In the recent conflict on the Israeli northern border, reasonable observers supported Israel's right to respond to Hezbollah with force. So why did these observers end up criticizing Israel's war conduct, when reason would have predicted the inevitability of Lebanese casualties?
The answer is difficult to see.
What's easier to spot, though, is that criticisms of the Israeli operation in Lebanon come on three fronts - the moral, the military and the political.
The moral criticism of Israel's Lebanon campaign centered on the notion of proportionality. Why did the U.N. claim that Israel inflicted disproportionate damage? Because Israel directed the bulk of early operations towards forceful responses at locations where Shiite militia had attacked but then strategically withdrawn. That guaranteed less damage to terrorists than to Lebanese civilians.
The military criticism of the war effort was similarly focused. By running out its own stated war clock of four to five weeks using air power only, Israel left its ground troops the equivalent of a two minute drill to get the job done. In the end, Israeli troops were too little and too late to do significant damage to Hezbollah guerillas or their capacity for terrorist mischief.
Meanwhile, the duration of the conflict, its lack of clear victory, and the overwhelming damage caused to the state of Lebanon resulted in political criticism of Israel. Initially, even other Middle East states showed little sympathy for Hezbollah; by the end, Hezbollah's leader was being declared Islam's modern day savior, and the Israeli streets echo with calls for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's resignation.
And what do these three catchall criticisms have in common? The answer is air power.
Air power, viewed by Israel as the balm to the nagging sore to its north, turned into poison for its war aims, its regional standing, and its capacity to fight a war limited by due concern for non-combatants. So the lesson of the Israeli-Hezbollah scuffle must be that, if used at the expense of other tactics, air power runs afoul of moral, military and political success in the arena of asymmetric conflicts.
Remember, Hezbollah is not a nation-state. It is a Jihadist state within a state. It is more like present day Iraq than Egypt in 1967. And Israel's failure to recognize the difference may have jeopardized its chances to eliminate Hezbollah from the military and political landscape.
It is impossible to say what would have happened if Israel had gone into, rather than over, Lebanon with overwhelming ground troops in order to eliminate a terrorist menace. But it is not too late to learn from all this.
Recent reports have suggested that the U.S. end game in Iraq is one that will involve a handover of ground power to the Iraqis coupled with a reliance, on the part of the U.S., on (you guessed it!) air power. But the Iraqi insurgency is, if anything, even more shifting, entrenched and flexible than Hezbollah.
Similar U.S. strategies are apparently on the table for Iran. But can anyone doubt that Iran has learned lessons in witnessing the success, against air power, of Hezbollah?
The U.S. should not continue to play the classroom dunce; air power is not the only answer on today's battlefield tests. And against insurgencies and terrorist groups, it is not even the right answer.