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VICTORY!! ...but for whom??

Well, before I'll publish here my own "opinion" I'll collect and upload several different voices(Israeli, Arab..) about this issue. I'll TRY to continue this daily until I'm ready to write my own stuff(..its a little difficult for me to find the right words without to confuse you/my readers completely^^).

Here, at first, some Israeli voices but from different point of fews. And these are just opinions - without to be the "only, real truth"...(and in some points this voices are failing to explain the - likely - "real" reason of Israel's defeat ..in my opinion).

Israel is losing World War III (Haaretz, 8.07)
 

There has never before been a war like this.

That is why we are losing it.

We don't know how to fight it. Not yet, at least.

From the start, the whole world has been watching this war, and for good reason:

This is the next great battle of World War III. And, as in Iraq, the war is not going well for the West.

There are parallels to the last world war, of course, beyond the newspaper cartoonists' and worldwide Israel-haters' first reflex of calling the Jews Nazis.

There is the danger that we are seeing a tipping point, in Iraq as well as in Lebanon, which will embolden radical Islam, and Iran in particular, to extend the battlefield of jihad indefinitely.

At its outset, the Second World War went staggeringly well for the Axis. German and Japanese tacticians were legions ahead of their Allied adversaries. Smarter, more creative, more innovative, more motivated, much more deadly.

The blitzkrieg caught all of Europe unawares and, within weeks, reeling. Pearl Harbor, the Twin Towers of its era, struck at an isolationist United States that was profoundly unprepared for war.

Allied military defeats followed in series for years, until endurance, faith, and appropriate fighting methods turned the tide.

Certainly there are those in Israel and the Jewish world who are perversely pleased by the way things have gone wrong for us. There is the Told You So brigade on the far right, which misses no chance to declare that withdrawal is the cause of this war, and is a mortal error that must never be repeated, no matter what, ever.

There is the supremely self-satisfied Not In My Name battalion on the far left, which suggests in its knee-jerk protests and pride at being called traitors, that Israel may have a right to defend itself, but should never really exercise it.

Why are we losing? It is because, in our haste to confront Hezbollah before Iran went nuclear, we went to war before we had the ways and means to win.

Give us the tools, the British said at the outset of WW II, and we'll finish the job. We now know that we went to this war without the tools.

After years of Military Intelligence warnings of Hezbollah's missile arsenal and vaguely comforting news items about the mystery-shrouded Nautilus Katyusha-killer, we now know that we knew next to nothing.

We are losing it because our prime minister, defense minister, and army chief, who are new at their jobs and have proven it at every opportunity, made outlandish, grandiose, and boastful claims at the outset of the campaign, speaking of disarming Hezbollah, creating a new order in Lebanon, creating a reality in which the Lebanese people themselves would turn on the terrorists and diminish their influence.

Even before we ran aground in the north, the words had a perversely familiar ring. They are the sound track of debacle. They are as dated and as current as a 16 mm version of Apocalypse Now screened in IDF forts in Lebanon in the '80s.

We've gone after infrastructure, and in so doing, caused immeasurable suffering to as many as a million Lebanese, a thousand of them dead, thousands of them maimed, hundreds of thousands of them displaced.

And there are still those, and they are many, who argue for More of the Same. Much more. For a start, "Erasing villages where Hezbollah operates."

But more of them same is likely to yield only more of the same failure.

With thousands of thousands of soldiers already in Lebanon, seven brigades and counting, after 4,600 IAF bombing runs , 150 of them Sunday night alone, 80 to 90 percent of Hezbolah's 2,500 fighters are alive and shooting. They are still capable of firing 200 rockets a day into Israel.

We are losing the war, in part, because our actions have only gained sympathy for Hezbollah.

Polls are now showing that nearly 90 percent of Lebanese ? including many who had serious doubts about Hezbollah in the past, now support the organization's war with Israel.

The war has so elevated Hezbollah in the eyes of the world, that terrorism authority Prof. Robert A. Pape, writing in The New York Times, could without flinching compare the group to "the multidimensional American civil-rights movement of the 1960s."

Oddly, one of the lessons of the war is that the government, fearing a backlash over the deaths of soldiers, has directed an offensive which has relied on remote control warfare, effectively causing the needless deaths of hundreds of civilians in Lebanon, and, in the process, putting a million Israelis in range of Katyushas and Fajrs.

It's true, this is World War III. And we are losing.

Cabinet minister Avi Dichter, head of the Shin Bet for much of the Intifada, suggested Monday that the government is heading for a change in direction in Lebanon, and not a moment too soon.

"Curtailing to the point of halting the rockets is the quintessential mission of the IDF. The IDF will need to find the formula to carry out this mission, whether from the air or by other means.

"The fact that this hasn't happened as yet, doesn't mean that this will not happen."

We have to fight smarter. We have to use diplomacy with more skill. But we don't have the option of rolling over and playing righteous. In a world war, you have to choose a side.

Our job now is to survive.

If the Second World War taught the Jews anything, it is this: History is not, fundamentally, written by its victors. History is written, and made, by its survivors. Hezbollah knows this. All they have to do to declare victory, is to survive.

The survival of the Jews is our victory as well. But we're going to have be a whole lot smarter than we have been, to come out of this.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/747340.html

When Moshe Dayan flew to Vietnam… (Yedioth Ahronoth, 8.06)

Perhaps solution to Middle East crises lies in creating a single American address that would exert international pressure on Lebanese government. Perhaps, then, this bruised and battered government would bring salvation

In the middle of the 60's Moshe Dayan, the man and the legend, flew to Vietnam to cover the war. On ending his visit to the war trenches, the former chief-of-staff was summoned for a talk with the commanding officer of the American forces, General William Westmoreland. "Nu," his host urged him, "what were your impressions from there?" "You have already lost this war," Dayan said, "but you don't know it yet…"

"Over what and why?" responded General Westmoreland. His guest fixed his one eye on him and said: "The Vietcong has gone underground, and you are flying at an altitude of 37,000 feet. From such an altitude you can't see the trenches, tunnels and sewers where they are hiding out." The Americans, as we know, lost the war.

Similar assumptions shouldn't be applied to our situation at this stage of the war against the Hizbullah. This story relayed to me by Gad Yaacobi, however, should be told at the beginning of the military inquest the day after the war.

What's next?

The fourth week of the war is likely to be critical for the future of Israel in the coming years. So much so, that the efforts to reach a ceasefire are accelerating, and the sand in the military hourglass is running out. Another two or three days, then what? A victory campaign? An endless trauma? Will Iran set its borders (God forbid, its military as well) next to Rosh Hanikra, at the gates of Metullah? Will Hizbullah cease to exist?

While these words were being written Saturday night, visions of the end of the war were still fuzzy. Some people, such as Major General Giora Eilland, believe that the army is fighting in the wrong place: that the infantry is carrying out its offensive 8-7 kilometers from the border, that the air force is spitting fire far into Lebanese territory and into Beirut, and that the Katyusha rockets are being fired from exactly this range, where no offensive is taking place.

Two scenarios

Katyusha rockets are being fired into Israel 10 kilometer from the border. We are, therefore, likely to face two difficult and perhaps unbearable scenarios:

On the one hand, in the event that there is no ceasefire and the IDF reaches the waters of the Litani River, but the Katyusha rockets continue to be fired at the Galil and Haifa from a point beyond the Litani, the army will not go that far, sparking off a war of attrition: Here a Katyusha, there a Katyusha, the situation will be frozen, time will freeze, and the world will become apathetic. Let them kill each other over there. After all, it's only Jews killing Arabs and vise versa.

On the other hand, if there is a ceasefire, it will take a long time until an effective multi-national force with a clear mandate is assembled. The Hizbullah will most likely demand that the IDF first redeploy to its borders. The IDF, and rightfully so, will not accede to redeploy its forces before the multi-national force takes control of the south of Lebanon.

In this situation, the IDF will remain put. Where? In the security zone it left six years ago. And now as then, every two or three days a roadside bomb will go off, Hizbulla ambushes will be set up and soldiers will fall. We shall do everything in our power to prevent violating the ceasefire, and if a decision is made to respond after all, the Katyushas will be back.

The situation, to say the least, is highly complex. Perhaps, the solution lies in creating a single American address that would exert international pressure on the Lebanese government. Perhaps, then this bruised and battered government will bring the salvation.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3287009,00.html 

Defeat and victory (ynet, 8.05)

We lost because of euphoria and bragging, but we shall ultimately win because we have learned Israeli society is stronger, smarter than its political, military leadership 

We lost because on the first day of the war the prime minister said that "we shall win."

We lost because on that same day the defense minister said, "Nasrallah will not forget the name Amir Peretz."

We lost because of the euphoria and the bragging, the aggressiveness and the vindictiveness.

We lost because instead of launching an immediate offensive against Hizbullah posts, we destroyed half of Beirut.

We lost because the IDF has become accustomed to operating in modes of policing, oppression, arrest and conquest.

We lost because we praised the home front's resilience without really assisting it. We lost because we didn't win. How simple...

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3286706,00.html