Did Israel “let it happen on purpose”? From a Sept. 18 Haaretz account of Israeli intelligence “failures” in the recent Lebanon war:
MI knew about Hezbollah kidnap plans
Military Intelligence had clear information about an impending kidnap attempt by Hezbollah shortly before the Lebanese group carried out its cross-border raid on July 12, according to an internal inquiry conducted by the Israel Defense Forces.The information – which could, if properly handled, have prevented the kidnapping of Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser – was not analyzed and passed on to the troops in time, the report indicated.
The IDF Spokesman’s Office refused to either confirm or deny the report, saying that the issue is still being investigated by Military Intelligence (MI) and the Northern Command.
The inquiry into intelligence questions is being conducted by Brigadier General Avi Ashkenazi, appointed by out-going GOC Northern Command Udi Adam. Even though his investigation is not yet completed, he is slated to present his report to Chief of Staff Dan Halutz and other senior IDF officers this week.
The report will apparently focus solely on the events of July 12, and will not deal with previous, similar kidnapping incidents that were foiled.
If intelligence information was indeed mishandled, this would hardly be the first time such an event has ever occurred. Army sources cited the case of the glider-borne assault on northern Israel in 1987 when, due to an error by MI’s signals intelligence unit – which misreported a key word as sayara (car in Arabic) rather than tayara (plane) – troops prepared for an attack by ground-based rather than aerial vehicles.
Similarly, America’s National Security Agency taped crucial conversations by Al-Qaida members on September 10, 2001, but the conversations were only translated on September 12 – a day after Al-Qaida destroyed the World Trade Center towers in New York.
See our last post on Israel/Palestine and the Lebanon crisis
DTB
How about DTB? “Dropped the Ball.” It’s a lot less sexy, and a lot more
likely.
Too many children died
…during Israeli attacks on Lebanon. Hezbollah miscalculated their movie to kidnap Israeli soldiers, and Israeli’s went pissed off and bombed civilian and military targets in Lebanon. Too many children died, very sad. Both sides should be ashamed of their child-killing attitudes.
While I condemn Israeli actions, I also condemn Hezbollah. In fact, I don’t see any difference between the two; none of these “parties” have any reason. No reasonable “side” targets civilians. But, is there any reason in the middle east? Same piece of land where people invented gods and prophets and fiction books in which food is falling from the sky, people live in a belly of the fish, and other stories that even little children have problem believing in.
Srebrenica Genocide Blog
Trapping the West
This analysis is consistent with my own particular conspiracy theory here, which is that Israel welcomed the conflict with Lebanon as it provides an opportunity to draw the rest of the world, and the West in particular, into a “clash of civilizations”. Many Israeli politicians and commentators see Israel’s problems with its neighbours in terms of such a global clash betweeen the forces of democracy on the one hand and terrorism/Islamic fundamentalism on the other. How better to get everyone on their side than to demand a UN force in Lebanon tasked with disarming Hizbullah? Any such attempts at forcible disarmament are likely to lead to clashes between Hizbullah and UN forces, putting Hizbullah and its allies (i.e. Syria and Iran) in conflict with the UN member states providing peacekeeping troops. Incidents could also be engineered to produce tension between peacekeepers and militant Islamic groups if conflict between the two parties fails to materialise on its own. I suggest that the latest debacle in Lebanon has been engineered as a trap for the West its allies in the UN, in order to draw it further into a conflict with Israel’s enemies in the name of freedom, democracy and civilization. The West is walking blindly into this trap by agreeing to provide troops. This is a conspiracy theory that doesn’t take much of a conspiracy – just agreement among a handful of Israeli politicians. The purpose is to accelerate the “clash of civilizations” so beloved of many politicians and pundits, which is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.