Ron Unz suspects that the pager attack was supposed to be a preemptive first strike to disrupt a Hezbollah attack that never came:
Mossad certainly achieved a brilliant tactical victory, one that its members and pro-Israel partisans surely intend to boast about for years. But many aspects of the attack seemed very puzzling to me, and experienced military analysts wondered whether any long-term gains had been achieved.
After Israel invaded Gaza in retaliation for the Hamas raid last October, Hezbollah and its Israeli enemies soon began trading cross-border fire, bombarding each other with missiles, rockets, drones, and artillery shells, and those exchanges have now continued for nearly a year. As a result, some 160,000 civilians on both sides of the border have fled their homes, with perhaps 60,000 of these being Israelis.
With so many tens of thousands of Israelis having become internal refugees, displaced from their communities in the north of the country and spending the last year living in temporary accommodations, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been under enormous political pressure to attack and invade Lebanon in order to drive the Hezbollah forces away from the border, thereby allowing those Israelis to return home. In addition, the most extreme religious elements among his supporters regard portions of southern Lebanon as part of Israel’s God-given lands and wish to see them conquered and annexed, with their local Lebanese residents expelled and replaced by Jewish settlers.
However, the last time the Israelis launched a ground invasion of Lebanon in 2006, their forces suffered a severe defeat at Hezbollah’s hands, and during the last eighteen years that organization has become far more powerful, with many of its troops having gained a great deal of military experience during their successful intervention in the Syrian civil war. Meanwhile, a year of fighting against Hamas in Gaza has left the IDF exhausted, so despite Israel’s command of the air, it’s not at all clear how well such a ground assault would go. Moreover, Hezbollah has reportedly amassed an enormous arsenal of some 150,000 rockets and missiles, and these could be used to inflict devastating damage upon most of Israel’s cities and towns if it chose to do so.
The combination of these two conflicting factors has led to repeated indecision on Israel’s part. For months, media leaks have reported that Israel had made the decision to invade Lebanon and that the attack was imminent. But nothing has ever happened, presumably because the military risks of such an operation were considered too great.
Those booby-trapped pagers and other devices might have played an absolutely crucial role in an Israeli ground invasion. If they had all been detonated at the beginning of such an attack, Hezbollah’s forces would have been left dazed and confused, with their entire communications network knocked out, thereby preventing them from mounting an effective defense or retaliatory measures. This would probably have allowed the IDF to win a major initial victory on the ground.
But instead those explosions occurred alone, with no invasion taking place. So Hezbollah has merely licked its wounds and is surely now putting in place a replacement communications network, presumably based upon a large shipment of carefully vetted pagers received from Iran or China or Russia. Israel thus lost the element of surprise, with little to show for it except wounding a large number of Hezbollah members. Thus, the exploding pagers merely produced a tactical victory instead of a potentially strategic one.
This raises the obvious question of why the Israelis chose to shoot their bolt when they did instead of waiting until the pagers could be detonated in conjunction with a major invasion.
It is becoming increasingly obvious that it is Israel that desperately wants a war while Hezbollah and Iran understand that time is on their side. Now that the technological attack has failed to spur either of the latter into action, Israel has proceeded to engage in another round of air strikes against Lebanon.
Israeli missiles slammed into the Lebanese capital of Beirut in a strike said to be targeting a senior Hezbollah commander this afternoon, after the southern suburbs were buffeted with hundreds of missiles. Hezbollah commander Ali Karaki was the target of strikes late Monday as Israeli attacks edge deeper into Lebanon, according to a security source speaking to Reuters.
Attrition warfare always favors the more numerous side. It appears that China isn’t the only one learning from watching how the Russians execute their strategies.