)
he Best-Laid Plans
Are Awry Again
AP/ NATI HARNIK
INA FRIEDMAN ISRAEL CORRESPONDENT
srael has had an overdose of liter-
ary references over the past two
weeks, not just because an IDF
computer randomly spouted out
Grapes of Wrath as the name of the
latest operation against the Hezbol-
lah in south Lebanon, but because
the country has learned, yet again,
that the best-laid plans (Of Mice
and Men) have an infuriating way
of going awry.
What went wrong in "Operation Grapes
of Wrath" began to occupy military and
political analysts even before the disaster
at the UNIELL post near Qana, where IDF
artillery fire took the lives of 102 civilians.
That's generally regarded as the turning
point of the operation.
By early this week, senior officers in
Israel's Northern Command were corn-
plaining that military intelligence had
underestimated the Hezbollah's power
and endurance. Yet, equally miscalcu-
lated seems the general strategy to sub-
due Hezbollah fighters.
At the start of the operation, Israel's
Air Force commander proudly displayed
video tapes of the "surgical strikes" and
"pinpoint bombings" by Apache heli-
copters firing laser-guided Hellfire mis-
siles. By day 11, Israeli sources estimated
that there had been more than 1,500 air
force sorties, some 400 targets struck and
18,000 artillery shells lobbed into south-
ern Lebanon. But only 40-50 Hezbollah
fighters had been killed (in contrast to
more than 150 Lebanese civilians) and
just five or six Katyusha launchers had
been destroyed.
Also, the supply of Katyusha rockets to
the Hezbollah and the hail of more than
530 rockets on Kiryat Shemonah and oth-
er parts of northern Israel and the south
Lebanon Security Zone had not slowed.
Clearly, the Israeli strategy was in-
fluenced by the lessons of its last major
incursion into Lebanon, in 1982. Fol-
lowing the late Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin's lead in the 1993 "Operation Ac-
countability," Shimon Peres's government
was determined to keep Israeli ground
troops from getting bogged down in the
infamous Lebanese quagmire.
Yet, Ha'aretz military analyst Ze'ev have used ground forces to hit the launch-
Schiff believes the military
ers in western Iraq," he re-
should have appreciated the
called.
An Israeli soldier
limitations of an air war from examines a fragment of a
Worse yet, Israel has now
the start. 'When Scud missiles
Katyusha rocket in
shown its most sophisticated
northern Israel.
were being launched against
weaponry to be largely inef-
Israel during the Gulf war," Is-
fective against guerrilla forces.
raeli experts sharply criticized the Amer-
This has damaged the equipment's de-
ican army for not realizing that "air terrent stance in the eyes of a vastly in-
activity was not enough, and they should ferior enemy.
The proof is Hezbollah's impudence.
Having caused 80 percent of the popula-
tion of Kiryat Shmonah to flee, it contin-
ued its Katyusha fire on the north but
and issued grisly threats of suicide at-
tacks in Israel and abroad, leaving the
rest of Israel to nervously await a poten-
tial attack.
Off the record, senior intelligence
sources say that the operation's aim was
not to destroy the Hezbollah's military
capability, but to force it into a prolonged
cease-fire so that peace talks with Syria
and Lebanon could restart.
By-generating a flood of refugees out
of southern Lebanon, as well as threat-
ening direct damage to Lebanon's eco-
nomic infrastructure (just when its
starting to reap the fruits of its rehabil-
itation program), Israel hoped to force
Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq el-Hariri
to get Syria's President Hafez el-Assad
to bring Hezbollah into line.
But Mr. Assad, as wily and inscrutable
as ever, preferred to pursue his own agen-
da. And by the second week of the fight-
ing, the consensus in Israel (as well as
the United States and Europe) was that,
without lifting a finger, he emerged as
the real winner of the latest bloodletting.
Rising out of the political isolation he suf-
fered during the Sharm a-Sheik Confer-
ence against terrorism, Mr. Assad
suddenly became the object of pilgrim-
age by five foreign ministers — of the
United States, France, Russia, Italy (rep-
resenting the European Community), and
Iran — as the key to obtaining a cease-
fire.
Mr. Assad was also in a position to play
the powers off against each other, by pit-
ting the French and Russian terms for a
cease-fire (which would essentially bring
Israel and the Hezbollah back to the sta-
tus quo after their 1993 clash) against
the more ambitious American plan to
neutralize the militia for the duration of
peace talks between Israel and Syria-
Lebanon.
Israel, by contrast, has suffered diplo-
matic setbacks. Iran has also extricated
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