Great post from Dad. I think Hezbollah, and behind them, Iran, were expecting a land incursion as in Gaza.
Shameless Plug
The Proxy War
Asharq Al-Awsat ^ | 7/15/06 | Amir Taheri
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1666154/posts
Until even a week ago the conventional wisdom was that there is not going to be another major war in the Middle East involving Israel. Now even the most optimistic observers are no longer sure. Meeting in Saint Petersburg this weekend, the leaders of the G-8 may try to stop a broader war, almost at the last minute. But, can they? The reasons why a broader war may be in the cards are not hard to fathom. Israel, facing what is a pincer operation by both Hamas in the occupied territories and the Hezbollah in Lebanon believes it is facing an existential threat.
This does not mean that either Hamas or Hezbollah, or their combination, would be in a position to defeat Israel militarily. However, both are capable of pursuing a low intensity war against Israel virtually forever. And that, like all low intensity wars, would aim at breaking the spirit of the enemy, persuading more and more Israelis that their homeland is not a place in which to have a normal life and raise children, and that their best bet is to head for safe havens elsewhere. Low intensity war is also bad for any nation's economy. People cannot think of long-term investments when the see missile raining on them. The effects of low intensity war on Israel are even more strongly felt because of the country's demographic disadvantage. Living under the threat of suicide attacks is hardly an encouragement for making babies.
At the opposite side of the fight, Hamas and Hezbollah are also facing existential threats, as they know that Israel is determined to destroy them as political organisations.
Israel has refused to recognise the Hamas-led government and has succeeded in organising what amounts to an international quarantine against it. If Hamas ends up by tearing up its own charter and recognising the legitimacy of Israel's existence, it would spell its own doom as a radical Islamist movement. If, on the other hand, it persists with its no compromise stance it will be seen by many Palestinians as responsible for all the hardship they now suffer. Hamas in government is quite different from Hamas as an independent movement.
As for Hezbollah almost all of its prestige, or whatever is left of it, is based on the myth that it defeated the Israelis and drove them out of occupied southern Lebanon. At the same time Hezbollah is the target of United Nations resolution 1559 that demands its dissolution as an armed group. Hezbollah without arms would become just another Lebanese political party, garnering around 20 per cent of the votes.
The Hezbollah faces another, perhaps bigger, problem: it must develop its policies within a broader strategy worked out by the Islamic Republic in Tehran and the Baa'thist government in Damascus. As a result, it cannot simply decide to defuse the situation in the hope of keeping its military organisation intact. Iran, coming under growing pressure on the nuclear issue, is desperately looking for a diversion. And what better diversion than a mini-war that could keep international attention focused on the Israel-Lebanon-Palestine triangle? Syria, for its part, could profit from a limited war, between Israel and Hezbollah, by pointing out that its own presence in Lebanon had been a stabilising force and that efforts to exclude it from the Lebanese scene have generated greater instability.
In a sense, therefore, what we are witnessing is the opening shots in a proxy war between the Islamic Republic and Syria on one side and Israel on the other. As for Lebanon, it is, as so many other times in the past, being used by rival regional and international powers as a battlefield in which the Lebanese people are regarded as collateral damage at best.
(snip)
/Shameless Plug