great deal of mischief. Unfortunately, the United States needs less uncertainty in world affairs, not more. Personal relationships between presidents aside, there doesn't seem much that the US government can do to reduce the uncertainties that Russia now creates.

Iraq is tough

IN THE NEWS
I'm so glad that I watched The Daily Show tonight. Senator John McCain taught me that the road ahead is tough, really tough. That was his answer to Jon Stewart's question about why anyone should take the Bush Administration's Middle East policies seriously, after its countless mistakes in Iraq--mistakes that top officials like Vice President Cheney continue to deny.

(This is my unsubtle way of expressing how tired I am of McCain. Please run for President, so that you can lose and start playing senator again.)

Ouch

IN THE NEWS
The Armchair General printed this letter from a colleague to William Kristol. All I can say is, he's not the only person in the military to feel this way.

Free-floating anxiety

IN THE NEWS
Armchair General has been wrestling with the public's misperceptions about chemical weapons disposal. The Department of Defense has stockpiles of nasty brews like VX that it wants to destroy. In many cases, the Pentagon doesn't have a choice. Congress may have mandated their destruction; the United States may violate treaty obligations if it doesn't dispose of them; the cost of keeping them in secure storage may not be justified, particularly after the chemicals have lost their effectiveness.

Unfortunately, the Defense Department runs into public fears about chemical weapons. It's a standard NIMBY question: where and how is it safe to destroy these materials? Needless to say, the public is naturally skeptical about the potential risks.

Although the General is pretty frustrated with this state of affairs, I can't say that the Defense Department has done a great job educating the public about the risks. Not everyone is a chemist, capable of determining the possibility that a nerve agent might accidentally escape containment during the destruction process. Most people are unequipped to judge whether burning chemical munitions creates harmful residue. In short, all they know is, "The US government developed these weapons to be extremely lethal. I'd rather not be around when they're destroyed, buried, whatever."

In general, unconventional weapons destruction has been a low priority for the executive branch since Bush took office in 2001. Gone are the days when the US government was energetically working with the former Soviet republics to lock down and destroy nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. Needless to say, this is an odd state of affairs for an Administration willing to invade Iraq, ostensibly over their unconventional weapons program. If the US had ever found hidden stockpiles of WMDs, how well-equipped would it have been to secure and eliminate them?

Like terrorism, unconventional weapons pose an important question about the perception of risk. The fear they generate may be far greater than the actual risk they pose. In that case, it's the job of government officials to make the actual risks clear and credible. Rather than look at  the fear of unconventional weapons as yet another thing to help sell a policy, people in the executive branch need to provide a sober appraisal of the risks that chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons pose. That statement is true for both unconventional weapons pointed at us and the ones in our own stockpiles. Free-floating anxiety--the emotion that the Administration prefers, when discussing threats--might seem like a way to steer public opinion in a particular direction. In reality, people who face ill-defined fears might go in any direction, not merely the one you prefer.

Truly, the line of the day

IN THE NEWS
Via Poliblogger, truly the line of the day.

What's up with Salon?

IN THE NEWS
Salon went through a long, long dark spell, in which the ever-slimmer political coverage was overshadowed by silly articles about TV shows and movies. Suddenly, things have changed significantly for the better. In the last week or so, Salon publushed an excellent three-part series about Iraq, a moving article about the 14th Amendment, one of the best on-site accounts of the war in Lebanon, and the analysis of Israeli strategy I cited in the last post. What the heck happened here?