Word: lebanon
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...Pentagon offered to supply Israel with "bunker-buster" bombs, capable of punching deep into the enemy's underground defenses. Israel's air force chief at the time, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, - who, as Chief of Staff, is currently commanding Israel's air, sea and land strikes in Lebanon - rejected Washington's offer, claiming that Israel had its own superb weapons. But with the "bunker-busters", says a senior Tel Aviv intelligence source, Israel could have knocked out most of Hizballah's rocket-launchers and possibly brought the war to an early close...
...Ironically, al-Qaeda finds itself substantially weaker organizationally at the very moment where the political conditions for its existence may never have been better. Muslims around the world are far more enraged by the U.S. today than they had been five years ago, fueled by shooting wars in Iraq, Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Afghanistan. Even if Bin Laden arguably helped provoke the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, he has not managed to capitalize on the resultant outrage. In fact, it is among the active jihadists on some of those battlefronts that his isolation is most palpable...
...Israel currently has 10,000 troops operating in southern Lebanon, but they're not digging in. Instead, they're attacking Hizballah village strongholds, maintaining mobility instead of establishing fixed positions. In fact, the Israeli soldiers are mostly living inside their tanks and APCs, where they eat, sleep and conduct their ablutions. Once they have expended much of the ammunition they're carrying in firefights with Hizballah, they are typically relieved after a few days, driving back to the Israeli border to refuel, rearm and, for many of the soldiers, to catch a day or two of r&r in abandoned...
...Israeli government has given its approval for a campaign to drive all the way to the Litani River, some 18 miles into Lebanon, which would involve deploying as many as 20,000 more troops and then working back down towards the Israeli border, sweeping through dozens of villages to eliminate the thousands of Hizballah fighters that remain there. Still, Israeli leaders remain cautious over going ahead, for a number of reasons...
...while Israel certainly has the forces to put boots on the ground and take control of southern Lebanon, it must now assess whether the advantages of doing so outweigh the costs and potential complications. Until now, it clearly hasn't thought so, and only a continuing failure of diplomacy will likely change its mind...