AboutDon Radlauer Expertise I`m originally from the United States, and now make my home in Israel - after living for some years in Hong Kong and England.
In addition to handling general questions about Israeli life and history, I can field questions relating to strategic aspects of terrorism and counter-terrorism, as well as some tactical aspects. As an Associate of the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT), I can draw on ICT`s accumulated expertise in this area. As the Lead Researcher for ICT`s "al-Aqsa Intifada" Database Project (and author of "An Engineered Tragedy", ICT`s report on the findings of this project), I have become the world`s leading expert (indeed, as far as I know, the world`s only expert) on the demographics of the victims of the phase of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that began in September 2000.
Going beyond terrorism per se, I can answer questions regarding pretty much all aspects of the Israeli-Arab conflict.
Experience
Experience in the area I've lived in Israel for over eight years. For more than five years, I have been associated with the Institute for Counter-Terrorism at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. My own role there is, to a degree, that of "expert in everything else" - that is, I'm less of a security expert than many of the other researchers there, but I have a broader background in other areas, including banking and finance, general scientific subjects, and so on. I also can draw upon the knowledge of other ICT staff.
Publications ICT website, http://www.ict.org.il
My blog, "On the Contrary: Don's Mideast Musings" is at http://radlauer.blogspot.com .
Question Dear Don
continuing my study, i have one more question that i hope
you answer.i'm sorry if i'm bothering you.
my question is:
in the 2006 war why did the Israeli army attack the
northern Lebanese borders when Israel could easily by a
landing in Beirut and the north( where no protesters exist)
take over technically 50% of Lebanon and then attack the
small south from all sides ... logical reasoning?
Answer Dear Fouad -
I'm not really an expert on battlefield tactics; my expertise is more on the political side of low-intensity conflict, with specialties in some rather odd areas like the analysis and use of mortality statistics - so I'm not really the best person in the world to answer your question. A lot of people appear to agree with you that an envelopment manoevre would have been a better strategy than the one Israel used; and I suspect that they (and you) are right. In fact, Israel's strategy in the 2006 campaign was basically to try to win the war from the air, with the use of ground forces as an afterthought; and this kind of strategy, attractive though it is on paper, seems to fail more often than not in the real world.
With all due respect to my lack of military expertise, I think there were a lot of problems in the high-level leadership of Israel's 2006 Lebanese operation - including a Prime Minister with no military background and, it turned out, rather poor strategic judgement; an inexperienced and inexpert Defense Minister; and an IDF Chief of Staff with an exclusively Air Force background, no sense whatsoever regarding the proper use of ground forces, and far too much confidence in his own (dubious) competence. If this weren't bad enough, we had also spent several years using the IDF as a not-very-glorified police force, rather than training it for "real" military operations against "real" military enemies. This means that when we needed the IDF to function as a proper army, it wasn't at an acceptable level of readiness; and the IDF's less-than-stellar showing in Lebanon (from the senior command level down) was mostly a result of its misuse over the preceding five years.
My favorite analogy for this (perhaps because I'm also a pretty good cook) is what happens when you use a good chef's knife as a screwdriver to change a light switch. By the end of the job, your knife is no longer much good as a chef's knife, and it never was any good as a screwdriver! This is exactly what happens when you use your army as a police/counter-terrorist force. In Lebanon, we had tankists who had hardly done any training for tank warfare - instead, they'd been used for years for operations like going house-to-house searching for terrorists in the Nablus casbah. Modern tanks (like other modern weapons systems) are not simple tools, and to use them effectively you have to spend considerable time learning and polishing your skills, and not let these skills decay once acquired. A modern army needs to spend a lot of time and resources training and practicing, and the IDF had largely neglected to do this over several years before the Lebanon campaign. (If I sound a bit angry and disgusted about this, it's because I am; for years before the Lebanon campaign, I was growling at people who used stupid slogans like "Let the IDF win" with regard to the Palestinians.)
The good news, from Israel's standpoint, is that Lebanon 2006 didn't turn out worse than it did; any disaster you can walk away from is a victory of sorts, especially if you learn something from it. Our new Chief of Staff has a strong ground-forces background, and has devoted a great deal of energy and resources to restoring the IDF's preparedness to carry out its intended missions. We also now have a Defense Minister and a Prime Minister who, regardless of their other failings, both have good military backgrounds.
I apologize for not really answering your question, and, worse, for doing so at great length. <g>
