Told you so.... the war's all about the West-Bankization of Iraq --if Gen Tommy Franks and co keep on blundering then they'd better pass the torch to the Israeli Chief of Staff... for the sake of "operational clarity".
Israel offers lesson to U.S. on Iraq war
James Bennet/NYT
Tuesday, April 1, 2003
JERUSALEM As they prepared for war in Iraq, U.S. military officials reviewed Israel's use of helicopters, tanks and armored bulldozers to fight in the cramped quarters of Palestinian refugee camps. But Israeli veterans and other experts said that the Americans might have learned more from the political dimensions of Israel's war in Lebanon and its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip: how hard it can be to sift civilians for potential threats without enraging a society and alienating world opinion; how inspiring it can seem to face up to an enemy and to try to improve the lives of its victims - and how agonizing it can be to end a resulting occupation. "We also think that we are very, very moral," Martin van Creveld, professor of military history and strategy at Hebrew University, said of Israelis. "And we wonder why they hate us so much."
Van Creveld briefed officers of the Marine Corps in North Carolina in September. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has repeatedly said that Israel is not involved in the Iraq war. Israeli officials who are usually quick to draw parallels between the American and Israeli experiences have been strikingly reticent to do so recently - even after a Palestinian suicide bomber blew apart in a coastal city here on Sunday, the day after an Iraqi bomber killed four American soldiers at a checkpoint. But, to any Israeli - and any Palestinian - the parallels are inescapable.
"I have a deja vu feeling," said Yoni Fighel, a colonel in the Israeli reserves who served as an intelligence officer in the Lebanon war and later as a military governor in the West Bank. He said that Iraqis also appeared to have studied the Israeli experience. "I do believe that some conclusions from Lebanon, and from the West Bank and Gaza, were adopted by the Iraqi regime," said Fighel, now a researcher at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism. He called suicide bombing and guerrilla warfare "an excellent tool to build a fence" between the U.S. and British soldiers and the Iraqi civilians they hope to win over. The soldiers who are setting up checkpoints in Iraq, demanding identification, frisking men and examining even the most innocent-seeming bundles are doing what Israeli soldiers do daily in the West Bank. Like the Israelis, the Americans and British are now relying on intelligence gleaned rapidly from collaborators and prisoners to storm homes in pursuit of wanted men, weapons and more intelligence. Like the Israelis, they are opening fire on people who move into off-limits areas. They are bulldozing trees and homes to improve their lines of fire. "Similar?!" blared the newspaper Ma'ariv recently on its front page, between a picture of Iraqis standing in the concrete rubble left by a bomb in Baghdad and a picture of Palestinians doing the same thing in the Gaza Strip. The newspaper ran a series of compare-and-contrast pictures - of soldiers guarding prisoners with their hands on their heads; of soldiers in battle gear standing by children; of soldiers napping in newly occupied buildings.
To expert Israeli eyes, the British troops, with their experience in Northern Ireland, appear more adept at this form of conflict than the Americans. American consultations with Israeli experts appear to have been part of a broad review of strategy for fighting in cities that preceded the war on Iraq. Marines trained on mock cities in Guam and in Southern California as the armed forces tried to extract and instill lessons from American combat in Somalia and from Russian fighting in Chechnya. In Israel's case, army officials have said that they were particularly interested in how the army used specially loaded tank rounds to blast holes through walls during fighting last year in the Jenin refugee camp. In Jenin, Israel also used bulldozers and wire-guided missiles fired from Cobra helicopters to overwhelm gunmen holed up inside the camp. Van Creveld said that, when he visited Camp Lejeune last autumn, the Marines were "interested in what it would be like fighting a guerrilla war, especially urban warfare of the kind we were conducting in Jenin."
He said he focused on three areas: The use of bulldozers, the use of helicopters and "the moral and ethical problems that were sure to come" from fighting among noncombatants. He warned that Israel could use helicopters in Jenin only because the Palestinians were so poorly armed. "You can't do that if you are facing fire from the ground, because the helicopters are very vulnerable," he said. He said he particularly stressed the moral dimension of urban warfare. He said it was critical to avoid "a prolonged campaign of the strong against the weak."
Sharon was minister of defense when Israel launched operation "Peace for Galilee" and invaded Lebanon in 1982 in what was sold to the Israeli public as a bid to drive the Palestine Liberation Organization back from the northern border. Sharon went on to drive the PLO out of Lebanon and to try to install a more friendly regime there. Ephraim Sneh, who commanded Israeli forces in the southern zone of Lebanon, rejected as superficial any comparison to the American war on Iraq, noting that Lebanon had no effective government when Israel invaded. He pointed out that it took Israel only days to reach and besiege Beirut. Further, unlike the Americans in Iraq, the Israeli were instantly welcomed as liberators, even by the Shiites of the south, Sneh said. "It was genuine, because we liberated them from the Palestinian occupation."
Sneh, who is now a member of Parliament, said he was received warmly into Shiites homes. But, he said, in the kind of warning other Israeli soldiers recall receiving at the time, one Shiite leader told him, "Thank you for coming, but please, leave quickly."
The Israelis stayed, and their effort to install a new regime ended in disaster.
Charles Enderlin, the bureau chief here for France 2 television, recalled covering the war initially from a passenger vehicle with Israeli license plates. Within months, he said, he was wearing a flak jacket and moving safely only in a military convoy. "You started to have attacks against Israelis and the Israelis reacted the usual ways and that was curfews on villages, searches in houses, sometimes in mosques, with dogs to look for explosives," Enderlin recalled. "The result was, after a few months, the whole Shiite community was anti-Israeli." The militant group Hezbollah had been born. Israel withdrew to a "security zone" in Lebanon's south, but did not abandon the fight and withdraw altogether for 18 years. Eventually, it was the withdrawal that illustrated for Israelis how dangerous a trap the invasion became. They did not want the army to stay in Lebanon; but they concluded that, by leaving Lebanon under fire, Israel emboldened the Palestinians to pursue their own cause violently, believing that Israel would capitulate to force. "I don't think the idea of the Americans staying in Iraq after the war is a good one," said Asher Susser, director of the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern Studies. "It's a tortuous road to begin."
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