Hezbollah: Corner Pocket?

This picture comes from a post a couple days old at Hashmonean.  Obviously an involved source, but one of the few bothering to post anything that might conceivably give us a clue about the tactical picture involved — at least, without being one of the lucky few journalists who aren’t posting it where I can find it, or being somebody who knows but can’t talk.

Now, Here’s the important bit to my eye.  Look at the third arrow from the left.  Very short deployment required to hit the Litani river, and form a blocking force isolating all of southern Lebanon from Irano-Syrian resupply.  The MSM idiots can blather on about “smuggling paths” all they want, but bullets are heavy — you’re not going to carry a meaningful supply of bullets and rockets over mountain paths on your back and expect to achieve anything useful.  Especially unless your donkeys or llamas or drugged-up Iranian mufsidun are all in anti-IR pajamas.  What’s more, the presence of an Israeli force that can use the blockers as a springboard from which to do whatever they want (move to Bekaa), well, right there.  Pity I don’t have anything that would let me piece together an Order of Battle + “Where’s Waldo” deployment list.  (If somebody’s got it, I’d be grateful).

This bodes

1. Badly for Hezbollah (cry me a river)
2. Very badly for anybody who claims that Israel’s losing this thing.

And this is well past the 72-hour mark.  With continued fighting in pockets of southern Lebanon (I seriously suspect a rope-a-dope in Bint Jbeil, since by all accounts the area the Hezbollistas are defending is small enough that it could simply be levelled from above).  What remains to be seen is how long this fighting goes on before the Lebanese agree to actually deploy into their own country (grrr), or else Hezbollah runs out of rounds to shoot.

What we can definitely say we’re NOT going to see, is an Israeli “drive to the Litani.”  That would leave Hezbollah free to run around their back-field pulling hijinks.  Since that’s all Hezbollah’s three-and-four-man teams are actually good for except mostly missing with an awful lot of unguided rockets, you’d have to assert criminal stupidity on Israel’s part to play into Hezbollah’s game plan there.

So we can expect to see a whole of lot of nothing the news networks will bother to cover except “some fighting’s happening” combined with the more noteworthy raids getting press time.  And then Hezbollah will probably collapse like an overcooked flan, as their fighters literally begin to run out of bullets.

~ by happycrow on August 8, 2006.