Unraveling a War (Extract)

By ARIEH O’SULLIVAN
Extract from an article in Issue 12, September 29, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here. Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff in their book "34 Days" do an excellent job in clearing the fog surrounding the Second Lebanon War This book is not about the Second Lebanon War itself. There is no record of the battle campaigns, a log of victories or defeats, or even battle tallies such as the number of tanks or Katyusha launchers destroyed. You will look in vain for mention of the hundreds of thousands of Israelis or Lebanese who fled the war zone. There are no maps, no personal accounts of battles, save one - an account of a failed Israeli assault during the last days of the war. For that, you will need to buy the original Hebrew version, published earlier this year. This is a book about the behind-the-scenes maneuvering of generals and political leaders during the war. Beware, you read it and your blood boils. You can't help but put yourself in the shoes of some good mid-rank IDF commander who had been jerked around and sent to war with ill-trained but highly motivated troops without any clear objective or mission. The authors contend that the mighty IDF had been reduced to an army totally obsessed with keeping casualties to a minimum, at the expense of its former core doctrine of achieving its military objectives; not that there was ever a declared definition of what Israel's war goals were. The image most of us have of war is not realistic. We in Israel have some experience of war, probably more than most other nations, to say nothing of terrorist attacks. The Second Lebanon War was painful for us not only because 161 soldiers and civilians were killed, but also because there was no sense that the war ended in victory. But as Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff point out in "34 Days," the story of the conflict is not one of defeat, but rather of failure. They brilliantly bring out the discrepancies between Israel's expectations at the beginning of the war, and the way in which the war ended. They explain why the IDF couldn't "deliver the goods," and reveal tellingly how Israel's most crucial governing bodies malfunctioned. Harel, who has been covering military affairs for the Haaretz newspaper for over a decade, teamed up with Issacharoff, the newspaper's Arab affairs correspondent, to produce a highly readable account of the war. The pair previously collaborated on "The Seventh War," their first book, published in 2004, about the second intifada. Arieh O'Sullivan is the director of communications for the Anti-Defamation League in Israel and a former defense correspondent for The Jerusalem Post. Extract from an article in Issue 12, September 29, 2008 of The Jerusalem Report. To subscribe to The Jerusalem Report click here.