Today's Situation

The race between Litani and Manhattan Thursday, August 10, 2006

Yesterday, nine soldiers inside a house were killed with such rocket, and similar rockets were used in several incidents, for a total of 15 Israeli soldiers -- all reservists -- killed. Today, there was anonymous recrimination in the media about how budget cuts had put an end to research and development for ‘solutions’ to the anti-tank rockets. Similar complaints have been heard about Israel cutting the budget for development and purchase of the Nautilus anti-missile laser system that had been in co-development with the U.S. The project, which would have cost $100 million per battery, as been touted in recent weeks as being capable -- if fully developed -- of downing Katyushas. Perhaps.

Those mutual recriminations for the failure to stop the Hizbollah rocket fire into Israel, are also making the national consensus in favor of the war seem vulnerable, if not disintegrating. When the army presented its plans to move to the Litani River - and perhaps beyond -- in an effort to push the Katyushas out of south Lebanon and therefore out of range of the border communities, former chief of staff and former defense minister Shaul Mofaz, now transport minister, piped up with a plan of his own. It made it sound like he could organize a much more elegant and swifter approach that would not take as many casualties. ‘Where were you when the Hizbollah was building its forces?’ Defense Minister Amir Peretz asked pointedly, sensing that the post-war politicking is already beginning. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had to step in and remind all the ministers that ‘the eyes of the world and the nation’ are upon them, and that now is not the right time for infighting.

But the much vaunted home front, meaning the estimated quarter million Israelis in the north who have spent the last month in bomb shelters and another quarter million who are refugees in their own country, further south than Haifa, sounds like it is losing patience, when interviewed by reporters. The shelters were not well-maintained during the six years of quiet on the border, and it is mostly the poor, infirm and otherwise marginalized, who couldn’t afford to move south for the duration of a war that sounded like it would take a week and now is entering its fifth week, who are suffering in the shelters.

Sirens go off throughout northern Israel as often as a dozen times a day and some towns, like Kiryat Shmona, are being hit by as many as 40 rockets a day. Most fall harmlessly, but some do enormous damage to buildings, and almost every day someone is wounded -- or killed. It’s a lottery ticket -- though the only casualties so far have been people who did not take cover when the sirens went off. The radio carries announcements of alerts, and no program is complete without at least one such announcement, listing towns that appear to Israeli spotters to be the likely landing places for rockets fired from various places in Lebanon.

Israel’s casualty list of soldiers and civilians has long since passed the 100 mark, and soon soldiers will outnumber the civilians on that list. Every soldier killed, once identified, starts the news report, as do reports of their funerals. Israeli news programming has taken over the three main channels, and unless there is an extraordinary development in the warfare or diplomacy, the opening news items on all three TV channels are always human interest stories about each of the soldiers who died that day or the day before. Only after that ritual is over -- on particularly bloody days, it can take up the first twenty minutes of the news program -- does the reporting turn to the military-diplomatic story.

And that story now is a race between the pressure from the army to rush north to the Litani and perhaps further, against the diplomatic efforts underway in Manhattan. Israel is getting crossed signals from the Americans, who say that Israel has the right to defend itself, but the hostilities should not be widened. The Americans and French are reworking their draft proposal for a ceasefire, with France seemingly negotiating on behalf of Lebanon and the Americans on behalf of Israel.

But both UN Security Council permanent members are also vying for their own political positions in a post-war Lebanon. Despite President Bush’s refusal to engage Syria, there are also consistent reports about European efforts to try to pry Syria out of the Iran-Hizbollah axis. But if Washington does not offer a large carrot, Damascus probably won’t budge.

Olmert and Peretz have been mandated by the government to decide that diplomatic movement is not leading to a ceasefire acceptable to Israel, with the authority to give the order to the army to begin rolling north. Neither of them seems very enthusiastic about the military plans they asked for and which say that while it will take a few days for the army to reach the Litani River, it could take at least another month to six weeks of fighting throughout south Lebanon before the Katyushas stop falling.

No less significantly, the IDF is estimating casualties could be as high as 400-500 soldiers killed in that month of fighting, with no estimate of how many civilians might yet be killed by Hizbollah rockets. And the army has completely revised its estimates of the Hizbollah forces it faces in south Lebanon, from an estimate that said Hizbollah in its entirety consisted of at most 2,500 men, only some of whom were trained (albeit well-trained), to twice that -- just in south Lebanon.

Furthermore, ‘cleaning’ south Lebanon of the Hizbollah’s arms will be a Herculean task: troops already in the narrow security zone Israel established right over its border, pushing Hizbollah away from the fence that was so easy to cross to kidnap a soldier, are finding arms caches in practically every house they enter. It suggests that there has been much more willing cooperation by south Lebanese with Hizbollah than Israeli intelligence had reckoned.

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