Boots and bodybags

Yesterday’s fighting in Bint Jbeil has brought home a harsh truth about boots on the ground in war – they come with a quota of bodybags attached.

It is no surprise that the Israelis have had to send ground troops into southern Lebanon to back up their air campign against Hezbollah. It may however have been something of a surprise to the Israeli army, and to the Israeli people, as the new broke last evening that they lost 9 or 10 troops in fighting with Hezbollah in Bint Jbeil.

Now, every army has days like that; in every war the side that are better trained and equipped has a bad day and the other side, less professional, less well equipped and less well trained, gets lucky. Normally, an incident like Bint Jbeil would recede to a footnote, a glitch in the bigger picture.

However, Bint Jbeil may not fade away. News reports on TV seem to suggest that the losses have caused some shock in Israel where public opinion is increasingly ‘americanised’ with regard to military casualties. The withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 was as a result of intolerance of high losses with no appreciable gain. That memory has undoubtedly faded; there may also have been a belief that a short, sharp ‘shock and awe’ air campaign would produce an easy victory.  The shock of a minor firefight in Bint Jbeil may have served as a sharp reality check for Israel.