An Israeli Invasion of Lebanon Will NOT be a Walk in the Park

Foreword to the Business Insider article below:

Thanks to Paul Iddon for warning the Israelis that an invasion of Lebanon will not be a walk in the park as it is in Gaza (though they have yet to “win” there). Lebanon is no Gaza promenade, and the all-terrain Hezbollah is no tunneled Hamas. But the Zionist colonial settlers are welcome to rid us of Hezbollah (like they did when they rid us of Yasser Arafat’s PLO in 1982), but without destroying Lebanon and annexing the Lebanese south.

It’s just that their friends like the US and France in 1982 immediately replaced the PLO with Hezbollah that barely one year later (23-October-1983) proceeded to truck-bomb the US Marines Headquarters in Beirut (killing 243 US servicemen) and the French Paratroopers Compound (killing 58 French soldiers). What did the Republican hero Ronald Reagan do in the aftermath of the carnage? He withdrew like a filthy dog with his tail tugged under his asshole, abandoning Lebanon to Syria and Iran.

The US Republican coward imbeciles have the gall to blame Democrat president Jimmy Carter for failing to rescue the US hostages in Iran in 1976. Iran is 1.648 million km², or 158 times larger than Lebanon’s puny 10,000 km². The US had no military presence in Iran in 1976, but in 1982 it had a large contingent of US Marines alongside French, Italian and British contingents of the Multi-National Force of approximately 400 French, 800 Italian and 115 British elite troops, and 800 US marines of the 32nd Marine Amphibious Unit (MAU). And the Lebanese population, unlike the Iranians, were very sympathetic to the West, not to mention the heavily armed and trained Christian militias, as well as President Amin Gemayel's Lebanese army, both of which would have been more than happy to assist in the fighting.

It would have been a lot easier for the coward Reagan to expel Syria and Iran from Lebanon in 1982-1983 than it would have been for Carter to rescue the hostages. Had Reagan had some testicular integrity and had done that, Hezbollah would have been destroyed in its craddle and would not have become the threat it poses today. Instead, Reagan chose to invade the Caribbean island of Grenada the very next day (24-October-1983) to rescue a handful of US students from a military government that had mounted a coup. In their inward-looking ignorance and totalitarian subservience to their government, the US media covered the invasion of Grenada and ignored the massacre of their Marines in Beirut. The more Reagan behaved like a simpleton, the more the US media branded him as a hero. If the killing by al-Qaeda of 3,000 Americans was worth invading Afghanistan and Iraq in 2001 and 2003, weren't the 243 US servicemen and Marines killed in Beirut in 1983 worth invading Lebanon and ridding it of Iran, Syria, the PLO and Hezbollah?

Reagan had a golden opportunity to free Lebanon, deal a blow to Syria and Iran, and ensure the security of Israel. Why did the West decide to flee like cowards from Lebanon and abandon it to the Iranian and Syrian occupations? Ask Henry Kissinger (Assad’s Jewish friend), the filthy duplicitous Zionists who thrive on violence, and the criminal conservative US republicans of the Bush dynasty who love the oily asses of Arab monarchies and pseudo-republics.

Finally, the Israelis should know that their pseudo-ancestors, Joshua’s barbarian Hebrews, slaughtered the southern Canaanites of Palestine who had done nothing to them and stole their land because fucking “Yahweh told them to do so” in the toilet paper scroll called the "Torah". But the northern Canaanites, the Phoenicians, helped Kings Solomon and David, whose Hebrews were a bunch of ignorant goat-stinking, tent-living nomads, by sending cedar wood, engineers and masons to build them private palaces and the Jerusalem temple which was modeled on the Melqart Temple in the commercial world capital of its time, the southern Lebanese city of Tyre. The backward Zionist primitives should show some Bronze Age gratitude since they are stuck there. Alas, the rulers of Israel are for the most part eastern European fake Jewish numskulls who hail from the same cretinous culture as Vladimir Putin.

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BUSINESS INSIDER 

Military & Defense

Lebanon is 'not tank country' and an Israeli armored assault there exposes it to Hezbollah's firepower

Paul Iddon
Jul 23, 2024 

An Israeli armored thrust into southern Lebanon would put Merkava tanks up against Hezbollah fighters with the weapons and training to exploit the region's mountainous terrain. Israel Defense Forces/Reuters

Hezbollah took a heavy toll on Israeli armor the last time they fought on the ground in Lebanon. Its fighters wield even more advanced anti-tank weapons and know how to exploit the hilly terrain. If Israel decides to go to war with Hezbollah, it will likely have to send tanks into Lebanon.

In a recent warning to Israel, Hezbollah's leader said his Iran-backed militia group would destroy all of Israel's tanks if it launches a ground invasion in southern Lebanon to try to stop its barrage of northern Israel. That's not an empty threat.

Hezbollah took a heavy toll on Israeli armor the last time they fought on the ground in Lebanon and have since acquired a larger arsenal of more advanced anti-tank guided missiles.

"If your tanks come to southern Lebanon, you will not suffer a shortage of tanks, because you will have no tanks left," Hezbollah's secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah warned Israel on July 17. Israel has a tank shortage from the nine-month Gaza war that may complicate preparations for a ground offensive into mountainous southern Lebanon, where Hezbollah fighters have readied to ambush them with mines and guided missiles as they pass through steep-sided valleys.

"Hezbollah has put considerable energy into developing a 'kill team' approach of using small, highly mobile groups of fighters that can deploy quickly to confront and attack Israeli armor in southern Lebanon," Nicholas Heras, senior director of strategy and innovation at the New Lines Institute, told Business Insider. "The hilly terrain in Hezbollah's home turf in southern Lebanon favors defenders and Hezbollah has developed innovative uses for the Kornet anti-tank missiles to strike at Israel's heavily armored Merkava tanks."

Hezbollah has engaged Israel in border skirmishes since the day after Hamas's 10/7 terror attacks that have forced thousands of civilians from their homes on both sides of the border, with growing fears these increasingly deadly clashes could ignite an all-out war. On Thursday, Hezbollah claimed its forces targeted an Israeli Merkava main battle tank near the Lebanese border in one of these exchanges of fire. Hezbollah has improved its anti-tank capabilities since its 2006 war with Israel and is likely to use the favorable terrain to threaten even the most advanced Israeli tanks and armored vehicles.

Towards the end of their 34-day war in 2006, the Israeli Army sent tanks into southern Lebanon. Hezbollah fighters armed with Russian-made 9M133 Kornet anti-tank missiles ambushed several. For example, of the 24 Israeli tanks deployed in the Battle of Wadi Saluki, also known as the Battle of Wadi Hujeir, Hezbollah anti-tank missiles hit 11.

"Out of the 400 tanks involved in the fighting in southern Lebanon, 48 were hit, 40 were damaged, and 20 penetrated. It is believed that five Merkavas were completely destroyed," noted a 2008 military analysis of that war.

"Clearly, Hezbollah has mastered the art of light infantry-ATGM [anti-tank guided missile] tactics against heavy mechanized forces," it added. "Hezbollah also deserves high marks for its innovative use of sophisticated ambushes and the clever use of both direct and indirect fires."

Israeli armor has improved since 2006 with the introduction of upgraded Merkava main battle tanks and the heavily armored Namer troop carrier based on the Merkava chassis. Many of these vehicles also have the sophisticated Trophy active protection system that tracks and counter-fires at incoming projectiles.

While Israeli armor losses in Gaza are difficult to accurately gauge, they are likely substantially less than previous conflicts the Israeli military has fought since 1982, the year it launched a large-scale invasion of Lebanon.

"In 1982, Israel faced foes with similar equipment, like the Syrian army and various Lebanese factions, that also had their own main battle tanks, heavy weapons, and air forces," Ryan Bohl, a senior Middle East and North Africa analyst at the risk intelligence company RANE, told BI. "Hamas had little of that — and certainly no armored vehicles."  "Hezbollah, too, has no conventional heavy weapons besides its limited artillery and rocket supplies."

If Israel decides to go to war with Hezbollah, it will have no choice but to send tanks over its northern border into Lebanon, according to Nicholas Blanford, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and author of the 2011 book Warriors of God: Inside Hezbollah's Thirty-Year Struggle Against Israel. "The 2006 war demonstrated that air power alone is insufficient to neutralize Hezbollah. But the Israelis cannot get away from the fact that South Lebanon is not tank country," Blanford told BI.

"The main lines of communication run from west to east, which is not helpful for an invading force wanting to move north," Blanford said. "Furthermore, the northbound routes tend to run through steep valleys, which makes armor particularly vulnerable to ambush by anti-tank missiles, IEDs, and belly charges as we saw in Wadi Hujeir at the end of the 2006 war."

Any cross-border incursion by Israeli armor would undoubtedly have cover and protection from accompanying infantry, artillery, aircraft, and drones. However, some of these forces could also find themselves exposed to Hezbollah's large missile arsenal, which include surface-to-air missiles. "The IDF will likely focus not just on force but also on material protection because of these threats, however, as losing tanks to Hezbollah will constitute a political problem for a campaign there," RANE's Bohl said. "Therefore, the IDF isn't likely to carry out a massed assault against Hezbollah, but rather narrow ground incursions that would limit the amount of Israeli armor that could be struck by Hezbollah."

"The last thing the IDF wants is to give Hezbollah a target-rich environment." Most of Hezbollah's new anti-armor capabilities come from Iran, including the Almas anti-tank missile it has used in recent clashes, which Iran reverse-engineered from Israeli Spike ATGMs captured by Hezbollah in the 2006 war. "They certainly have acquired new systems since 2006, as we have seen in the current conflict. The Almas being one," Blanford said. The group also possesses extended-range AT-14 Spriggans, the NATO reporting name for the laser-guided Kornet that has a six-mile range, and an Iranian reverse-engineered version of that Russian ATGM.

"They have also developed the Tharallah system, which has two AT-14 launchers side by side which fire two missiles in quick succession," Blanford said. "The idea is that the first missile is taken out by an Israeli tank's Trophy defense system, but (that active protection system) doesn't have time to counter the second missile.

Armed with these weapons, Hezbollah's "kill team" approach outlined by Heras could prove deadly for Israeli armored units in a future war.

"Hezbollah's introduction of the Almas system provides it with a ranged strike capability against Israeli armor, which can allow the organization to have multiple kill teams to engage against the IDF in the battlespace, both from range and in close combat," Heras said.

"Despite its ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) capabilities that it can bring to bear in the battlespace in southern Lebanon, it is highly likely that the IDF would suffer significant casualties in conflict with Hezbollah."