Sunday, December 28, 2008

Follow-up

History is replete with military campaigns that stopped short of an achievable goal of defeating the enemy. A few examples:
In 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor caught the US completely by surprise, there was no effective defense and if the US aircraft carriers had been in dock it is unlikely that the US would ever have recovered (since the carriers were the basis of the subsequent US victory at Midway). But, the Japanese military did not invade the Hawaiin Islands, nor did they attack the undefended American mainland. If they had followed up their successful air attack who knows how far they could have gone, and they could at least have prevented a US counter-attack.
In the first Gulf War, Kuwait had been recovered by the defeat of the Iraqi forces, and some of the Iraqi Army had retreated beyond Basra. At that point Pres. George Bush declared a halt to the US advance and let them survive. Saddam Hussein then used them to decimate the southern Shia and the northern Kurds, who had cooperated with the US forces to remove him from office. Who knows what would have happened if the US forces had then defeated the rest of Saddam's already retreating Army and had joined forces with the Shia and the Kurds. Instead both of these groups were left by the Americans at Saddam's mercy (the US even allowed the Iraqis to use helicopters against them). So consequently, the second Iraqi war would have been unecessary, and when the Americans came back to remove Saddam from power, they found the Shia and Kurds not surprisingly unwilling to cooperate, and the USA forces also had to overcome a refurbished and entrenched Iraqi Army all over again.
These blunders are a lesson for the IDF in Gaza. They have hit Hamas hard, thru the use of intelligence gathered over years, of the locations of all Hamas security and army camps as well as major facilities for storing and manufacturing Kassam missiles. These were all destroyed in two waves of fighters on Saturday. Never mind the media emphasis on civilian casualties, most of the casualties were in any case military men, but that is not the main point, the ability of Hamas to control the Gaza strip has been dealt a severe blow.
But, they have an estimated 20,000 armed men, trained by Iranian Guards. But, without command and control they would now be unable to mount an effective defense. It is clear that Hamas will never "surrender" to Israeli dictates, for example for a ceasefire, and so they will continue firing rockets and planning suicide attacks against Israel. In order to defeat them completely, the IDF must invade and destroy their armed resistance. Anything less will be considered a victory for them.
Effective follow-up need not be an invasion directly along the main roads into Gaza, that in any case have certainly been mined for such an eventuality. The IDF should first occupy the regions in front of the main cities in the north to take the areas from where rockets are fired at Israel and prevent further firings. Then the coastal strip should be occupied by paratroopers and a few tank columns that cross the strip east to west. Then the main towns and cities should be surrounded and then attacked one by one. Certainly this will be difficult and there will be Israeli casualties, but the alternative is to sit on the border and let Hamas re-organize itself and be a stronger enemy in future attacks. Now that the groundwork has been laid, the job must be finished, unlike in Lebanon in 2006, when the initial huge aerial attack was not followed up until too late and the IDF was caught disorganized and unprepared.
Finally, it is reported in the Jerusalem Post that officials in the PA Government in Ramallah have said that they would be prepared to take over control of the Gaza strip from Hamas if they were totally defeated. This is Israel doing Fatah's dirty work, but the name of the game is to remove Hamas as a player in the field, and even though Pres. Abbas has come out publicly against the Israeli action and there are anti-Israel riots going on in the West Bank, nevertheless the Fatah loyalists in Gaza have been told to stay in their places ready to act once Israel's war against Hamas is over. So that is an achieveable goal, destroy Hamas' control of Gaza and allow the PA-Fatah forces to take over and replace them. Then the future might look brighter.

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