The Lebanese Army

Some people ask the question "why didn't the Lebanese army try to stop the Israeli invasion?" They left Hezbollah to fight the war alone. But there are many reasons why the Lebanese army could not do much.

1) Hezbollah was occupying the South and never let the army take control. The army could not suddenly show up and start fighting. The routes were anyway destroyed by the invader within a few hours, and the army didn't even have a chance to move logistics to the South (at the eleventh hour, without any prior notice from Nasrallah). Moreover, when you have a militia already fighting, you can't have a third army suddenly showing up and trying to organize the fight. It will become a circus. How do you ensure that the militia and the Lebanese army don't shoot at each other by mistake? Who decides what the tactics are and who controls what? Just imagine you are a soldier stuck between two enemies shooting at each other.

2) Even if the Lebanese army was already established in the South, it is suicidal to fight a superpower like Israel. What did the Iraqi government do against the US invasion? What did Granada do against the US invasion? The more you fight, the more you kill your innocent people. Better not to fight and find another solution. Quite often cowardice is intelligence. What does pride serve you if you lost your family, house and job? When a tiger in the jungle feels threatened, he hides. Many mammal species in Australia were wiped out ten thousand years ago because they didn't know they should hide from invading humans. Who talks about these mammals today except some archeologists and biologists? Survival of the fittest implicitly means that if you're dumb you're history.

3) You may ask "then why was Hezbollah capable of standing against Israel?"
Hezbollah is a guerilla and is quite different from an official army. They are armed civilians hiding in caves. Their logistics are kept to a minimum. They cannot fight wars other than sitting in place and defending, or hit and run type of attack. Their leadership went in hiding and no one knows where Nasrallah is today. Do you think Siniora can afford to run away and hide like Nasrallah (if the army were to get involved)? Who would run the government, the economy, the security, the country?

4) For the same reason that Syria and Iran did not get involved, the Lebanese army did not get involved. Because once you put an official army in the face of Israel, Israel will have an excuse to wipe it out, along with the entire country. They easily won all previous traditional wars. And once things become official, Israel could feel more threatened, or play the victim, and use WMD weapons (chemical, biological, etc).

5) The Lebanese army has limited resources. It could not afford to buy Kornet missiles. The economy of Lebanon is in a disastrous shape, the debt is huge, we have no industries like the US and no oil like Saudi Arabia, and little chance of paying off our debts and coming out of poverty. So the government decided to save the money, invest it in social services rather than buying weapons. Hezbollah, on the other hand, has the luxury of receiving free and sophisticated weapons from an oil rich country, Iran, who likes to play superpower in the region. So Hezbollah is showered with money and weapons, without putting real hardwork to earn them. When things come easy, they go easy.

6) Why should the Lebanese army engage in a war that was, in part, decided by Hezbollah? Hezbollah triggers wars and then asks for help? I think that the Syrian army and the Iranian army should have come for help, not the Lebanese army. They were happily watching this war and quick to brag about how they can resist Israel via a proxy militia.