Friday, July 21, 2006

Arabs At War: Hizbullah's tactical advantage, and Israel's false assumption. I should first state that I am no military expert, and have never played a military person on TV. There is a massive book by Kenneth Pollack titled "Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948-1991." I assumed that I was going to dislike the book before reading it, but the author surprised me in not engaging in cultural explanations. There are many things that I disagree with in the book and sometimes he slips into cultural explanations without even noticing, and the author does not use much Arabic sources, but there is an important point that Pollack makes. He talks about how Arab military units are not permitted to take the initiative, and Arab regimes--for political reason and for reasons of insecurity--centralized the military decisions, even at the smallest and most lowest levels of combat. This was a great disadvantage of Arab armies in their wars with Israel, and this was ALSO a great disadvantage of PLO's forces in Lebanon. `Arafat famously centralized all decisions making powers--financial, political, military, etc. And he made things worse by appointing the most incompetent cronies and pyschophants with little regard for skills or qualifications. So when Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, the corrupt and incompetent `Arafat's "commanders" fled the scene (people like Hajj Isma`il, for example), and that left the fighters to scramble for themselves with little guidance and with little tactical flexibility. This is not to say that some Palestinians and some Lebanese did not fight in 1982--in many cases they did despite absence of guidance from the center, look at the youngsters of `Ayn Al-Hilwah in 1982--but they did so on their own, and in an improvised fashion. When Israel began its massive bombing and destructive campaign in Lebanon, it assumed that Hizbullah fighters will emulate the practice of Arab armies and of `Arafat's commanders. They assumed that Hizbullah commanders would simply flee, and that would lead Hizbullah fighters to surrender. That did not occur. And that is now leading to a debate in the Israeli military about the possible use of some ground troops although I rule out a ground invasion. I followed the news of the battle between Hizbullah fighters and Israeli occupation troops in Marun Ar-Ras near the border. It seems that Hizbullah military units are operating in small cells, and with no centralized command. It seems that these small units are given the powers--and they are people who are from the villages that they are defending--to be in charge of the battle. `Arafat controlled everything: to buy a stapler for a PLO office in Tyre required his signature. But I don't intend this post to be read in the Arab world in the spirit of false triumphalism.