I'm not passing moral judgments here. I’ve never been able to turn a blind eye to the war crimes of one side or the other – rationalizing the suicide bomb that blows a bus full of Israeli civilians to bloody bits while crying tears of outrage over the destruction of a power plant that provides clean water to tens of thousands of Palestinian mothers and infants, or vice versa. To me, the conflict has long since come to resemble a war between lunatics, and one doesn’t pass moral judgments on the behavior of the insane, not even the criminally insane.
And then go on to analysis of the prelude:
If I had to pin it down, I would say the big difference between this crisis and similar past episodes is how completely off balance the Israelis seem to be – lurching from reaction to reaction without any clear plan or strategy. The Gaza incursion was thrown together, more or less on the fly, which led to some embarrassing public squabbling within the Israeli cabinet. The attempt to decapitate Hamas’s civilian leadership by arresting the entire Palestinian cabinet smacked of improvisation, and largely failed. Hezbollah’s intervention clearly took Jerusalem by surprise, which is probably why the response has been so disproportionate: the Israelis are rather desperately trying to regain the initiative.
What’s strange about this is that the Israelis started with the initiative, at least tactically. I’m told an incursion into Gaza was actually in the works before the Palestinian attack on the frontier post – although the original plan has been for a smaller search-and-destroy operation aimed at suppressing, or at least harassing, the Hamas rocketeers. Whether the Palestinians knew this and managed to get a jump, or were just lucky with the timing of their cross-border raid, the result is that the Israelis were left scrambling to come up with a response, and it showed.
Move on to the main course:
Three days in, and it looks like Israel is losing the war.
Not militarily, of course -- The IDF could turn Lebanon into a parking lot if it wanted to, and if it's willing to take enough casualties it can probably push Hezbollah away from the Israeli border and suppress the rocket attacks (or at least most of them.)
No, Israel is losing this war the same way it "lost" the October 1973 War -- by not crushing its enemies swiftly and completely, and then rubbing their faces in their own impotence and humilation.
Just the opposite: Today it was Israel that suffered the humilation of nearly losing one of its missile frigates to a warhead-carrying Hezbollah drone -- a threat the IDF apparently didn't even know existed.
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