Hizbullah was foolish to provoke Israel, but according to Seymour Hersh, Israel was planning this assault anyway:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article14526.htm

So, if Seymour is right, they were doomed to Israel's destruction of their country with or without the kinapping.

Mike, the kidnapping also took planning and those rockets didn't just appear out of nowhere. Israel knew Hezbollah would attack, again, and they planned for it.

mike,

Thank you for this nice conspiracy theory website*. I'll file it along with Loose Change and The Israel Lobby.

You can now slide back into your burrow.

* A sample: "Pitch Black Void" by Manuel Valenzuela, summarized, "Make no mistake, 9/11 was, and continues to be, a war upon the American people, a psychological operation directed at our minds and hearts that was, from the very start, nothing but the catalyst needed to launch Project Empire by the delusional criminals and miscreants in power."

I believe the article was by Seymour Hersh.

How convenient of Malik to endores the "invincible Hezzies" theory, thereby absolving the Lebanese of actually having to do anything about them.

On one of the American news channels (I think it was FOX?) they said that the anti-tank missles that Hizballah was using against Israel don't work on the tanks that America uses. Has there been any discussion in Israel (or perhaps it's widely known?) as to why Israel's tank technology is behind the times?

I'm not certain, but I may be able to shed some light on it.

An issue of DebkaNet Weekly (which I cited here) has this to say about Israeli armor defensive systems:

As to the Israeli tank, our military experts point to some of its vulnerabilities.
1. There is no such thing as tank armor which is absolutely impregnable to attack.
2. Some of the tanks may have been from the first series that came off the Israeli production line without the protective devices affixed to the later Mark 3 and Mark 4 series.
3. Up until the shock of the July 12 Hizballah attack, Israel’s policy-makers - and therefore the army - were ruled overwhelmingly by a conviction that Israel faced no major war threat in the next five years, except for the daily grind against Palestinian terrorists. Therefore, they enacted some economies in defense spending, including cutting out the installation of Rafael’s Trophy active protection system for all the IDF’s tanks.
Trophy creates a hemispheric protected zone around a vehicle such as a tank which intercepts and destroys incoming threats. It has three elements: The Threat Detection and Warning subsystem, which consists of several sensors, including flat-panel radar placed at strategic spots around the vehicle to provide full hemispherical coverage.
Once an incoming threat is detected, identified and verified, the Countermeasure Assembly is opened and the countermeasure device positioned so as to intercept the threat. It is then launched automatically into a ballistic trajectory to intercept the incoming threat at a distance.
Trophy is marketed by General Dynamics, which plans to install the system on every new and existing combat vehicle it produces, including Stryker, M-1A2 and FCS. It has completed hundreds of live tests with Israeli Defense Forces and demonstrated its effectiveness in neutralizing anti-tank rockets and guided missiles. The system is in full-scale engineering for inclusion on the Merkava Mark 4 and the light armored vehicle (Stryker).
While Israel saw no need for this protective device until too late, DEBKA-Net-Weekly’s military sources report that the US army, seeing the steep strategic price Israel paid for this omission, has decided to purchase the Trophy for its tanks and armored vehicles.

I hope this sheds some light on your question.

Anti-tank weaponry is an ongoing cat-and-mouse game. Defender builds reactive armor, attacker sticks an explosive probe on the front of the missile. Defender adds decoys to defeat the missile's guidance system, attacker finds a way to outsmart the decoys.

The missile we used in '91 was a TOW-2, which incorporated some Israeli upgrades into the original TOW design.

Thanks for the info Asher. It's kind of funny to make a strategic decision that your country faces no real military threat and thus can let down it's guard with respect to updating it's weaponry. If I was the enemy of such a country, that five year window would look like a mighty good time to attack. Maybe I'm looking at the situation too simplistically, but it seems that countries like Israel and America--who are perennial favorites of terrorists/rogue nations--can never afford to conclude that they face no serious military threat.

Mike:

Seymour Hersh's article is notable for the number of "undisclosed sources".

I posit that his undisclosed sourse is Hassan Nazrallah himself, who, from his safe haven in the Iranian embassy in Damascus, tried to spin the timing of his kidnapping having been a lucky accident, because the Israelis were caught offguard as they prepared for war. The fact that Syria has been delivering to Hezbollah thousands of rockets bought by Iran from Russia for the last five years, and the Lebanese government has failed to disarm them, as they were commmitted to do in 2004 under a UN resolution... ...strangely none of that figures into Seymour Hersh's figurings as to what was going on behind the scenes.

I suggest you make an appointment ASAP with an ear-candler so you can get the excess wax buildup between your ears reduced and have your brain operate a little more effectively.

The timing of kidnapping that finally resulted in Israeli reprisals after five years of missile attacks was entirely at the behest of Syria, which wanted to distract world attention from the inquiries into the assassination of Rafiq Hariri, and Iran, from its nuclear weapons project.

Funnily enough, Israel holds all of three Lebanese "prisoners" including the very notorious Samir Kuntar, who shot an Israeli civilian to death in front of his four year old daughter, then bashed the four year old's head in, before preceding to enter the family's apartment and murder the mother, who accidentally smothered her two year old while they hid in a crawl space. On the other hand, it is reckoned that Syria holds about 700 genuine Lebanese prisoners of conscience in its jails, but I doubt Nazrallah is concerned about getting them sprung.

Asher,

You did NOT answer Fern's question directly.

I will.

Fern,

"On one of the American news channels (I think it was FOX?) they said that the anti-tank missles that Hizballah was using against Israel don't work on the tanks that America uses. Has there been any discussion in Israel (or perhaps it's widely known?) as to why Israel's tank technology is behind the times?"

No, because Israel's tank technology is not behind the times. It's among the most advanced in the world.

The Merkava tank is the toughest & best-armored tank in the universe.

The problem is that you are not supposed to use tanks against anti-tank missiles!!

It's as simple as

"One member of an Israeli tank crew who had just left Lebanon told the Guardian: "It's terrible. You do not fight anti-tank teams with tanks. You use infantry supported by artillery and helicopters. Wide valleys without shelter are the wrong place to use tanks."

Is that clear? The Israelis allowed themselves to lumber into "kill-boxes" where, guess what, they got killed.

The Israelis didn't have bad weapons. They have great weapons. They just made some stupid battlefield decisions. The answer to that is by firing the people who made these bad decisions.

Is that clear?

(Link:http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1842276,00.html)

Sorry to link to The Guardian, but the quotation is devastating.

I read an article, by Walid Phares, I think, that theorizes that 1) since Hiz'ballah is not an indigenous Lebanese movement but an Iranian proxy; 2) since Iran's goal is to complete the conversion of Lebanon into a client state completely dominated by Iran and Syria, and 3) since the only thing that can conceivably prevent that is the Lebanese army, that 4) Hizb'allah has deliberately engineered a situation where the Lebanese army, supposedly taking over southern Lebanon to extend Lebanese government authority over the area, is in reality walking into a Hizb'allah trap, where they will be destroyed in the next round of fighting between Hizb'allah and Israel, which is sure to come. (Hizb'allah's refusal to disarm should show everyone where they really stand, regardless of anything else.)

I don't know about anyone else, but this is the most plausible sounding explanation I've heard of this whole thing yet. Everything fits. A Lebanon that can resist Syrian and Iranian machinations will make it difficult for Iran to carry out its schemes, and Syria has never abandoned its "dream" of reabsorbing Lebanon back into the body of "Greater Syria". Once that happens, Iran and Syria will have a free hand in Lebanon, and nothing will prevent them from stationing a real army on Israel's northern border.