The Changing Rules of War

For millennia, the strength and weapons of the opponent in war usually made the difference. But, two times in the past 50 years, the most powerful military nation in the world has been fought to a standstill by rag-tag insurgents using easy to obtain reliable weapons, in particular, the Kalashnikov automatic rifle and the rocket propelled grenade. Now battle field rockets, a weak, unreliable weapon that has been in use for two thousand years, have been more successful than every before.
Now, the notorious army of the Israelis is suffering a similar fate for the second time, in the same country with the same foe. They hope that by destroying infrastructure, the means to fight back and killing and razing all buildings in a buffer zone along the border, they will prevent Hizbullah from firing it's rockets at them. They forget that they did the same thing in 1986, and by 2000, nothing was changed, Hizbullah was stronger than ever. Within five years, Hizbullah armed itself in unprecedented ways.
Modern countries are not willing to pay the price of war. Fanatics are. That is the reason that they will always win. Vietnam fell. Iraq will fall into civil war and fragmentation. Hizbullah will become the most powerful political force in Lebanon. They will rearm someday and send even more effective rockets into Israel. Fanatics are willing to sacrifice generations of their own people to the cause. Modern democracies shudder under a few casualties and the scream of incoming rockets.
The only way to defeat the fanatics is to deprive them of their basis of support. We must win the hearts and minds of the people of Lebanon, Palestine, Afghanistan, Pakistan, all over the Middle East and south Asia if we hope to prevail. Bombing a country to the stone age won't help, it just delays the battle to the next generation and radicalizes the population to accept decimation to win. We in the west can not win that kind of battle. We are unwilling to accept the casualties of hand-to-hand combat every foot of the way and grinding oppressive occupation with a constant and increasingly effective insurgency.
WaPo

The strategy of Israel's (and America's) enemies today is to lure the military superpower into a protracted conflict. To accept the bait, as the Israelis did in assaulting Lebanon and as America did in Iraq, is to risk stepping into a trap. As Lawrence Wright says in his new book, "The Looming Tower," the master of this approach is Osama bin Laden: "His strategy was to continually attack until the U.S. forces invaded; then the mujahadeen would swarm upon them and bleed them until the entire American empire fell from its wounds."


The Israeli and American resolve in this grim summer of war should be: No more falling into traps. In the age of missiles, there's limited value in a "security fence" or "security buffer." The evidence grows that you can't achieve real security without negotiating with your adversaries, and you can't succeed in such negotiations without offering reasonable concessions.


For the Arabs, the opportunity of 2006 lies in the surprising success of Hezbollah and its leader, Hasan Nasrallah. Their resistance on the battlefield makes them more dangerous adversaries -- but also more plausible negotiating partners. Little in Nasrallah's past suggests that he will use his new stature and confidence to encourage indirect negotiations with Israel, but, as 1973 reminds us, the aftermath of war
can produce big surprises. U.S. officials recognize that Nasrallah is likely to emerge as the strongest political force in Beirut, and they hope he will make strategic choices that will build a stronger and more stable Lebanon.


This war is opening a door: Will the combatants have the good sense to walk through it? Will America have the guile to help them?