Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff have a piece here in which they assess Operation Cast Lead a year after its conclusion.  They acknowledge that,

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) penetrated to the heart of the strip — the center of Gaza City, where most of Hamas’s major compounds are located. The organization’s defensive infrastructure, which had been painstakingly built over three years and included hundreds of booby-trapped houses, tunnels, landmines, and smuggled anti-tank rockets, was destroyed.

Hamas fighters had no answer for the IDF’s technological and military edge. Their attempts to kidnap Israeli soldiers failed and, though Hamas fired hundreds of rockets into Israeli territory, only a few civilians were killed. More than a year after the fighting, the strip is still under siege by both Israel and Egypt. Most Gazans are forbidden from traveling abroad, while their supply of goods depends primarily on smuggling through tunnels from Egypt.

They go on to describe how, in spite of this, a year later Hamas is celebrating what it feels was a great victory and explain this by saying,

… that asymmetric conflicts are very different from conventional warfare. In these battles, perception - even marketing - is far more important than results. The images that organizations such as Hezbollah and Hamas manage to sell to their publics, to their enemy, and to the international community have a far greater effect than actual events on the battlefield.

No one would deny that in the era of the 24 hour news cycle and the internet the marketing aspects of warfare play a much bigger role than they once did. However, it seems rather excessive to state that they have become “far more important” and have “a far greater effect” than real events. Indeed this seems to be a rehearsal of a commonly held notion that warfare has uniquely counter-intuitive results when practiced by the world’s only army that’s largely comprised of Jews: the bigger its victory in terms of slain fighters and smashed equipment, the stronger it’s held to have made its enemies.

Imagine, for a moment, the same logic being applied to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. We’d have to conclude that the apparent victory of the United States and its allies actually disguised the greatest triumph of Saddam Hussein’s regime, that by being overthrown and eventually being executed the tyrant in fact prevailed. How much sense does that make? If you don’t like that example then how about this one; Georgia’s 2008 war with Russia was actually a defeat for the Kremlin because even though it smashed the Georgian armed forces and consolidated its control over parts of Georgia, the plucky Georgians got a lot of positive coverage in the West. How does that sound?

None of this is an attempt to defend Cast Lead as an unalloyed triumph nor do I think war can be conducted now with the same PR tools as it was 60 years ago. However, I do think we shouldn’t get carried away with the idea that in war everything is now virtual and it all depends on spin.  Should I ever be so unfortunate as to be personally involved in a war I hope it’s on the side that makes the best job of keeping its own soldiers and civilians alive and worries just enough and not too much about how the BBC is going to report it.