Better Now

My friend is an old Middle East hand who has some  good sources on the Israeli side, mostly ex-military and ex-Mossad, plus some contacts among the Bush I realist crowd -- although of course they're not in government any more either.

He didn't have any secret dope on what the next military or diplomatic moves will be -- it seems to be purely day-to-day now -- but he DID get a clear sense that the Americans and the Israelis both understand now that they are in serious danger of losing the war.

They're freaking out about this, of course, because they're deathly afraid that if Israel is seen to fail, and fail badly, against Hizbullah, everybody and their Palestinian uncle will get it into their heads that they can take a crack at the Zionist entity. (The tough guy realists see this as a disaster in its own right; the "cry and shoot" gang frets the IDF will have to pound the West Bank and Gaza even harder to re-establish the balance of terror. Either way, it's an unacceptable outcome.)

Plan B, then, is to try to "make something happen" on the ground -- although what, exactly, isn't clear. Today it was killing a low-level Hizbullah leader (in a border village they supposedly secured three days ago) and pumping him up as a big catch (shades of Zarqawi's 28,000 "lieutenants".) Tomorrow it will be something else -- maybe the capture of the "terror capital" of south Lebanon, beautiful downtown Bint Jbeil.

But, of course, I'm getting the impression from reading between the lines of the official propaganda that the IDF is struggling just to produce these little symbolic victories -- they seem to be "securing" the same objectives over and over again. So my guess is that the internal debate will now turn to how many more divisions to commit to the battle, how far north to push, etc.

But the Israelis are being squeezed between two relentless pressures. One is the desire to avoid taking too many casualties, and the other is the amount of time left to achieve even their minimal objectives. The less time, the more casualties -- and the more firepower that will have to be poured down to hold those casualties down. More firepower means more scenes of civilian death and devastation. (The Arab puppet regimes can see what's coming, which is probably why they all bailed today.)

But the end game remains stubbornly unclear. Or rather, what is being put forward as the official end game -- insertion of a force of NATO peacekeepers into the "buffer zone" -- is so outlandish it's hard to believe that the Israelis (the ultimate hard-eyed realists) believe it for a second. An ex-Mossad guy actually told my friend the Israeliis were optimistic that the EU would provide the troops. The EU!

So I explained to my friend that the EU manages a currency and writes standardized regulations for toaster safety and stuff like that. It doesn't do peacekeeping. If the Israelis want boots on the ground, they're going to have to go to the Germans and the Danes and the Poles and the French (yes, the cheese eating surrender monkeys) -- who are about as enthusiastic about the idea as they are about the spread of Mad Cow disease. Maybe less.

[Whiskey Bar]