Myths About Afghanistan
Victor Davis Hanson on whether Afghanistan is really the "graveyard of empires ..."
The World Tribune has this from Israel’s military stunned by the failure of its air war:
Israel’s new chief of staff, an air force general, believed that most of Israel’s future operations would be conducted from the air.
Military leaders were convinced that with superior communications and air power they did not even need new U.S. “bunker buster” munitions to root out terror leaders in underground hideaways.
Today, this vision of air power as a panacea has been shattered.
Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz and his advisers have been stunned by the failure of Israel’s air war against Hizbullah, which has shrugged massive air bombings on its headquarters in Beirut to maintain the rocket war against the Jewish state.
“Air power is not the answer here,” a senior officer said. ‘You have to go from one Hizbullah [weapons] bunker to another. Some of these bunkers are seven meters deep and can’t be destroyed by aircraft, even if you could find them.”
Most of the blogs, including us, predicted days ago that air power alone would not suffice. In other news, The Israeli ground forces are “Ready to Roll.”
On July 22, 2006 at 7:15 am, chromatius said:
Unsurprising. There’s no apparent military logic to this adventure – it’s all politics and broadbrush strategy like ‘tie America closer to Israel’, ‘look hard enough to be Sharon’s inheritor’. And of course, ‘creative destruction’ and ‘we have the right to kill Arabs with impunity’.
And Hizbullah await the ground incursions with some enthusiasm. And many years’ preparation.