In Over Their Heads

Ehud Olmert is in big trouble if he thinks that the current offensive in Lebanon is "meeting the goals" of Israel. Air wars cannot defeat a guerrilla group, especially if those air strikes are targeted at the civilian population instead of the guerrillas themselves. I know that Hezbollah allegedly hides among the civilian population, but at the same time, hitting trucks full of medical and food supplies and longstanding UN bases (which was under fire for a week, according to one of the dead Canadian soldiers), while leaving alone known weapons caches in Tyre reflects nothing but bad strategy. On Day One of this war Hezbollah launched 120 rockets into Israel. After two weeks of shelling, yesterday they launched 130. Yesterday was the heaviest day of fighting yet. At least 500 are dead.

It's time to look seriously at what Israel thinks they're accomplishing by this. I don't believe Olmert has a clue what to do. Israel fought for 18 years on the same strip of land, house to house, on the ground, and couldn't beat Hezbollah. Now they bomb a bunch of unrelated targets for a couple weeks and send in 50 soldiers and they expect to win?

Digby writes about the lack of US involvement, and how it has once again harmed our status in the world at a time when it could have been a great boost:

The situation in Lebanon requires American leadership and we have failed miserably to provide it. The various players are engaged in a struggle in which minimizing loss of life and face saving kabuki may be the best we can hope for at any given time. The megalomaniacal belief that if only the Israelis are allowed to "get tough" or the Americans "take it to the Iranians" or whatever other simplistic schoolyard impulses they have been operating under have led us to the point at which the US is taking on the character of a rogue superpower, not a global leader.

I maintain that the players in the mid-east expected the US to exercize its power wisely and the American failure to fulfill its obligation has led to confusion, overreach and miscalculation. This is not surprising. The bumbling, hallucinatory nature of this administration's foreign policy has been manifest for some time now, but it's still hard to wrap your mind around the fact that the most powerful country in the world is being led so incompetently that it simply cannot rise to the occasion when the stakes are so high. I confess that I'm still shocked by that myself, although less so each time we are confronted with a challenge and these neocon magical thinkers automatically default to bellicose trash talk they are unable to back up.

And now that the leader of Israel apparently is poised to make Lebanon into an analogue of our situation in Iraq, the neocons look even stupider, because they're enabling a war that's doing nothing but killing civilians and angering hundreds of thousands of Lebanese and millions in the Arab world. I wish we'd stop getting tough and start getting smart.