One thing that has become clear in the past fourteen months is that the process of defeating Hamas and Hizballah is a long and arduous one. To Ariel Vishne, the problem with such Israeli feats of intelligence and technological wizardry as the detonation of Hizballah pagers is that they can mask the need for the sort of patient, messy operations like the one the IDF is conducting in Gaza. His argument is not that the pager attack was ill-considered, or indeed, anything but a success, only that there can be ancillary costs to such displays of ingenuity:
Killing dozens of Hizballah operatives and injuring thousands could have been achieved through the carpet bombing of Beirut. But the achievement was made in an unprecedented, targeted manner, with minimal harm to non-combatants. The downside is that this sets an unrealistic standard when the “cool operation” can’t deliver the same effect—either because it’s not feasible in the first place or because it is feasible but with much higher collateral damage. The very existence of the “cool operation” creates a strong illusion about how wars work and sets an impossible bar.
And when tools as magical as “a terrorist organization’s dedicated communications devices that only terrorists use, which will explode exactly when and where we want” exist, there’s a strong tendency to believe that every problem can be solved through the framework of Israeli cunning.
The problem is precisely that—when Israel is successful, its successes are so elegant that they create the illusion of a panacea. This often leads to them being carried out in isolation, or at least not tightly connected enough to a broader, holistic political framework. And, in international security, there aren’t only “cool operations”; there’s also a lot of grunt work, less “cool” actions, and certainly less elegant ones.
More about: Hizballah, IDF, Israeli Security, Israeli strategy