Digby: RMA 1.0

Billmon, in another of his excellent essays on the Israel Lebanon crisis (aptly entitled "the Debacle") points out what I think may just be the most important fact to emerge about our Really Big Adventure in the mid-east these last few years:

It's a dismal situation for the Israelis -- worse, in many, many ways, that what I would have called the worst-case scenario before the war started. This is what happens when your state-of-the-art blitzkrieg machine is exposed as a relic of a past century.

In 1870, when the Emperor Louis Napoleon declared war on Prussia, he was confident his armies could beat those of Kaiser Wilhelm I just as throughly as his famous uncle had whipped the Prussians at the Battle of Jena in 1806. After all, everyone "knew" the French were the masters of modern military science. In Europe's capitals the betting was on how long it would take the French to get to Berlin.