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So who's really winning this war?
Jim Geraghty, National Review "TKS" blogLooking at the situation in Israel and Lebanon, theres a lot of debate as to whether Israel is winning the war, or Hezbollah. At times, the same paper can report the contradictory assessments of each side. . . . A key question is how many casualties have been inflicted in Hezbollahs ranks. The organization doesnt have unlimited men, endless supplies of Katyusha, Fajr-3 and Fajr-5 rockets. They started with X; while I'm sure Hezbollah will claim that the conflict is giving them many more recruits, they are, most likely, at something lesser than X. That first Post story quotes the Lebanese Health Ministry as stating that at least 46 Hezbollah guerrillas had been killed in the conflict so far. That number may be significantly higher; still, out of an organization that has thousands of foot soldiers, thousands of rockets and who knows how many launchers, one has to wonder how much Hezbollahs warmaking capabilities have been degraded. Still, I was reminded of an anecdote by Tony Robbins. (Stay with me here). You have a sculptor or miner who wants to break down a boulder into smaller rocks. He hits the boulder at the top. Nothing happens. He hits it again in the same spot. Nothing happens. He hits it in the same spot, over and over again, 50 times, 100 times. Finally, on the two-hundreth or so strike, the boulder splits. It wasn't the force of that individual blow; it was that the two-hundreth blow was "the straw that broke the camel's back". While the progress wasn't visible, the boulder was being changed, bit by bit, by each successive blow. Like the sculptor, a military campaign can have no visible signs of progress until there is a sudden change, reflecting the impact of all the accumulated actions. I looked up what the coverage was of the U.S. military operations against the Taliban in the first week of November. Typical was a line in a story by The Christian Science Monitor, November 6, "One month of US-led airstrikes against the Taliban has so far yielded no obvious military gain." The discussion was what the U.S. would be able to accomplish during the long and harsh Afghan winter. On November 9, the Northern Alliance controlled fifteen percent of Afghanistan; on November 12, they controlled half, and the Taliban were abandoning Kabul. On December 7, Khandahar fell, marking the end of any effective Taliban claim to territory in the country. Hamad Karzai took the oath of office in Kabul on December 22, 102 days after the 9/11 attacks. So the situation can change, even when it's a rag-tag team of religious extremists fighting on their home turf against a military superpower using advanced weaponry, special forces, air power, and precision bombing. This doesn't guarantee that Israel will mirror the success of the U.S.; only that the situation can change rapidly, even if it seems like a stalemate to our eyes. Posted by: Mike 2006-08-02 |
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