Many assume the military initiative lies with Israel, but that is to underestimate Hizbullah's sponsors - Syria and Iran, writes Tom Clonan.
As current tragic events continue to unfold in Lebanon, much media analysis of the situation appears focused on Israel's military superiority and domination of Lebanese airspace - with an emphasis on the ability of the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) to conduct air-strikes and missile attacks throughout Lebanon at will. Many accounts assume that the duration, direction and tempo of the hostilities will be dictated solely by the Israeli government and the IDF - or even by decisions reached many thousands of miles away in St Petersburg by the G8 leaders. This analysis is flawed. The initiative in the current crisis lies not with Israel but with Hizbullah and its sponsors.
Formed in Lebanon in 1982 with assistance from Iran's Revolutionary Guards, Hizbullah began as a Shia resistance group carrying out guerilla actions against Israel's invasion of Lebanon. As Irish troops serving with Unifil in south Lebanon observed, Hizbullah's early attacks on IDF troops and positions were fanatical but primitive and ill-planned and co-ordinated.
But Hizbullah's military performance in the field improved dramatically over the next decade. In the early 1980s, Hizbullah carried out frenzied waves of suicide missions against the IDF in Lebanon - including the truck bomb attack on a US marine base in Beirut in 1983 which killed 220 American troops. By the 1990s, however, Hizbullah had evolved sophisticated guerilla tactics that effectively neutralised the IDF's superior fire-power and technical and air superiority.
By the mid 1990s, Hizbullah became engaged in a new pattern of attacks on Israeli troops that included sophisticated roadside bombs, convoy ambushes, and mortar and missile attacks into heavily defended Israeli positions. The hallmark of Hizbullah ground operations would become the gradual and painstaking infiltration of IDF positions in small numbers, culminating in a devastating close proximity attack with rapid withdrawal to evade retaliatory strikes. This "shoot-and-scoot" policy mirrors Hizbullah's current practice of the remote launching of single missiles into Israel from multiple, hastily abandoned firing positions - thus frustrating Israeli countermeasures and counter-battery fire.
This pattern of attack - now familiar to US troops being engaged by Sunni resistance groups in Iraq - led to a dramatic increase in the numbers of IDF troops killed in Lebanon during the mid-1990s. During this period, Hizbullah also learned how to destroy Israeli Merkava main battle tanks - previously considered impregnable - using Iranian anti-tank missiles. These attacks, along with remotely detonated roadside bombs, had a powerful psychological effect on Israeli troops operating in Lebanon and robbed them of any feeling of invulnerability or security on Lebanese soil.
When Israel withdrew from Lebanon in May 2000, Hizbullah saw it as a direct result of its increasingly effective ground campaign against the IDF and declared it a victory for its forces.
In parallel with the ground campaign against Israeli troops, Hizbullah also waged an infamous campaign of Katyusha rocket attacks on civilian targets in northern Israel throughout the 1990s. This provoked the Israelis to bombard Lebanon in 1996, but the operation failed in its strategy to contain, alienate or destroy Hizbullah. Rather it strengthened support for the organisation by radicalising thousands of Lebanese citizens, and brought Israel into international disrepute through the IDF massacre of civilian refugees at a UN post in Qana in April 1996.
Hizbullah's decision to provoke Israel with the killing and abduction of its troops on Israeli territory last week was a calculated act of war. The ambush and abduction of heavily armed IDF troops - and the subsequent conspicuous defeat of the Israeli counter attack into Lebanese territory - demonstrate that Hizbullah has lost none of its recently acquired prowess in ground operations. The IDF will know this and the Israeli government - conscious of an Israeli public opinion sensitive to troop losses - will be anxious not to become involved in yet another costly ground offensive into Lebanon.
Hassan Nasrallah, leader of Hizbullah - with its cult of martyrdom - will have no such scruples about the current Lebanese death toll. Nor will Nasrallah be overly burdened by Lebanese public opinion as to the culpability of Hizbullah in the current crisis. As a fundamentalist Shia ideologue dedicated to the destruction of Israel, the polarisation of Lebanese society caused by the Israeli bombing campaign may well play into his hands by further radicalising the Shia majority in Lebanon.
The most sinister development in Hizbullah's actions against Israel in recent days has been in its missile attacks on Israeli civilian targets. The diminutive Katyusha rocket, with its relatively small warhead consisting of approximately 22kgs of high explosives - the staple of Hizbullah's previous missile attacks on Israel - would appear to have been superseded in recent days by far larger missiles with evidence of guidance systems and much larger and more destructive payloads.
Consistent with Hizbullah's own statements on the matter, international intelligence sources - including the Israeli military authorities - believe that Hizbullah may possess up to 13,000 missiles for immediate and ongoing use against civilian targets in northern Israel. The vast majority are believed to be Fajr-3 missiles, an Iranian-manufactured variant of the Katyusha missile. It is also believed that Hizbullah possesses up to 500 Iranian Fajr-5 missiles, with a range of up to 75km and a payload of up to 75kg of high explosives.
It is likely that Fajr-5 missiles were responsible for the damage done to Haifa's railway station on Sunday which killed several Israelis, along with the destruction of an apartment block in Haifa on Monday night which injured 11. These missile variants have created new precedents for Israel, bringing highly destructive rocket attacks to civilian communities as far south as Haifa on the Mediterranean coast and to Nazareth and Afula and Tiberias in Israel's interior. The accurate targeting of Haifa's railway station from Lebanese territory suggests more than mere coincidence. The Haifa attacks suggest that Hizbullah has made sudden leaps in missile technology in terms of a rudimentary but accurate guidance system for its rockets, along with more potent warheads.
Israel, along with many others, will suspect Iranian and Syrian assistance in these matters.
Approximately one million Israelis have been directly affected by Hizbullah's attacks in recent days. In addition to the psychological impact of the attacks on the Israeli public, the economic cost to Israel through forced closure of business and other factors is estimated to be as high as €100 million per day.
More worrying for the Israelis, however, in the coming days and weeks will be the nightmare prospect of Hizbullah firing one of its dozen or so Iranian-built Zelzal-2 missiles - with a range of 200km and a warhead weighing 600kg - at Tel Aviv or one of Israel's nuclear reactors in the Negev desert.
Such an attack would provoke savage retaliation from Israel and might well escalate and widen the conflict. Precedent has shown that the bombardment of Lebanon alone is insufficient to neutralise the threat from Hizbullah. Hizbullah, based on hard-won combat experience, will disperse its arsenal and will continue to press its attacks on Israel. Israel's bombardment of Lebanon will likely continue to be broadly ineffectual and if escalated, ultimately disastrous for the Middle East. Hizbullah and its allies would appear to be in the driving seat in terms of the future direction of this crisis. They would do well to consider the implications of a pre-emptive or retaliatory strike by Israel on Syria or Iran.