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Thursday, Aug. 24, 2006 JAPAN
TIMES
New lessons in the Mideast
By DAVID HOWELL
LONDON -- It was not meant to be like this. The plan, and the promise by Israeli
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, was that the operation would be over swiftly, the
Hezbollah forces with their missiles would be surrounded, rooted out and
crushed, the kidnapped Israeli soldiers would be returned, and southern Lebanon
would be cleared of terrorists and cease to be a threat to the frightened
inhabitants of northern Israel.
To the dismay of the Israeli public, and the surprise of a large flock of
defense experts accustomed to high-speed Israeli victories over weak Arab
neighbors, the Hezbollah guerrillas continued raining down rockets on Israeli
towns for weeks. Worse still, armed with their ultra modern, armor-piercing and
laser-directed missiles, they were able to knock out Israel's invincible tanks
and then to melt into the hills and villages of southern Lebanon. They proved to
be an elusive enemy that all the bombs and reconnaissance from the air could
never somehow pin down. None of Olmert's promises have been delivered.
As one weary Israeli soldier observed, this was an enemy that seemed to combine
all the advantages and flexibility of an irregular underground fighting force,
operating in its own familiar territory, with the technology and firepower of a
modern and fully equipped army.
Yet should the defense experts have been so surprised that this time Israeli
military superiority just did not work so well? After all, military history is
littered with examples of agile irregular forces endlessly harassing more
cumbersome and slower moving armies, however unequal the numbers or the
armaments. Napoleon's huge armies were destroyed in part by such tactics both in
Spain in the Peninsular War and in Russia during the disastrous retreat from
Moscow.
In the 20th century there were plenty of lessons to be learned by the major
powers about guerrilla fighting and how to handle it, sometimes by adopting
similar tactics. In Malaysia (then Malaya), in Kenya and in Northern Ireland the
British armed forces faced highly organized terrorism and gradually and
painfully learned how to cope with this sort of low intensity warfare -- both by
military and by political means -- the iron fist but also the velvet glove.
In Vietnam, and also in Somalia, the Americans found that "overwhelming force,"
mainly in the shape of aerial bombardment and helicopter gunship deployment,
just did not work. Much more subtle strategies were needed, but were tried too
late to prevent defeat and withdrawal.
So no one should have expected the vicious Hezbollah forces, who had had years
to burrow both physically and politically into the wounded body of Lebanon, to
have been an easy walkover.
Yet this time it appeared that there were some even more powerful currents
running in favor of the irregulars against the forces of the Israeli state.
Technology and the amazing power of the microchip are now tilting the whole
balance of advantage in warfare and ground fighting against heavy weapons and
equipment. Tiny and light weapons can now muster unimaginable power. It is as
though the proverbial pea-shooter has become "e-enabled," turbo-boosted to the
point where it can pierce the thickest protective armor and find the
best-protected target swiftly and accurately.
In short, the miniaturization of weapons, along with the miniaturization of
everything from mobile phones to computers, has enabled the modern guerrilla not
only to harass regular forces, as he (or she) always could do, but to match
their firepower and to destroy them. All that is now needed for a group to
acquire the firepower, and therefore the power, to match a full-size, fully
trained army is a few months of preparation, time to build up stocks of
weaponry, a degree of training in handling the new technology and, of course,
plenty of cash to hand to the willing sellers of such arms who populate the
world's armament bazaars.
In the Hezbollah case in Lebanon, the preparations had been going on for many
months, with ship and aircraft loads of ultra-sophisticated, high-tech weapons
being imported and stockpiled -- and being small in volume quite easy to
conceal. The cash came, and no doubt continues to come, from Iran, which is
awash with revenues from high oil prices. The weapons themselves could have been
bought in many places, but were probably liberally supplied through Syria.
If the Israelis, with all their advanced systems, with a supply chain of bombs
being flown from the United States and with a tough, brave and well-trained
army, cannot wipe out Hezbollah, then this changes everything, not only in the
mosaic of the Middle East but in the dynamics of modern conflict.
When they see what is happening in Lebanon, Western policymakers may at last
begin to grasp what should have been obvious from the onset of the information
and electronic revolution over 20 years ago -- namely and simply that the
microchip disperses power into more and more hands (good and bad) and smaller
and smaller groups, and that where the microchip leaves off, nanotechnology --
packing power into invisibly small entities and sources -- will take over. Sheer
weight of arms no longer translates into power and influence. Big fleets of
carriers, squadrons of tanks, armadas of aircraft and strike fighters with
devastating rocket power are no longer the key to domination or the insignia of
over-arching authority.
Small remains beautiful but small has also become lethal. Those who would seek
to establish a new political and social architecture, and a new equilibrium in
the unstable and dangerous Middle East, will from now on have to live with that
fact.
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