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We heard the first rumbles of discontent from inside Israel on Tuesday. The complaints are muted and most decidedly do not come from an anti-war faction. Rather, the complaints originated from a few retired Israel Defense Forces (IDF) officers and intelligence officials who would normally be fairly quiet during a crisis. The mere fact that we are picking up these discordant tones indicates to us that the unease is more widespread than it would appear and likely reflects growing tensions in the IDF.
The complaints revolve around the strategy the IDF has pursued over the past weeks. Rather than pursuing a more traditional IDF course of coordinating airstrikes with intense mobile operations on the ground, the Israelis have chosen a strategy that has focused on an intense air campaign -- and which some say is trying to deal with Hezbollah almost exclusively from the air. In some ways, they say, the current operation is more in keeping with U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's view of the uses of air power and technology than with Israeli military tradition. The argument is that air power cannot deal effectively with Hezbollah, that the failure to suppress rocket fire indicates this, and that the open-ended nature of an air campaign conflicts with Israel's diplomatic and strategic realities.
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