Israel has, for the moment, postponed or decided against a ground incursion into Gaza pending international diplomatic efforts to reach a cease fire. While Israeli leaders deliberate, it’s worth reviewing the last thirty years of Israeli ground wars, in which Israel conducted roughly four* major ground operations, to see whether Israeli they accomplished their strategic ends. The evidence suggests the incursions were occasionally tactically successful, but generally did not succeed strategically and always carried a high body count.

Two caveats. First, this is an attempt to assess whether Israeli ground incursions were successful on their own strategic-military terms, and does not examine any questions about the rightness or morality of Israeli actions. Second, the casualty counts below represent estimates from the entire conflict in question, not the ground campaign specifically. Since ground operations were major parts of each of the conflicts in question, and separating what counts as a “ground” casualty is methodologically difficult, it is fair to employ the more general casualty count.

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As more information emerges about Mitt Romney’s foreign policy adviser Walid Phares, Romney’s campaign, no doubt, will face increasing scrutiny over their decision to hire the outspoken anti-Muslim advocate. But potentially even more concerning than Phares’ ties to the anti-Muslim far-right in the U.S. are the allegations — outlined in Adam Serwer’s profile of Phares — that the now-Romney adviser was one of the chief ideologists in the Lebanese Forces, a Lebanese Christian militia that committed atrocities during Lebanon’s civil war.

How Romney and his campaign will respond to the newly publicized facts that one of their top foreign policy advisers — indeed a former associate of Phares’ told Serwer that Romney “promised Phares a high-ranking White House job helping craft U.S. policy in the Middle East” — used Christian-sectarian ideology to justify the mass slaughter during the Lebanese civil war.

But Romney has called for the firing of public officials for far less than participating in war atrocities.

Romney said he would fire Obama adviser David Plouffe for comments saying Americans won’t vote based based on the employment rate. Romney said:

If David Plouffe were working for me, I would fire him and then he could experience firsthand the pain of unemployment,”

Romney called upon his GOP rival, Gov. Rick Perry, to “repudiate” anti-Mormon comments made by Perry supporter Dr. Robert Jeffress.

And in a September GOP debate, Romney said that if president he would fire Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke for his failure to resuscitate the U.S. economy. Romney said:

I’d be looking for somebody new. I think Ben Bernanke has overinflated the amount of currency that he’s created. QE 2 did not work, it did not get Americans back to work, it did not get the economy going again … We’re growing now at 1 to 1 and a half percent.

Romney and his campaign have a precedent of considering disagreements over monetary policy and electoral policy to be fire-able offenses. And expressing intolerant sentiments about Mormonism is worthy of “repudiation.”

The Romney campaign appears to accept Phares’ public association with the Islamophobic Clarion Fund and anti-Muslim blogger Robert Spencer. But given Romney’s record of calling for the firing of individuals for far less than ties to a violent militia, will he apply the same standard to Walid Phares?

When GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney announced his foreign policy advisers earlier this month, one of the names raised some eyebrows among Middle East watchers in Washington: Walid Phares, a self-styled terror expert, who had made the rounds of the burgeoning U.S. anti-Muslim crowd. But an exposé from Mother Jones sheds new light on some of Phares’ older associations with an ideological Lebanese militia implicated in mass slaughter during that country’s civil war.

Phares’ links to the Islamophobic right are no secret. His associates litter the August CAP report “Fear, Inc.,” which described America’s Islamophobia network. Phares has written for David Horowitz‘s website; he sits on the advisory board of the Clarion Fund; and he’s flirted with vague conspiracy theories about Islam with anti-Muslim activist Brigitte Gabriel. The activist was even controversial enough to be removed, under pressure, from the witness list of Rep. Peter King’s (R-NY) Homeland Security Committee hearings on domestic radicalization.

But now, Mother Jones’ Adam Serwer has a richly detailed piece about Phares’ past with right-wing Lebanese Christian militias — a political association that goes hand-in-hand with his anti-Muslim sentiments. Phares has played down his long-rumored links to the Lebanese Forces, an umbrella group of sectarian militias, but former associates painted a different picture of Phares’ role as major ideological force in the group. Serwer reports:

According to former colleagues, Phares became one of the group’s chief ideologists, working closely with the Lebanese Forces’ Fifth Bureau, a unit that specialized in psychological warfare.

Régina Sneifer, who served in the Fifth Bureau in 1981 at the age of 18 [...and] now an author in France who wrote a 1995 book detailing her experiences in Lebanon’s civil war, recalls that in his speeches, Phares “justified our fighting against the Muslims by saying we should have our own country, our own state, our own entity, and we have to be separate.” [...]

“[Militia leader Samir Geagea] wanted to change them from a normal militia to a Christian army,” says [Toni] Nissi, Phares’ former associate. “Walid Phares was responsible for training the lead officers in the ideology of the Lebanese Forces.”

With Christian-sectarian ideology underpinning Phares’ opposition to Islam, he was well-suited to the U.S. anti-Muslim movement, and it led to gigs relating to counter-terrorism. He, for a time, ran the “Future of Terrorism” project at the neoconservative Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and has consulted for law enforcement groups. But one former U.S. counter-terror official questioned if Phares’ knowledge was appropriate for the industry: “He’s part of the same movement as Pamela Geller,” the official told Serwer. “He’s viewed as a mainstream scholar of jihadism, but he doesn’t know a lot about the actual movement.”

Phares’ ties to the Romney camp — which is hawkish in the Middle East, especially on Iraq and Iran (an area where another adviser has ties to a controversial, formerly-armed group) — are long standing. Nissi, the sometime associate of Phares’, told Serwer that during the 2008 presidential campaign, Romney “promised Phares a high-ranking White House job helping craft US policy in the Middle East.”

The combination of his ideological past and current anti-Muslim “counter-terror” bent, though, have led to questions about Phares’s motivations. Another Maronite Christian with Lebanese roots, Arab American Institute president James Zogby, wondered about Phares to Serwer: “Is he serving Mitt Romney, or is he serving the politics of a group in Lebanon that was fighting for their sectarian hegemony in a civil war that took over 100,000 lives?”

A new United Nations report criticized Israel’s use of disproportionate force in clashes with Palestinian protesters attempting to enter Israel from Lebanon. Seven died and 111 were injured when the Israeli army opened fire on the protesters during their commemoration — known as Nakba Day — of Palestinian dispossession resulting from Israel’s founding in 1948.

While criticizing the Shia Lebanese militia Hezbollah for helping to organize the border demonstration, the U.N. report found that Israel did not take the necessary steps before deploying deadly force against the protesters:

Other than firing initial warning shots, the Israel Defence Forces did not use conventional crowd control methods or any other method than lethal weapons against the demonstrators.

U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon chimed in with a statement at the end of the report, noting that Israel “used direct live fire against unarmed demonstrators”:

I call on the Israel Defence Forces to refrain from responding with live fire in such situations, except where clearly required in immediate self-defence.

The U.N. said the disproportionate use of force constituted a violation of U.N. Resolution 1701, which ended the summer 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war.

After the announcement of the report, Israel reacted with indignation, refusing to officially comment and canceling a planned periodic trip to Israel by the report’s author, U.N. Special Coordinator for Lebanon Michael Williams.

When asked about Israel’s controversial crowd control methods at the time, a U.S. State Department spokesperson refused to condemn the use of live ammunition against the protesters. (h/t: Mondoweiss)

Lebanon’s new prime minister, Najib Mikati, announced yesterday that his new government will be dominated by members and allies of Hezbollah. The news has prompted House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) to call for a cut-off of U.S. aid to Lebanon. On Monday, Ros-Lehtinen said:

The U.S. should immediately cut off assistance to the Lebanese government as long as any violent extremist group designated by the US as foreign terrorist organizations participates in it.

While Hezbollah controls most of the country’s south and maintains an armed force, the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) are an under-equipped but nonsectarian institution that has cooperated with the U.N.’s mission in the south. Hezbollah, on the other hand, has received weapons from Iran and serves as a proxy for Iranian and Syrian interests in the region.

It’s unclear at this point how the new Hezbollah-dominated cabinet will govern, but it’s important to note that previous attempts to cut off aid have backfired.

When Congress put a temporary freeze on military aid last August, Iran reportedly stepped in and offered its own military assistance to the LAF. Whether Iran will offer to make up for a cut in U.S. aid if Ros-Lehtinen gets her way remains to be seen. But any steps that weaken the LAF and diminish U.S. influence in Lebanon are bound to strengthen the importance of Hezbollah’s militant wing in Lebanon as well as Iran and Syria’s regional power.

And the State Department isn’t ready to write off the potential gains from military-to-military aid for the Lebanese Armed Forces. A State official in October defended the military assistance as an important tool for strengthening democratic institutions in Lebanon:

US support to Lebanon is part of an international commitment to help strengthen the institutions of the Lebanese state and the ability of the Lebanese government to exercise its sovereignty and authority over all of its territory.

In March, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton argued for a continuation of U.S. aid to the LAF, telling the Senate Foreign Relations Committee:

We worry that if the United States does not continue supporting the Lebanese armed forces, its capabilities will rapidly deteriorate, security in the south and along the border with Israel will be at risk.

The State Department was much slower to pass judgement on the new government. A spokesperson told reporters yesterday that it’s important “that the new Lebanese Government abide by the Lebanese constitution, that it renounce violence, including efforts to extract retribution against former government officials, and lives up to all of its international obligations.”