At the ten-year anniversary of the second Lebanon war, a number of Israeli commentators have argued that, contrary to the common view of that conflict as a fiasco, it actually secured a decade of quiet from Hizballah. Ruthie Blum is more skeptical:
The Winograd Commission, set up in the aftermath of the war, delved into [various mistakes made by the military and the government]. But the real culprit was a false assessment, reached more than a decade earlier, that the “conventional battlefield” was a thing of the past. According to that ridiculous theory, it would be wasteful to expend energy and resources training for ground incursions when the era of high-tech sorties from the air was the wave of the future. . . .
[Meanwhile, the UN] peacekeeping force [established as part of the ceasefire], which was supposed to prevent Hizballah from transporting and rebuilding its arsenals, did nothing.
But the most damning evidence, according to Blum, is that Hizballah now has over twenty times more rockets than it did in the last war, and more sophisticated ones at that—and, thanks to the Syria conflict, it has become a battle-hardened force with significant regional influence.
Read more on Israel Hayom: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=16775