Lessons learned

From The Washington Times:

METULLA, Israel -- Soldiers returning from the war in Lebanon say the Israeli army was slow to rescue wounded comrades and suffered from a lack of supplies so dire they had to drink water from the canteens of dead Hezbollah guerrillas.

"We fought for nothing. We cleared houses that will be reoccupied in no time," said Ilia Marshak, a 22-year-old infantryman who spent a week in Lebanon.

Mr. Marshak said his unit was hindered by a lack of information, by poor training and by untested equipment. In one instance, Israeli troops occupying two houses inadvertently fired at each other because of poor communication between their commanders.

"We almost killed each other," he said. "We shot like blind people. ... We shot sheep and goats."

The war has cost Prime Minister Ehud Olmert much of his political capital. With approval ratings plummeting, he has been forced to shelve his West Bank pullout plan and is struggling to ride out a growing public storm over the government's wartime bungles.

Notice the last sentence. The fallout from this is costing him the ability to go forward with his "West Bank pullout plan". This explaines Israel's failure.

Olmert is a fool. Only a fool could think that handing your enemies a tremendous unearned victory could somehow gain you peace. Ever since Bill Clinton sent some of his more venomous political operatives to Israel to engineer a left wing takeover of that nations government they have been led by fools.

The IDF handed Olmert a good plan. It called for a massive air bombardment to be followed by the deployment of tens of thousands of ground troops (because the IDF’s commanders know that air power alone does not win wars). Olmert would not approve of either. Instead he attempted to fight a “limited” war with limited air strikes and no boots on the ground.

When this failed he slowly, far too slowly, began to ramp up the military effort, but never gave the IDF what it needed to win. Now we are finding out that the IDF was further hampered by the neglect and corruption which always go hand in hand with incompetent left-liberal leadership.

Warehouses that were supposed to be full of ammunition, food and fuel turned out to be empty, their contents pilfered and sold on the black market. Troops turned out to be inadequately trained because of military budget cuts and the de-emphasis of the role of military superiority as the road to national security.

Frederick Nietzsche observed that what does not destroy us makes us stronger. This will surely be the case for Israel. They have learned a valuable lesson here. Two lessons in fact. First they should now realize that one should never commit half heartedly to military actions. When you send your troops into battle you owe it to them to fully commit to their victory. If all you have is a pile of rocks for them to throw you owe them every rock in the pile.

The next and ultimately more important lesson is that under no circumstances should the political left ever be granted any level of power at any level of government.

Those lessons apply to the United States as much as to Israel. Having committed our forces to Iraq we must press through to victory. And, more importantly, we must not allow the modern Democrat Party any access to political power at any level in the United States.