“No idea” about the way to victory

A crushing military advantage – but still not even close to any kind of real victory. This summarizes Israel’s warfare against targets in Lebanon for the past two weeks.

– The rocket units are still active, Hezbollah has absorbed the first shock and the battle has only just begun, former militia member Qassim Qassir told the AP news agency.

That it was actually a shock, Hezbollah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah has also basically admitted. First, the attacks via pagers and walkie-talkies, which surprised the whole world and are widely seen as the work of Israel. And then massive airstrikes against Lebanon, which this week cost perhaps more than half the number of lives as in the entire devastating last war in 2006.

But how much closer is Israel to its goals? Perhaps the most important thing in terms of domestic politics is that 60,000 Israelis in the northern border areas, who were evacuated from previous hostilities, should be able to move home. And it’s not even on the map at the moment, according to many observers.

“Worst week”

“No one, in or out of the defense, has any idea how these brilliant operational successes will turn into political benefit, into an actual victory that stops war in the north,” writes columnist Nadav Eyal in Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s largest newspaper.

“As long as Hezbollah retains firepower, the northern border will not return to normal”.

Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant claims that that firepower has now been severely cut.

– This is Hezbollah’s worst week since its founding, he said the other day.

– Blows have been dealt to the command, to the terrorists at several levels, to their firepower and to their morale.

“Just a fraction”

On the other hand, Israel calculated around the time of the 2006 war that the extremist Islamist movement had about 12,000 projectiles of various types. The same estimate this year has been 150,000 – and many of those rockets and robots are newer, bigger and more advanced than before. Via the land route through Syria, the group’s powerful ally Iran has been able to deliver fairly unimpeded for years.

No one believes that Israel has managed to reach any major parts of that arsenal.

– Hezbollah has only used a fraction of its capabilities, says Qassim Qassir, himself a former member of the movement, now a writer who has published a book about its development from the 80s to the present.

Compare with Vietnam

So even if the Islamists are now under pressure, time can work for them. The 2006 war can be said to have ended in a “draw”, but since then Hezbollah has been able to ignore many of the demands of the time. The peace settlement stipulated, among other things, that the movement would be disarmed, and that the border area – everything south of the Litani River – would be demilitarized. Instead, Hezbollah on its home turf is now believed to be more ready than ever should Israel venture another ground invasion.

About the prospects for such, Daniel Byman of the CSIS think tank in Washington tells The Wall Street Journal:

– It would be like saying to the USA in 1980: “We are entering Vietnam again”.