Hizbollah, Iran’s tool in Lebanon, is in virtual control of its government, armed with thousands of missiles from Iran directly and via Iran’s Syria conduit, the missiles able to reach all of Israel.
As US Secretary Of Defense Robert Gates said last month:
"Syria and Iran are providing Hezbollah with rockets and missiles of ever-increasing capability," he said at a joint news conference with his Israeli counterpart, Ehud Barak.
"And we're at a point now, where Hizbollah has far more rockets and missiles than most governments in the world, and this is obviously destabilizing for the whole region and we're watching it very carefully."
Hizbollah is encouraged by the hamstringing of Israel by the Obama administration and Israel’s allowing it in dealing with the Gaza blockade runners, coupled with the hypocritical outcry of international abettors and appeasers of Hamas.
If Israel has its way and does what’s necessary, Hizbollah should think twice before attacking Israel, unless Washington again tries to hobble Israel and Israel allows it.
Israel is focused on dealing a severe blow to Hizbollah. Defense News, a leading authoritative US publication on military matters, reports “Israel’s New Hard Line on Hizbollah.” Letting Lebanon, Hizbollah and the world know what’s in store is called deterrence, or stand-by-for-an-ass-whipping.
The last time war broke out along the Lebanese border, Israel acted clumsily and lost its aura of invincibility. If there is a next time, Israel's military brass vows, things will be different.
Under a strategy honed since the 2006 Lebanon war and rehearsed in microcosm in the late-2008 Gaza incursion, a new fight against Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hizbollah would see an all-out assault on the party's arsenals, command centers, commercial assets and strongholds throughout the country.
But it also would include attacks on national infrastructure; a total maritime blockade; and interdiction strikes on bridges, highways and other smuggling routes along the Syrian border with Syria. Meanwhile, land forces would execute a ferocious land grab well beyond the Litani River that Israeli brigades belatedly hobbled toward yet failed to reach in the last war….
In a May 23 interview, Gantz [IDF General Staff] warned that it could take repeated rounds of high-intensity wars to remove the Iranian-trained and financed threat from the north. The aim, he said, is to prolong the periods of relative quiet between war fighting.
"Israel cannot exist with protracted peaks of warfare," he said. "Therefore, we have to reduce them to reasonable levels - similar to the way we drove down terror in the aftermath of Defensive Shield [the IDF's 2002 operation in the West Bank]. That way, we allow our people to live reasonably under a protracted emergency situation until we fix it, and then we go back to square one.
"I doubt there will be peace afterwards, but at least we'll be able to extend the time between peaks ... Through strategic attrition - one round and then another round - we'll create a situation where each new round brings worse results than the last. And that, in and of itself, brings a formidable deterrent."
Here’s a video of tank defense technology that Israel is rapidly implementing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jzAupr044
