Every once in a while, an opportunity comes along that seems like it is made just especially for the present conditions.  It isn’t very often that an intractable problem presents itself, and yet the solution to that intractable problem just as readily presents itself, if only you have the courage take it.

Israel has had just this kind of opportunity with Hezbollah starting the recent conflict, Syria and Iran staying out of the war, and Lebanon powerless to do anything about any of it (including not just Israel but Hezbollah as well).  This had left Israel completey unshackled to destroy Hezbollah.

It should have been expected that the U.S. diplomatic machinations would have attempted appeasment of the world powers.  Condi went it to reform the State Department, and herself was co-opted by the “lifers” at the department who see themselves as neutral brokers between U.S. policy and the rest of the world, rather than an arm of the U.S. government and ultimately, therefore, servants of the people.

So armed with this knowledge, i.e., a once-in-a-nation’s-lifetime opportunity combined with a U.S. State Department that will aim to appease regardless of the circumstances, Israel could have utilized this chance to destroy its enemy — at least, the proxy of its enemy.  The Counterterrorism Blog notes that:

Every once in a while, an opportunity comes along that seems like it is made just especially for the present conditions.  It isn’t very often that an intractable problem presents itself, and yet the solution to that intractable problem just as readily presents itself, if only you have the courage take it.

Israel has had just this kind of opportunity with Hezbollah starting the recent conflict, Syria and Iran staying out of the war, and Lebanon powerless to do anything about any of it (including not just Israel but Hezbollah as well).  This had left Israel completey unshackled to destroy Hezbollah.

It should have been expected that the U.S. diplomatic machinations would have attempted appeasment of the world powers.  Condi went it to reform the State Department, and herself was co-opted by the “lifers” at the department who see themselves as neutral brokers between U.S. policy and the rest of the world, rather than an arm of the U.S. government and ultimately, therefore, servants of the people.

So armed with this knowledge, i.e., a once-in-a-nation’s-lifetime opportunity combined with a U.S. State Department that will aim to appease regardless of the circumstances, Israel could have utilized this chance to destroy its enemy — at least, the proxy of its enemy.  The Counterterrorism Blog notes that:

Fox News is showing the IDF moving south out of Lebanon, and The Jerusalem Post is reporting:

The booms of Katyusha rockets continued; another day of what has become routine in the North. But the IDF was holding position, waiting for orders that did not come. After 30 days of fighting, the war with Hizbullah seemed to be nearing its conclusion Thursday.

Just a day earlier, the situation had looked drastically different. The security cabinet had approved the army’s request to send thousands of troops up to the Litani River and beyond in an effort to destroy Hizbullah’s infrastructure and to stop the Katyusha attacks. After the cabinet meeting, one division actually began moving north from Metulla. Its goal – to clear out al-Khiam and Marjayoun and to reach the Litani.

But then, under pressure from the US, Defense Minister Amir Peretz made a frantic call to Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz and ordered him to stop the division in its tracks. “We need to give the diplomatic process one last chance,” Peretz told Halutz. The orders trickled down the chain of command and by the time they reached 366, it had already reached Marjayoun, a stone’s throw from the Litani.

With the UN Security Council on the verge of passing a cease-fire resolution, the IDF understood on Thursday that Operation Change of Direction was ending, for better or for worse.

The IDF was disappointed. Senior officers said they had been looking forward to the fight. Reaching the Litani and eliminating Hizbullah from the villages on the way could have provided, senior officers believe, the victory that Israel has been trying to obtain since July 12. By Thursday night, the chance of that happening was drifting away.

The only way to hurt Hizbullah, a high-ranking officer in the Northern Command said, was to use the military. “Diplomatic processes will not achieve the right effect,” he said, acknowledging that the incursion up to the Litani was not to be. “The key is the military operation. That is the only way to stop Hizbullah.”

But the political echelon thinks differently, and from the first day of this war the politicians, senior officers said, held the IDF back from escalating its offensive and hitting Hizbullah hard. First it was the massive air campaign. Then came the limited, pinpoint ground raids. Only when all that failed did Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his cabinet approve a large-scale incursion into Lebanon and the re-creation of the security zone.

This wishy-washy decision-making process cost the IDF lives, according to one senior officer. “A military force always needs to be on the offensive, pushing forward and keeping the enemy on its toes,” he said. “When you sit still for too long, you turn into a target and you begin to get hit again and again.”

My readers know that I have been pushing General George Patton’s philosophy of war in this conflict.  “Fixed fortifications are monuments to man’s stupidity,” Patton said.  Offense was indeed the only way to clear and defeat Hezbollah; a strong, rapid and deadly use of all of the force that the IDF had could have done this in two weeks to a month.  The alleged strength that Hezbollah had with its fixed fortifications would have turned into its weakness.  Their fortifications would have become their tombs had the IDF advanced without hesitation.  Fixed fortifications are confined spaces and can be used against their occupants.  Where we are now in time — right now — the IDF would have had Hezbollah significantly weakened, if not completely defeated, had the Israeli security council allowed the IDF to do its job from the beginning.

As the situation currently exists, however, Hezbollah remains, gets to claim victory, and is stronger in the eyes of the Arab world.  Force and strength is the only thing that the Arab world understands.  Negotiation has cost Israel not only the war, but the lives of IDF soldiers.

Shame on the security council.  They have endangered Israel — now and in the future.

It has now become apparent that Iranian soldiers have been killed in southern Lebanon.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – Members of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard have been found among Hizbollah guerrillas slain by Israeli forces in southern Lebanon, Israel’s Channel 10 television reported on Wednesday citing diplomatic sources.

It said the Iranians were identified by documents found on their bodies, but gave no further details on how many were discovered or when. Neither the Israeli military nor Hizbollah representatives in Beirut had immediate comment on the report.

A number of things converged on me at one time to cause me to remember where we are in this international war.  My son will deploy to Iraq some time early in 2007, so I have been closely tracking things going on in Ramadi, Baghdad, and other places (mostly in the Sunni triangle).  It is easy to become myopic when faced with the pressure of things like a son’s deployment to war.

I recently exchanged e-mail with Michael Ledeen, who reminded me that it was impossible to win the war in Iraq “first.”  This is a regional war.  I began to think about the very things that I had written, and the first thing that came to mind was my “The Iran War Plans” where I link to Michael Ledeen’s “The Same War,” in which Ledeen persuasively argues for seeing the war in the Middle East as running through Syria and eventually to Iran (and from Iraq, directly to Iran).  As a side note, I discussed the difficulties of a war with Iran in my post, making sure to warn the reader that a war — almost no matter what form it took — would be costly.  I intend to post in the future on suggestions I have for war with Iran, however pedestrian it might seem for me (a non-expert) to do so.  As another side note, my post on war plans with Iran remains a popular hit with Google, coming up on the third page of links.

Next, I stumbled upon an interesting post that Michael Rubin placed on National Review Online, in which he says (in part):

As a post-script:  A lot of writers have pretended to explore what went wrong in Iraq.  Most use secondary accounts—some accurate, others pretty inaccurate—to reconstruct planning.  Their conclusions are a product of their sources, which is why it’s going to take wholesale declassification of documents before we learn the real story of the Iraq war.  Still, there’s opportunity to break new ground.  One topic you’d think an investigative reporter would consider:  Why did the Coalition not take action against Muqtada al-Sadr immediately after the April 2003 murder of al-Khoie?  Who made the decision not to act?  Based on what assessments?

Interesting, and similar to my (much more blue collar) post “The Biggest Mistake of the War,” where I charge the brass with failure to apprehend al-Sadr (or at least, question how it could happen that he has been allowed to go free all of these months).  Also of interest is that the recent U.S. attack on some of al-Sadr’s killing squads was met with rebuke by the Iraqi Prime Minister, something I posted on (“Is the Iraqi Prime Minister Bullying the U.S.?”).  I had known for a while that al-Sadr was Shia, and that there was a close connection betwen him and Iran, but I have failed to completely put two and two together to make four.

We simply cannot finish the job without first taking on Iran head-to-head.  It is more than simply “we must take them on at some point.”  Some point is now.  I have been aware for a while that Iran has furnished the more complicated IEDs and associated technology to the insurgents in Iraq, and had believed, or wanted to believe, that the outposts that the U.S. manned on the border with Iraq-Iran would stop this inflow of weapons.  But it might just be more complicated than sealing the border with Iran (although we have failed even to do that).  There is money and people from Iran already in Iraq, and the failure of the government to cohere is a function of Iranian influence.  In the same post on NRO, Micheal Rubin linked to an article over at the American Enterprise Institute, entitled “Bad Neighbor.”  I will quote from it at length (the entire piece is recommended).

The Iranian government has not limited its support to a single faction or party. Rather, Tehran’s strategy appears to be to support both the radicals seeking immediate confrontation with the U.S. occupation and Islamist political parties like Sciri and Ibrahim Jafari’s Dawah Party, which are willing to sit on the U.S.-backed Iraqi Governing Council and engage with Washington, at least in the short term. The Iranian journalist Nurizadeh wrote in April 2003, “[President Mohammed] Khatami [and other Iranian political leaders] … were surprised by the decision issued above their heads to send into Iraq more than 2,000 fighters, clerics, and students [to] the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq and al-Dawah Party.” My own experience backed up his claims. This February, I spoke with a local governor from southern Iraq who wanted to meet me after he learned that I lived and worked outside CPA headquarters. The governor complained that the CPA was doing little to stop the influx of Iranian money to district councilmen and prominent tribal and religious officials. The money, he said, was distributed through Dawah offices established after a meeting between Jafari and Iranian security officials.

Twice in the last twelve years, large-scale Iranian destabilization efforts have confronted U.S. military interventions. In Bosnia, after significant internal debate, George H.W. Bush’s administration chose to block Iranian infiltration, risking revenge attacks against the United States by Iranian-linked terrorists. In September 1992, Tehran attempted to ship 4,000 guns, one million rounds of ammunition, and several dozen fighters to Bosnia. An Iranian Boeing 747 landed in Zagreb, where, in response to U.S. pressure, the Croatian military impounded the weapons and expelled the jihadis. Today, there is little threat of radical anti-U.S. Islamism in Bosnia.
 
Almost a decade later, the current Bush administration identified an Iranian challenge in Afghanistan. Speaking before the American-Iranian Council on March 13, 2002, Zalmay Khalilzad, senior National Security Council adviser for the Middle East and Southwest Asia, declared, “The Iranian regime has sent some Qods forces associated with its Revolutionary Guards to parts of Afghanistan. . . . Iranian officials have provided military and financial support to regional parties without the knowledge and consent of the Afghan Interim Authority.” Rather than combat this Iranian challenge, the Bush administration chose diplomacy. “Notwithstanding our criticism of Iranian policy, the U.S. remains open to dialogue,” Khalilzad continued. Today, visitors to Herat, a main city in western Afghanistan, consider Iranian influence there to be extremely strong.

In the wake of Sadr’s uprising, Washington is faced with the same choice: End Iran’s infiltration through forceful action, or wish it away. How long can we afford to keep choosing the latter?

Michael Ledeen also has a salient piece entitled “Iran’s Nuclear Impasse: Next Steps.”  We are reminded that Iran wants to go nuclear, and that time is of the essence.

This convergence of things has caused me to realize that winning the war in Iraq, or in Lebanon against Hezbollah, or in Afghanistan against the radical elements there, requires cutting off the head of the snake.  The head of the snake is Iran.

Once again, however pedestrian it may sound, I will post in the near future on my Iranian war plans.  Why?  Because it is not apparent to me that the U.S. brass has any good ones based on my earlier post on this subject.

Michelle Malkin has the scoop on the eleven missing Egyptian men who entered the U.S. as “students,” got off the airplane, and have not been seen since.  Of course, eleven potential terrorists are a problem, but since we probably have far more than that in Dearborn, Michigan alone, more disconcerting to me is the cavalier and dismissive treatment of this issue by Michael Chertoff.  To be specific:

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was less than pleased when the Federal Bureau of Investigation put out a BOLO (be-on-the-lookout) for 11 Egyptian students who failed to show up for class.

“The secretary was not happy that we went so far for a just a bunch of kids who cut class,

From Haaretz:

The security cabinet approved Wednesday a broader ground offensive by the Israel Defense Forces in Lebanon, authorizing troops to push to the Litani River some 30 kilometers from the Israel-Lebanon border.The IDF’s goal is to significantly reduce Hezbollah’s short-range rocket launching capabilities. Most Katyusha rocket launches take place from within this area. The cabinet authorized Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz to widen the offensive and to determine its timing. According to the decision, however, the two are not obliged to implement the decision. Nine of the 12 ministers in the cabinet voted in favor of the move, while the other three abstained. There were no votes against the decision.Labor Party Ministers Shimon Peres and Ophir Pines-Paz and Shas’s Industry and Trade Minister Eli Yishai abstained from voting. Peres and Pines-Paz said all diplomatic channels must be exhausted before the war is expanded. Yishai said the ground offensive must not be expanded until air strikes have run their course.

But even up until the time of the meeting, Olmert was hesitant:

Olmert was hesitant prior to the meeting on whether to approve the proposed expansion of the IDF ground operation in south Lebanon. Olmert was concerned that the plan presented by the defense establishment would result in hundreds of casualties, and therefore, wanted to subject it to a careful cost-benefit analysis.

There is also some incredibly bad politics going on with the replacement of the general over the northern command in Israel.  This is the stuff of “soap operas” and tabloid headlines.  This type of thing should not be happening during a time of war.  Northern Command Chief Udi Adam has been replaced (sort of) by Moshe Kaplinsky.  Read about it here and here.  But has he really replaced him?  Who is reporting to whom?  Did Adam really go before the Security Council and beg for a ground operation, only to be denied by the council?  Or is Adam really not the leader for this operation to begin with?

Okay, so here it is: Ehud Olmert hesitates, Udi Adam is replaced, but only sort of.  The Security Council gets to overrule military plans, and the war is run by committee.  I know that here in the U.S. things are much more simple due to the fact that we have a commander in chief.  But one thing is for sure.  After this war is all over, Israel needs seriously to revisit its form of government as it pertains to the conduct of war.  While a Parliamentary form of government may have served Israel in the past regarding politics, it just isn’t well-suited to rapid warfare and evolving conditions on the battlefield.

There is no place for politics in warfare.  Politics can only cost lives.  It can never help.  If you want to do politics, then stop the war and play politics.

Okay, here we go with a prediction.  I have made only a few of those so far, because they are something that:

1. No one remembers if you got it right, and
2. Everyone will remember if you got it wrong.

Nevertheless, I will make one.  This is a prediction with a small “p.”  I have no special knowledge and I am not clairvoyant.  I just have a web site and have a thought to share — for whatever its worth.

Joseph Lieberman will win the Senate race this November.  The democrats in Connecticut committed suicide tonight.  They simply imploded, and let the Daily KOS types ruin their chances of taking the Senate this November (I am a Republican, so this is a good thing if I am right).

My thinking goes like this.  Ken Mehlman won’t give a penny from the RNC coffers to the Republican candidate in Connecticut.  There will be enough Republicans that cross over and vote Independent this November that, together with about half of the democrats in Connecticut (if tonight is any indication), Lieberman’s tally will make him victorious.

Polls will be taken until the “cows come home” or until “pigs fly.”  People will respond in polls what they would like to happen, not what they will do in November.  When Republicans go into the private voting booth, they will (correctly) think: My candidate cannot get elected — he doesn’t have the votes, and my vote will not change that.  Lieberman can get elected, but my vote might make a difference in this case.  If Lieberman gets elected, not only do I have a Senator who is strong on defense, but the democrats lose a seat in the Senate, decreasing their strength by unity (one).  If I vote for Lieberman my candidate loses, but I win.

So, I cast the vote for Lieberman.

Michelle Malkin has a roundup of coverage.

**** SCROLL FOR UPDATES **** 

The Jerusalem Post is reporting that an unidentified source in Israeli intellegence is saying that Hezbollah remains strong and relatively unaffected by the Israeli offensive:

Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Amir Peretz, have spoken with enthusiasm about a multinational force, but the high-ranking officer said Monday that Hizbullah had not been damaged enough and still retained enough “diplomatic power” to thwart the deployment of such a force.

“Hizbullah has not been sufficiently weakened,” the officer said. “And there may be no choice but to expand the ground operation in the direction of the Litani River to achieve that goal.”

According to intelligence information, the Hizbullah command-and-control array is still functioning even after nearly four weeks of fighting. So are the logistical command centers – still operating and succeeding in directing the smuggling of weapons into Lebanon from Syria.

The officer said that Hizbullah still had the ability to fire short-range rockets, of which the guerrilla group has already fired 2,500 since the beginning of the war.

The only way to stop the short-range rockets, he said, was for the IDF to deepen its incursion north to the Litani and to sweep through cities like Tyre, estimated to be the hiding place for most of the short-range 122mm Katyusha rockets. 

In a stinging opinion piece in the Jerusalem Post, David Horovitz opines (this is an extended quote, but well worth the time to read it):

Almost four weeks into the war, Hizbullah mocks Israel’s inability to staunch the fire. The Arab world, part of which essentially backed Israel’s anti-Hizbullah offensive in its early stages, has withdrawn or, in many cases, thrown its weight publicly behind the terrorists amid daily evidence of Israel’s failure to decisively prevail. In America, analysts question Washington’s over-reliance on Israel, the little strategic ally that couldn’t.

But Israel could prevail in this conflict. Israel could silence the Katyusha launchers. What it would need do is resort to one of those two options – a much greater use of air power or a larger ground offensive.

Either of those avenues, however, would necessarily involve death on a far larger scale than we have seen thus far. Pulverizing air power would likely create Lebanese civilian casualties of a number that would dwarf the toll to date. Wider use of ground forces, on Hizbullah’s home territory, would likely dwarf the IDF toll hitherto sustained in the close-quarters fighting.

With every day’s evidence of underwhelming military success, the chorus swells in Israel that this is a no-brainer. The army is being humiliated, the argument runs; Israel’s critical deterrent capability is being shattered. Israel simply must ratchet up its military response to the daily rain of incoming rockets. And while some experts favor the ground-forces option, for others the choice is no choice at all: Dead Lebanese or dead Israelis? Why the hesitation?

And yet Israel hesitates. It certainly does not want to put more of its ground forces into harm’s way. But it also does not want to inflict civilian casualties on a more drastic scale in Lebanon.

This is partly because of a sense of short-term gain and long-term loss. A much more forceful use of air power might indeed shatter Hizbullah’s Katyusha capability and bring a respite to the North. But it also might leave Israel friendless internationally, and thus utterly vulnerable.

Without America in its corner, Israel is in real, existential trouble.

I have called for more aggressive ground action by the IDF, in part:

• IDF Loses Momentum?
• Israeli Air Force Shocked at Failure of Air Campaign 

But a combination of things have come together to put the Israelis in a terrible predicament right now:

1. Five years of buildup by Hezbollah (For the moderates and doves in Israel, let’s admit it together.  This occurred on Sharon’s watch.  There is a price to pay for such things.).
2. Hesitation at the potential of inflicting civilian casualties with an enemy who rejoices and celebrates at the deaths of innocents.
3. Israeli Air Force claims that air power alone could do most of the heavy lifting in the war.

This should have been a two or three-week war with tens of thousands of IDF troops going north, accompanied by heavy armor and all of the air power than Israel could muster at one time.  Instead, time has wasted away.  Hesitation always makes the losses worse.

Will Bush be able to stem the tide of anti-Israel sentiment long enough for Ehud Olmert to lead Israel out of this mess?  Is Ehud Olmert competant enough to lead Israel out of this mess?  Does Israel have the will to wage this war?

These are all salient questions and ones that will be answered in the near future.

On a side note, somehow I cannot see Israel in this same situation had Benjamin Netanyahu been Prime Minister.

**** UPDATE #1 ****

Continuing its incoherent military strategy against Hezbollah, Israel has apparently decided to ditch the plan to reach the Litani River.  It looks like Olmert and the IDF will pursue this half-way measure until the bitter end.

I predict that Hezbollah will be empowered by the apparent defeat of the IDF when this is all over.

**** UPDATE #2 ****

NRO has a good commentary from the editors:

Arabs are complaining that the proposed U.S./French resolution hands the Israelis their military objective by diplomatic means. So it does.

And here’s the rub: Israel does not appear to have been able to weaken Hezbollah sufficiently to compel it to go along with any settlement acceptable to the Jewish state. Perhaps when the fog of war lifts, Israel will be revealed to have damaged Hezbollah in a way that isn’t evident right now. If Israel were waging a war against bridges, highways, and south Beirut apartment buildings, it would be winning a smashing victory. But it is fighting a tenacious guerilla force that can be swept out of the south only with the kind of massive ground invasion that it has so far wanted to avoid. Instead, Israel has contented itself with quick hit-and-run raids, and has consequently been forced to fight for control of villages just inside the Lebanese border two or three times over.

Absent a clear Hezbollah defeat, a satisfactory diplomatic result is hard to imagine. The Lebanese government and other Arabs will find it difficult to stand up to a militia that fought the mighty Israelis at least to a draw. Any international peacekeeping force, meanwhile, is unlikely to hold its own against a Hezbollah that hasn’t been de-fanged, and such a force may well only become complicit in Hezbollah’s control of the south, in a repeat of the feckless performance of the current force, UNIFIL. 

There are a few options, then. Israel could significantly broaden its military offensive, which would offer the best chance of changing the dynamic; this is still under consideration. It could continue to fight a limited war against Hezbollah in some form or other for weeks, hoping that it can hurt Hezbollah over time and that no political disaster — like the fall of the Lebanese government — will happen in the interim. Or it can let American diplomacy run its course and hope for the best, knowing that the U.S. is not operating in ideal circumstances and that, even if Hezbollah accepts a deal, the outcome will probably only be a stopgap prior to the next war. If none of Israel’s options is appealing, it is because there are consequences to waging a mediocre military campaign (bold mine).

I was complaining about the military campaign two or more weeks ago, saying that this could be rectified and the whole campaign saved, if only the IDF would move immediately to a large-scale ground invasion of southern Lebanon.  Time was — and still is — of the essence.  As it is, it is doomed to fight a much more bloody campaign to take this territory than if they had taken our advice, and the Arab world is under no pressure to make a deal with Israel because of the failed military campaign.  A deal favorable to Israel will only be brokered if there is compelling reason for the Arab world to do so.  A military victory over Hezbollah would be just such a compelling reason.

I know that the Bush administration has been careful not to call the presence of U.S. troops in Iraq an “occupation.”  Notwithstanding politics, the question should be asked, “exactly who was it that conquered the Iraqi armies?”

The AP is reporting:

Iraq’s prime minister sharply criticized a U.S.-Iraqi attack Monday on a Shiite militia stronghold in Baghdad, breaking with his American partners on security tactics as the United States launches a major operation to secure the capital.

More than 30 people were killed or found dead Monday, including 10 paramilitary commandos slain when a suicide driver detonated a truck at the regional headquarters of the Shiite-led Interior Ministry police in a mostly Sunni city north of Baghdad.

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s criticism followed a pre-dawn air and ground attack on an area of Sadr City, stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.

Police said three people, including a woman and a child, were killed in the raid, which the U.S. command said was aimed at “individuals involved in punishment and torture cell activities.”

[ … ]

“Reconciliation cannot go hand in hand with operations that violate the rights of citizens this way,” al-Maliki said in a statement on government television. “This operation used weapons that are unreasonable to detain someone — like using planes.”

He apologized to the Iraqi people for the operation and said “this won’t happen again.”

I have been vocal in my call for the arrest or killing of al-Sadr and his henchmen, as well as very aggressive offensives against all enemy in Iraq, whether Shia killing squads or leftover al Qaida.  This is war, and if we do not have the stomach left to fight it as such, then we should bring our boys home.

Now, the PM of Iraq is telling the press and the Shia killing squads that our warring against the enemy “won’t happen again.”  Words cannot express my utter disgust at the U.S. military brass if we cower to this kind of pomp and bloated self-aggrandizement.

The notion that anyone in Iraq should inform the U.S. of boundaries and stipulations in the war on terrorism boggles the mind.  Only in an atmosphere where this sort of arrogance has been allowed to flourish would this even be thinkable.

Who has given the Iraqi PM the impression that he can set our boudaries?

We will be watching closely to see if the U.S. cowers to little bullies.  We should quit trying to be loved and simply wage war.

This from Arutz Sheva:

Brig.-Gen. Noam Feig, head of naval shipyards, said the Naval Commando 13’s operation in Tyre targeted senior Hizbullah operatives responsible for the launch of long-range rockets, similar to those fired at Hadera on Friday. “The goal of the operation was a commando raid against [those] senior Hizbullah operatives,” he said. “Among other things, they were involved in launching rockets at Hadera Friday. The operation brought closure to all other operations.”

Feig stressed that the heroic operation was deemed necessary to combat the threat of long-term rocket launches into Israel, while minimizing the possibility of Lebanese civilian casualties. “The force, under the command of a Commando 13 commander, was made up of three separate forces. Hizbullah’s pattern of operations, hiding in apartments, endangers the lives of Lebanese civilians and necessitates selective and accurate capabilities,” Feig stated.

[ … ]

“The two soldiers were treated in the field by a medical unit under the command of the unit’s doctor,” explained Feig, “and an operation was performed in the field. The force evacuated under fire to the coast, where a helicopter waited, as planned, to transport them back to Israel at 5 a.m. All in all – fighting and presence in the field – one hour and 45 minutes.”

Remember the Zarqawi bombing run and how U.S. forces found him?  Video here.  The U.S. used a standoff weapon (JDAM).  The U.S. used standoff weapons in order to protect the lives of U.S. troops.  Remember also that a child died in the attack on Zarqawi.

I want to make a several brief observations and then follow up with a view towards rethinking just war theory.

1. The U.S. did not repudiate the actions involved in killing Zarqawi because an innocent was killed.
2. The U.S. military leadership chose by their tactics to side with the protection of U.S. troops rather than the protection of possible innocents.
3. The Israeli military leadership chose to side with the protection of possible innocents in the vicnity of the enemy.
4. Yet Israel is challenged every day in the media for the killing of innocents in the vicinity of the enemy.

I prefer to think within the paradigm of “good wars” rather than “just war.”  We need to relinquish this quaint but highly outdated notion of wars as soldiers lining up opposed to each other on a field of battle where innocents are either looking on or completely absent from the vicinity.  Certainly this idea prevailed — for good reason — throughout the First and Second Worlds Wars, the Korean War and even to some degree the war in Vietnam (as well as the first Gulf War).  Today there is such an absence of moral underpinnings in war that the innocent is scattered amongst the warrior.  The warrior puts himself in the vicinity of non-combatants by choice in order to cause collateral damage, thus playing to political sensibilities as we see in the media the continual drumbeat of this country or that country “intentionally targeting civilians.”

When “warriors” do this, they are no longer protecting anyone, and are thus not worthy to be called or considered warriors.  They are terrorists.  The scene now becomes a hazy chaos of terrorists rather than warriors, combatants mixed with non-combatants, murky situations where non-combatants are actively aiding the combatants, and impossible stipulations such as the prevention of all civilian deaths — juxtaposed with the moral duty of a country to protect the safety of its citizens.  Stated simply, the paradigm of soldiers lining up in a field of battle (where a just war may be ascertained based on simple questions like “who is the aggressor?” or “what fixed boundary was violated by some outsider?”) is a paradigm whose time has come and gone.

In the case of the U.S. leadership choosing to use a JDAM to take out Zarqawi rather than bring additional risk to the lives of U.S. troops, I would not have had it any other way.  If keeping a child among the enemy stops your armies from fighting because they might kill the child, it is the enemy who is at fault rather than your armies, and it is a tactic that will cause you to lose the war.  To fail to war against aggressors because of potential collateral damage would be to fail your own people and thus to bring them additional risk and perhaps worse.

It is a matter of keeping in front of you the reason we are at war and who warrants the protection of U.S. troops.  What is most important?  The protection of U.S. citizens or the protection of potential non-combatants?  Remember that this is a salient question for our troops at war right now.  It goes to every part of their existence, from targeting munitions to “room-clearing” and “stacks.”  If a fire team has to delineate between friend or foe upon entering a room, the fire team will likely die due to the time delay and opportunity for the enemy to engage our troops.  This is no theoretical matter to our troops.  Those who want to protect against the possibility of the deaths of any non-combatants must take this into consideration.  Not only would such a policy mean many more U.S. deaths, it would probably mean the end of combat capability and the loss of the war.  No army can fight a war under these conditions.

In the case of Israel, it seems to me that they went above and beyond the call of duty to protect innocents.  It is further than the U.S. went when we killed Zarqawi, and it is further than I would have gone had I been in charge.

As it is, a battlefield operation had to be performed on an Israeli soldier because Israel was concerned collateral damage.  Tell that to the mother of the IDF soldier who had the operation and ask her about priorities.