- In the past few days, Israel's IDF forces have begun
moving deeper into Lebanon. While Israeli announcements of this plan
did not include details, the goal is to clear the area of south Lebanon
up to the Litani River of any Hezbollah fighters. Israeli officials
have said that already some 300 of an estimated 2,000 Hezbollah fighters
have been killed. According to a New York Times report, Brigadier General
Shakar of Israel's Northern Command indicated that the IDF is forming a
"Red Line" along both sides of the Litani River--which runs pretty
much east to west after it leaves the Lebanon range--and that a force
amounting to around six brigades or 10,000 men would be fielded for this
task. An overall objective, according to the Times, is to clear a two to
three mile wide zone of land north of the Lebanon-Israel frontier of all
Hezbollah fighters, explosives, mines, outposts, storage areas, barracks
and other infrastructure, so that an international force can be deployed
there without itself having to engage Hezbollah.
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- Couched in the jargon of military maneuver, the plan
sounds plausible. However, the numbers are, to say the least, challenging.
As a practical matter, delivery on the plan would require a scorched earth
sterilization of roughly 60 to 100 square miles of southern Lebanon, while
maintaining effective occupation of roughly 400-500 square miles of Lebanon
to north of the Litani River. That averages out to roughly 20 men
per square mile. Such a force is equivalent to a large hunting or
foraging party, but hardly a substantial fighting force when scattered
over the whole region.
-
- The rejoinder to that observation is likely to be: But
those forces will be assembled into fighting units according to the needs
of identified battle zones. Right, as Sun Tzu or Clausewitz might
say, but where is the battle? Here guerrilla warfare, as practiced
by Hezbollah, has proven to be a baffling ordeal. After three weeks
Israelis are asking why the best army in the region, the one that beat
three national armies in six days, has been unable to beat a ragtag bunch
of insurgents in three weeks. The second embarrassing question is:
Having bombed poor Lebanon for several weeks with impunity, without resistance,
and with the best equipment on the planet, why haven't IDF forces found
and destroyed the battlefield?
-
- Here the IDF really needs to do the numbers. To start
with, how many Hezbollah are there? At last count (estimate), Lebanon
had almost 4 million people. Roughly 60% of the population is Islamic.
An estimated 40% of the population is Shi'a, and roughly half (who knows
exactly) of the Shi'a population appears to be Hezbollah. In effect,
that means as many as 20-25% of the Lebanese (700,000-800,000 people) could
be associated with Hezbollah. However, clouding that number even
more is the fact that recent polls indicate that as many as 80-85% of all
Lebanese now strongly favor Hezbollah.
-
- Both of the above percentage sets pose major problems
for engaging a guerrilla war in Lebanon. The State Department estimates
Hezbollah fighting strength at "several thousand," while the
International Institute for Strategic Studies suggests the fighting force,
including actives, backups and reserves, could exceed 15-20,000. Even if
the fighting element of Hezbollah is on the low side of those numbers,
the asymmetrical nature of guerrilla war, the ease with which such forces
can hide in and receive support from the general population, and the fact
that battle grounds are more than likely to be chosen by Hezbollah than
by the IDF, would commend a much larger force than Israel has deployed
or has talked about. Meanwhile, interdicting Hezbollah re-supply,
not only from Iran and Syria but offshore sources, is a major challenge,
and the Lebanese know their coast line and mountains far better than the
Israelis.
-
- The numbers suggest that a prudent Israeli/US objective
would be to stop soon and not risk the likely failure of an effort to eliminate
Hezbollah as a fighting force. At the moment, the prospect is for a war
that will be very costly in Israeli blood and treasure, to say nothing
of the costs to Lebanon. The most likely outcome appears little better
than a draw. And that says nothing of the political furor in Lebanon, Israel,
the United States and the rest of the world that will be generated by an
Israeli effort to sterilize southern Lebanon by the gross means it already
has applied to Lebanon as a whole.
-
- **********
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- The writer is the author of the recently published work,
A World Less Safe, now available on Amazon, and he is a regular columnist
on rense.com. He is a retired Senior Foreign Service Officer of the
US Department of State whose immediate pre-retirement positions were as
Deputy Director of the State Office of Counter-Terrorism and Emergency
Planning, and as Chairman of the Department of International Studies of
the National War College. He will welcome comment at wecanstopit@charter.net.
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