19 July 2006

Blood and Rockets

The Israeli Defense Force was starting work as I went to bed last night. The dawn was just coming up there, and the independent fire units were processing targets as battlefield intelligence queued them up.

I turned in as they turned it up, and the clock radio gave me the status of the day's work from London when the earth rolled around to it.

A thousand Americans are preparing to get out of Beirut by a charter liner. The Orient Queen arrived yesterday, and another will arrive late today. There are nine assorted warships from the NATO nations offshore, and the UK has been flying Britons out since the beginning of the week.

Many are headed for Cyprus, a curious island only a hundred miles from Damascus. The Ottomans have ruled the island, as have the Knights Templar and the Italians. Currently, Her Britannic Majesty has a presence there, low profile but quite real, and so do the Turks and the Greeks. It is a splendid place to take a holiday. There are excellent places to have a cool beer and watch the gunboats patrol the line of demarcation off the coast.

USS Nashville should arrive at best speed today. USS Iwo Jima, hero of Katrina relief operations in New Orleans will be on station tomorrow with the Whidbey Island in company. Embarked is the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit, a battalion plus, and six CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopters.

There is talk about a multi-national force being put ashore to enforce an armistice. This has been done before, in Beirut, but that is not where the problem originates. The problem is further south, and that is where the IDF is concentrating today.

We doze here on our sunlit continent during the summer. I have been as torpid as a lizard in a week of traditional Washington heat and humidity. It has been an effort just to get down to the pool, which is the temperature of a tepid bath. I have had guests visiting, and it was a marvelous time. Quite enough to take one's mind off a strategic military campaign.

There is a lot of talk filling up the airways, from politicians and diplomats and retired military officials. They have expounded at length on the situation, on the astonishing provocation by the Palestinian hotheads from Gaza, and from the Party of God in south Lebanon.

The opinions are predictable. The Israeli's started this with the moral high ground. They had abandoned Gaza, and the settlements, and it was their soldiers who were kidnapped on their own territory. Even the left has to wring their hands on that, but the depth and breadth of their response has left us breadth of their response has left us breathless.

If you were dozing at the beach, you might have missed what is really happening. There is not much talk about targets in Gaza. There was not much there to begin with. The main powerplant was destroyed early in the response, and part of its elected government was scooped up. The sum of that short shock-and-awe campaign was to leave the miserable even more so, and with months of work just to get electricity back.

Gaza is essentially out of the fight, if anyone more than a few fanatics were ever in it. The Palestinian people are still the poster children for outrage across the Islamic world. My Mercedes representative showed me some of the latest snapshots on the web as we finalized a deal on a car I cannot afford.

Traffic whizzed by on Glebe Road, outside the glass of his corner office. An Israeli trooper snarled at Palestinian children. I sighed as I signed the paperwork.

The situation in Lebanon is quite straightforward. The IDF has shut down the place, ruining the tourist season. Beirut was just coming back into its own, the jewel of the Levant. The international airport was first on the target list, then the key lines of communications north and south, and then the ports.

It was not easy. There are new weapons on the battlefield. The Party of God has some new toys from the Iranians, who have helped to build the inventory of Katusha rockets to nearly twenty thousand. There are more toys with longer range, and for this purpose accuracy is not a major factor.

The rockets are what this is about, and their impact could not be heard here in the summer doldrums.

We seem to think that the crisis began last week. It has been going on for months without respite.

The news only highlights the more egregious acts, either or action or reaction. Because the Israelis have the capability to act dramatically, we have tended to hear more about that side. But the reality is much more nuanced.

It is a fascinating calculus being played out in blood and rockets. With this justification, the Isrealis calculate they have a free hand for a limited time to scourge south Lebanon of the stockpiles of rockets. Destroying key infrastructure will inhibit re-supply, and killing the military wing of the Party of God will beat back the threat for a while.

Who knows. Perhaps peace will break out.  Imagine the IDF will conduct high-tempo operations in the sealed off areas north of the Golan heights, there will be a Secretary of State visit, and perhaps a buffer zone with some hostage Blue Beret observers from the UN.

We have seen that before, and the calculating is easy. The numbers get fuzzy after these first weeks. Once the radicals are defanged, there may be a time for peace. But there is always the possibility that this road leads to Damascus and Tehran. The rockets come from the latter, via the former, after all, and much of the blood is on their hands by proxy.

That is another set of numbers. The calculations that drive the destruction of the rockets of the Party of God are not zero sum. Unfortunately, when you add the numbers up in all the columns, in years and dollars and liters of blood, there are sums that will be horrendous to pay.

Copyright 2006 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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