If this alignment of interest between Amal and Iran would not have ensured a problematic occupation in and of itself, Israel’s actions in the south at the invasion’s inception virtually ensured a permanent schism between Israel and the Lebanese Shiite population. Avner Yaniv argues that Israel had no plan for administering the power vacuum that it created in the south through the destruction of the PLO mini-state. Ad hoc improvisation, which had always been a component of Israel’s conventional, offensively minded doctrine, led to “a series of reflexive fits drawing on Israel’s previous experience with comparable problems in the Sunni, Christian West Bank and Gaza Strip.”31
This had an almost instant deleterious effect on Israel’s relationship with the Shiites. In the early days of the war, while the siege of the PLO in Beirut was still ongoing, the Higher Shiite Council, led by Amal’s Shams al-Din, Sadr’s successor, urged the Shiites of Lebanon to reject as illegitimate Israeli interference in southern Lebanon and the imposition of Israeli-backed administrations in Shiite towns and villages. Shiites were urged “to reject the occupation and not to cooperate in any way with the Israeli-imposed local administration.”32 When I asked Baruch Spiegel if the IDF had done anything initially to win “the hearts and minds” of the Lebanese Shiite population, his answer was simple. “Not immediately. It took time until we modified. It took time.”33 If there was ever a real window of opportunity to win over the Shiite population, it was shut by the time the IDF “modified” its practices.
This installment of the JRTC CALL Cell BiWeekly History Lesson again turns to a product from the Combat Studies Institute. Occasional Paper 21 Flipside of the COIN: Israel’s Lebanese Incursion Between 1982 - 2000 by Daniel Isaac Helmer provides an in-depth analysis of Israel's 22-year long venture in Lebanon.

Helmer describes this Israeli experience as a defeat on three levels. The Israelis went into Lebanon to destroy the Palestinian Liberation Organization: they won sweeping tactical victories but never succeeded in their aim to crush the PLO. More importantly, the sustained existence of the PLO as champion for a Palestinian people was a strategic defeat directly tied to the beginning of the First Intifadah. The Israelis stimulated the creation of Hezbollah in Lebanon and then lost the asymmetric fight with the Shia militia, in the process turning the militia into a global threat. Finally as described by Helmer, the 1982 Invasion was to destroy the "terrorists" and as he shows, the net result was an increase in terrorism from pre-1982 levels.

As a former United Nations Military Observer in southern Lebanon (1987), I found this paper to be balanced and accurate. In many ways it explains what happened to the Israeli Defense Force in the 2006 fight with Hezbollah. But this paper transcends its role as a study of the conflict in Lebanon. It is very much a study of the unconventional versus the conventional. As such it is also quite relevant to US operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

V/R

Tom Odom