I think anytime Israel fails to win decisively, its foes declare themselves victorious for having survived, like Hizbullah did.
In addition, Israel clearly did not achieve its stated goals of destroying or heavily degrading Hizbullah, or getting its hostages back. It's true that they destroyed nearly all of Hizbullah's long range rocekts, but Hizbullah got resupplied from Iran and Syria.
So the fact that by military standards, Israel won handily, does not weigh with me that greatly. I think it's more useful to look at the situation from military, political and media angles and ask: what was the situation before, and what is the situation after, and who benefits?
The point about availability of bunkers, Hizbullah influenced coverage, etc, is this: a large part of the Israeli Arab conflict is fought in the media. Anytime the Arabs can give Israel a human rights black-eye, they have won a victory in this field. Hizbullah definitely achieved this last summer, between parading dead babies up and down at Qana, launching Katyushas and larger missiles from residential neighborhoods, and not providing any shelters to the Lebanese.
I don't know how many times I have heard the number of dead Lebanese cited as proof of Israel's greater moral turpitude. I usually reply that by this calculus, Israel should close all its civilian shelters so that its moral standing may improve in the next war.
About the only two things that I think Israel achieved successfully last summer were to make both the Pals and the Lebanese more wary of attacking across the border, and making all the non-Shia Lebanese (and some of the Shia too) very mad at Hizbullah, who started the war without a by-your-leave to Lebanon. |
