Dang it Bear... looks like it's getting spun off topic from us

I wanna add something more to this.... It seems more & more I listen and read up on it, That neither side can seem to really hit military targets too good.

I've read where members of NATO said they are willing to go in there, along with the Lebanese Govt... but only after a cease -fire. Uhhh. really?


That's pretty dang logical, but I think once the Lebanese govt and NATO start trying to
actually disarm Hezbolla, things are going to get nasty fast.

Interesting thread.. wasn't expecting to find this here.

As luck would have it, I just finished redesigning a brand for the relaunch of a restaurant in downtown Beirut, and creating a flyer to hand out on the street.. printed up and ready to hand out, the very night the bombing started.

I'm really sad for the Lebanese people. They've been a geographical punch-bag for a long time, now. It was their moment of triumph, having defeated such a long and difficult period of depression (in the classic sense). Their tourism industry was on the rise, they were beginning to feel confident again. The tide, finally, had turned. The holes in the sides of buildings were all covered and repaired.. Beirut was a happening place again. Now this. I am having difficulty not despising Israel's government for what they're doing. I look and I see a bully. I've never liked bullies.

For any Brits, with any mileage under your belt, you may find this comparison helpful in getting a perspective of the situation: If it is right for Israel to do what it is doing, then we should have bombed Dublin (and the Irish who drank in those pubs/meeting places where the IRA recruited, met, planned..) into the dust for not sorting out and removing the IRA.

Hezbollah are to the Lebanese people what the IRA is/was to the Irish. They are indemic in society. They are a direct result of outside forces, pressing in on a people.

Hezbollah's outside forces are Israel as the oppressor (demonstrated), with Syria and Iran (principally but not exclusively) supporting their fight. The IRA's outside forces were Britain as the perceived oppressor (arguably demonstrated, AKA Northern Ireland), with the USA and Libya etc as their financial backers.

Israel's special forces are notoriously effective. Britain's MI5 was hugely successful in infiltrating the IRA. Israel would have succeeded in a similar fashion, if it had gone that route. The only reason I can think why they didn't is because their motivation is not what they claim it is.

I think this fight is about the oppression of the Lebanese people and to hand a certain country out there a perfect excuse to go after an "axis of evil", and as always, I think it's being very successful. I am not sure, yet, if I believe that Israel wants the US to go after Iran, or if it's the US that does. It's too early, yet, to tell.

I vow that, when this is all over, I will go to Lebanon to support the Lebanese people's efforts to rebuild their country yet again. I'll go, on principle, as one in the eye for the bully next door. That's where I'm at.

Capital punishment is barbaric. You have to be barbaric to think it's not. However, it's also one of the few things that the US and many mid-eastern nations have in common.

Finding something in common to chat about with a stranger at a dinner party is often difficult. Capital punishment is a start.. let's get the US and Iran over for dinner. I see the potential for a new peace accord.

Quote from SamH :

Interesting thread.. wasn't expecting to find this here.

As luck would have it, I just finished redesigning a brand for the relaunch of a restaurant in downtown Beirut, and creating a flyer to hand out on the street.. printed up and ready to hand out, the very night the bombing started.

I'm really sad for the Lebanese people. They've been a geographical punch-bag for a long time, now. It was their moment of triumph, having defeated such a long and difficult period of depression (in the classic sense). Their tourism industry was on the rise, they were beginning to feel confident again. The tide, finally, had turned. The holes in the sides of buildings were all covered and repaired.. Beirut was a happening place again. Now this. I am having difficulty not despising Israel's government for what they're doing. I look and I see a bully. I've never liked bullies.

For any Brits, with any mileage under your belt, you may find this comparison helpful in getting a perspective of the situation: If it is right for Israel to do what it is doing, then we should have bombed Dublin (and the Irish who drank in those pubs/meeting places where the IRA recruited, met, planned..) into the dust for not sorting out and removing the IRA.

Hezbollah are to the Lebanese people what the IRA is/was to the Irish. They are indemic in society. They are a direct result of outside forces, pressing in on a people.

Hezbollah's outside forces are Israel as the oppressor (demonstrated), with Syria and Iran (principally but not exclusively) supporting their fight. The IRA's outside forces were Britain as the perceived oppressor (arguably demonstrated, AKA Northern Ireland), with the USA and Libya etc as their financial backers.

Israel's special forces are notoriously effective. Britain's MI5 was hugely successful in infiltrating the IRA. Israel would have succeeded in a similar fashion, if it had gone that route. The only reason I can think why they didn't is because their motivation is not what they claim it is.

I think this fight is about the oppression of the Lebanese people and to hand a certain country out there a perfect excuse to go after an "axis of evil", and as always, I think it's being very successful. I am not sure, yet, if I believe that Israel wants the US to go after Iran, or if it's the US that does. It's too early, yet, to tell.

I vow that, when this is all over, I will go to Lebanon to support the Lebanese people's efforts to rebuild their country yet again. I'll go, on principle, as one in the eye for the bully next door. That's where I'm at.

So basically you're saying that Israel should send commandos in there or something? What if during one of those commando raids, they hit the wrong house?....
but you're right. I think Israel is going the wrong way on this, It should be handled more like a police style action instead of all this artillery,
And as far as US (lol the US) looking for an excuse to finally throw down with Iran - unless they do something really stupid like openly join in, this
won't be it. Eventually we will, but they're gonna have to do a little bit more than just run their mouths and give a couple of missiles to a few defective personality types.
See, in a nut shell Iran thinks it's a bad ass and we think they're punks.
So sooner or later, we're going to ruin their day. But that probably won't be for another 6-8 years. I mean sure some miracle/catastrophe might happen to prevent that, but I doubt it. THere's way too much bad blood between us. and LOL you know us "barbaric" types there's only one way to settle that sort of thing

it's terrible what israel is doing down there. they haven't accomplished a big hit against the hisbollah yet and mostly kill civilians while destroying their homes.

now they managed to bomb a uno camp....

When Annan says that this was a deliberate attack he must have more information than is officially available...

But about the conflict itself:
I strongly object the israeli attacks on lebanese civilians. The israeli deliberately kill civilians and destroy normal factories (some cloth and sponge factories were destroyed lately). The attack on the UN soldiers was either terrible intent or a proof of how badly their reconnaissance works. This will give the Hisbollah a very good position and strenghten them in the long run.
Israel is doing wrong what it can do wrong.
Personally I don't believe that the region will ever come to peace until Israel is no more.

Vain

1) The cost of life, or the value of life.
Life is cheap. This doesn't mean that you need almost no money to live, this means only that life still has almost no value.
For example, take the amount of money needed to "compensate" an Iraqi family who suffered a death because of an "error" of the US soldiers: 2500 dollars. This is a sum that would make any occidental laugh. Then, if this occidental suffered a loss compensated with a few thousand dollars, he'd probably think about compensating bullets with bullets. Somewhere else people don't just think about it: they do it.
I think that most of the carnage we're seeing in the Middle East is based on a poor perception of the value of life, particularly arab life. As an abducted journalist (formerly an elite soldier) said, there's no way to win the war in Iraq for the United States: American soldiers fight with the thought of going back home, insurgents fight with the idea of an honourable death that will be rewarded by Allah. They have no fear of death and their motivation is stronger than American motivation: they fight for the arab nation, they fight for Allah. What the hell are the US soldiers fighting for? And what are the Israeli soldiers fighting for? Life is cheap also in Lebanon. Israel's public opinion, while divided, would surely not be able to accept the loss of soldiers' lives that you usually have to suffer in door to door combat: therefore, to limit their casualties, Israel Defense Forces use airstrikes and bombs, just like the marines. But acting this way you have to accept "collateral damages", but you can easily sustain that because collateral damages won't be on your side since you are on foreign soil. Such disregard for civilian life is nowadays generally considered an ill form of conducting a war, and that's a huge step from past wars.
All in all the ugliest crime committed by US Army and IDF is the acceptance of civilian casualties as part of the game because the cost of own lives that field combat has wouldn't be acceptable at home.

2) Vengeance (an excerpt from some commentary written by Charly Reese)

Here's a story from Arabic folklore. A man returned to his village after an absence of several days. He met his best friend, and they sat down to drink tea.
"Do you remember the man who offended me 25 years ago?" the man asked his friend.
"Sure."
"Well, I killed him two days ago."
"Why were you in such a hurry?" his friend asked.

Now here is a true story reported in the news some months back. An American officer went to the home of a family whose young son had been killed by American soldiers who mistook him for an enemy.
"What compensation would you accept for your son?" the American officer asked.
"Ten dead Americans," the father replied.

3) Politics
SamH wrote some really interesting commentary drawing comparisons between IRA and Hezbollah, both seen as freedom fighters in their respective nations. We can put also Hamas in the lot.
The comparison fails when looking at the political side of things: the provisional IRA is an armed organisation which has in Sinn Fein its political wing. The same degree of separation however doesn't seem to apply to Hamas or Hezbollah: their political strength is denied.
This denial is absurd and counterproductive since this lack of separation between militants and political organisers harms any possibility to talk. For Hamas it's even worse since they have been elected as a legitimate government. Even the EU didn't change the political status of Hamas, as if they had no right to speak on behalf of millions of palestinians. They have it, the palestinians decided it. That's a serious political error and our governing bodies should be accounted for it. If you deny your opponents the possibility to speak out you deny them dignity and they'll have to resort to other means to forcibly make themselves heard.
Words maybe won't solve anything, but giving to someone the dignity to voice their opinions without being treated as scum is an important step of a process. The sooner it happens, the better.

Beautifully put, Albeig. I absolutely agree about Europe's error in failing to recognise Hamas in Palestine. Hopefully that will come soon. Britain didn't recognise the government of the United States until 1783.

Thank you SamH. When I wrote that your comparison fails in that respect I wasn't pointing fingers at you, obviously. It's not an error of yours

Quote from Albieg :

Thank you SamH. When I wrote that your comparison fails in that respect I wasn't pointing fingers at you, obviously. It's not an error of yours

You were quite right to point out that failing. It's very important, when looking at the causes and effects of the repression of a people.

In Northern Ireland, there is (at least for now) a peace, which has only been made possible by recognising Sinn Fein as a political party that represents the hearts and minds of a portion of the community, and allowing them to be a part of the political process.

International community just seems so powerless

Quote from Blackout :

International community just seems so powerless

The problem is who is in which community...!

I was thinking more like the world, countrys outside the conflict and the UN. Thats a community, a big one, and they can't do allmost nothing to stop this. Well, maybe it's about a certain members, don't know. But it's sad we see this happening in the year 2006

The most difficult part of the deal is trying to convince USA that non-intervention (for them) in the Middle East would be the right thing since there's nothing they can really do about the situation with their current methods, but we'd go on discussing economical problems and the loss of dollar power, along with the stated will of some arab countries (especially Iran) to quote oil in Euros. The balance of power (or status quo) has several ways of expression: morals, economics, politics, military might, international credibility, currency values, the stated need to protect Israel... too many issues at stakes. I don't know who's winning, but if I had to choose an overall loser you can put me in line with Chomsky and other more than liberal thinkers: the overall loser (at the moment) is the United States, but everything could change while your eyes blink.
A solid EU global policy could help, but as long as there will be some puppets eager to please and to have their place in history the EU won't go far. We'd better stick, as Europeans, to the values that make our political world so different from the rest of the world: those values are to be found in the philosophical world of positivism, in the assertion of the power of reason. Long ago I had a discussion with an Israeli who told me that Europeans have a different way to look at things than Middle Eastern people since we rely much more upon objective thoughts than we rely upon our sentiments. While I think this is not completely true, that sentence helped me to establish my identity: I was no longer Italian, I was European. This is what we are in the eyes of the others, and this is what Europe should be like: not the "old Europe" that idiot Rumsfeld talked about, but a new conscious and strengthened Europe, in order not to lead, but to able to participate.
As an old slogan says, don't join, participate.
That should be the role that Europe should have as a whole, a unique supernational identity that takes pride in his differences and in his similarities, and is able to appreciate the differences and similarities in the rest of the world.

Sorry to sound so sloganistic, but this is a personal and strong belief of mine.

and again a nice backup from the USA in the UNO......

A big german newpaper (faz) reports that yesterday Israel bombed a convoy of humanitary goods for the libanese civilians.
Israel suffered 52 casualties in this conflict. 18 of those civilians. The libanese suffered 423 casualties. 344 of those civilians.

Vain

http://video.google.com/videop ... 123714384920696&hl=en

Some background to the whole Palestine, Gaza, Westbank & Lebanon conflict. If you're from the US and only heard of the propaganda uttered by pro-bush/israel side, you really should see this.


The current israel/Lebanon death tolls:

Just got done watching that. Wow. It very much confirms a lot of what I knew, and taught me a lot more too. It was very hard to watch in places, but it's extremely important to do so.

Maybe now we have the internet and broadband, the Americans can finally circumvent the gatekeepers of the media and reach the truth another way. Send a link to all the Americans you know!

I find it interesting that Israel (well, Ehud Olmert anyway) seems to be claiming victory, even as his troops are leaving southern Lebanon - the area they were supposed to "cleanse" of Hezbollah. Well, Hezbollah are still there and enjoying much greater support than they did before this madness kicked off. Initially, many Arab states condemned Hezbollah's capture of those Israeli soldiers, but once Israel started deliberately destroying Lebanon's civilian infrastructure including bridges, roads, fuel depots, hospitals, airports, apartment blocks etc (defined as "collective punishment" and a war crime under International Law and the Geneva Conventions), sympathy shifted swiftly towards Hezbollah. The deliberate targeting of Red Cross and UN personnel of course did nothing to elicit sympathy for Israel. The mighty ground forces of Israel were shoved off by classic hit-and-hide guerilla tactics and Hezbollah are still south of the Litani river, able to see northern Israeli towns with the naked eye. They are in a much stronger position now than ever before, both in Lebanon and in the eyes of the Arab world.

Who won? In terms of actually achieving their stated objectives, Hezbollah. Who lost? Everyone in Lebanon, not just the 800+ dead or the estimated one million refugees. The survivors not only have to grieve, but also face a reconstruction project of massive proportions. After having just reconstructed after the last Israeli invasion, the country has been set back another 20 years. Does anyone expect Israel (and its chief supporter, the US) to participate in reconstruction? Who else lost? Israel. The innocent people who were killed by Hezbollah's haphazardly targeted rockets weren't the only casualties in this madness. Olmert and his administration may not survive the repercussions of this military, moral, political and PR failure. Israeli soldiers and civilians have died and the people and press, and many politicians are asking "why?" If Olmert can't give them an answer that's acceptable, he may well be the last casualty...

I recently heard on the news that prior to the kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers by Hezbolla, Israel captured 5 Hezbolla soldiers (guerillas) which is why they then captured the Israeli soldiers... but hardly any media attention was paid to that fact.

Isreal was just looking for an excuse to go into Lebanon and cleanout the Hezbolla fighters and the kidnapping of their soldiers opened the door.

I was just looking at the news yesterday and the destruction in some of those cities is unbelivable, they said they were only targetting Hezbolla strongholds but to reduce a whole city to ruble is unjust.

My heart goes out to the people of Lebanon, they have suffered whilst here in the west politicians simply looked on... now the war is over, no one has won, and all that damage has now got to be repaired.

when will humans learn that war isnt the way to solve something!

mad

I'd link this if everyone could read it. It's lengthy, but I think also quality.

<<
Cease-Fire: Shaking Core Beliefs in the Middle East
By George Friedman

An extraordinary thing happened in the Middle East this month. An Israeli army faced an Arab army and did not defeat it -- did not render it incapable of continued resistance. That was the outcome in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973 and 1982. But it did not happen in 2006. Should this outcome stand, it will represent a geopolitical earthquake in the region -- one that fundamentally shifts expectations and behaviors on all sides.

It is not that Hezbollah defeated the Israel Defense Forces (IDF). It did not. By most measures, it got the worst of the battle. Nevertheless, it has been left standing at the end of the battle. Its forces in the Bekaa Valley and in the Beirut area have been battered, though how severely is not yet clear. Its forces south of the Litani River were badly hurt by the Israeli attack. Nevertheless, the correlation of forces was such that the Israelis should have dealt Hezbollah, at least in southern Lebanon, a devastating blow, such that resistance would have crumbled. IDF did not strike such a blow -- so as the cease-fire took effect, Hezbollah continued to resist, continued to inflict casualties on Israeli troops and continued to fire rockets at Israel. Hezbollah has not been rendered incapable of continued resistance, and that is unprecedented.

In the regional equation, there has been an immutable belief: that, at the end of the day, IDF was capable of imposing a unilateral military solution on any Arab force. Israel might have failed to achieve its political goals in its various wars, but it never failed to impose its will on an enemy force. As a result, all neighboring nations and entities understood there were boundaries that could be crossed only if a country was willing to accept a crushing Israeli response. All neighboring countries -- Egypt, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, prior to the collapses of central authority -- understood this and shaped their behavior in view of it. Even when Egypt and Syria initiated war in 1973, it was with an understanding that their war aims had to be limited, that they had to accept the probability of defeat and had to focus on postwar political maneuvers rather than on expectations of victory.

The Egyptians withdrew from conflict and accepted the Sinai as a buffer zone, largely because 1973 convinced them that continued conflict was futile. Jordan, since 1970, has been effectively under the protection of Israel against threats from Syria and internal dangers as well. Syria has not directly challenged the Israelis since 1973, preferring indirect challenges and, not infrequently, accommodation with Israel. The idea of Israel as a regional superpower has been the defining principle.

In this conflict, what Hezbollah has achieved is not so much a defeat of Israel as a demonstration that destruction in detail is not an inevitable outcome of challenging Israel. Hezbollah has showed that it is possible to fight to a point that Israel prefers a cease-fire and political settlement to a military victory followed by political accommodation. Israel might not have lost any particular battle, and a careful analysis of the outcome could prove its course to be reasonable. But the loss of the sense -- and historical reality -- of the inevitability of Israeli military victory is a far more profound defeat for Israel, as this clears the way for other regional powers to recalculate risks.

Hezbollah's Preparations

Hezbollah meticulously prepared for the war by analyzing Israeli strengths and weaknesses. Israel is casualty-averse by dint of demographics. It therefore resorts to force multipliers such as air power and armor, combined with excellent reconnaissance and tactical intelligence. Israel uses mobility to cut lines of supply and air power to shatter centralized command-and-control, leaving enemy forces disorganized, unbalanced and unsupplied.

Hezbollah sought to deny Israel its major advantages. The group created a network of fortifications in southern Lebanon that did not require its fighters to maneuver and expose themselves to Israeli air power. Hezbollah stocked those bunkers so fighters could conduct extended combat without the need for resupply. It devolved command to the unit level, making it impossible for a decapitation strike by Israel to affect the battlefield. It worked in such a way that, while the general idea of the defense architecture was understood by Israeli military intelligence, the kind of detailed intelligence used -- for example, in 1967 -- was denied the Israelis. Hezbollah acquired anti-tank weapons from Syria and Iran that prevented Israeli armor from operating without prior infantry clearing of anti-tank teams. And by doing that, the group forced the Israelis to accept casualties in excess of what could, apparently, be tolerated. In short, it forced the Israelis to fight Hezbollah's type of war, rather than the other way around.

Hezbollah then initiated war at the time and place of its choosing. There has been speculation that Israel planned for such a war. That might be the case, but it is self-evident that, if the Israelis wanted this war, they were not expecting it when it happened. The opening of the war was not marked by the capture of two Israeli soldiers. Rather, it was the persistent and intense bombardment of Israel with missiles -- including attacks against Israel's third-largest city, Haifa -- that compelled the Israelis to fight at a moment when they obviously were unprepared for war, and could not clearly decide either their war aims or strategy. In short, Hezbollah applied a model that was supposed to be Israel's forte: The group prepared meticulously for a war and launched it when the enemy was unprepared for it.

Hezbollah went on the strategic offensive and tactical defensive. It created a situation in which Israeli forces had to move to the operational and tactical offensive at the moment of Hezbollah's highest level of preparedness. Israel could not decline combat, because of the rocket attacks against Haifa, nor was it really ready for war -- particularly psychologically. The Israelis fought when Hezbollah chose and where Hezbollah chose. Their goals were complex, where Hezbollah's were simple. Israel wanted to stop the rockets, break Hezbollah, suffer minimal casualties and maintain its image as an irresistible military force. Hezbollah merely wanted to survive the Israeli attack. The very complexity of Israel's war aims, hastily crafted as they were, represented a failure point.

The Foundations of Israeli Strategy

It is important to think through the reasoning that led to Israeli operations. Israel's actions were based on a principle promulgated by Ariel Sharon at the time of his leadership. Sharon argued that Israel must erect a wall between Israelis and Arabs. His reasoning stemmed from circumstances he faced during Israel's occupation of Lebanon: Counterinsurgency operations impose an unnecessary and unbearable cost in the long run, particularly when designed to protect peripheral interests. The losses may be small in number but, over the long term, they pose severe operational and morale challenges to the occupying force. Therefore, for Sharon, the withdrawal from Lebanon in the 1980s created a paradigm. Israel needed a national security policy that avoided the burden of counterinsurgency operations without first requiring a political settlement. In other words, Israel needed to end counterinsurgency operations by unilaterally ending the occupation and erecting a barrier between Israel and hostile populations.

The important concept in Sharon's thinking was not the notion of impenetrable borders. Rather, the important concept was the idea that Israel could not tolerate counterinsurgency operations because it could not tolerate casualties. Sharon certainly did not mean or think that Israel could not tolerate casualties in the event of a total conventional war, as in 1967 or 1973. There, extreme casualties were both tolerable and required. What he meant was that Israel could tolerate any level of casualties in a war of national survival but, paradoxically, could not tolerate low-level casualties in extended wars that did not directly involve Israel's survival.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was Sharon's protege. Olmert was struggling with the process of disengagement in Gaza and looking toward the same in the West Bank. Lebanon, where Israel learned the costs of long-term occupation, was the last place he wanted to return to in July 2006. In his view, any operation in Lebanon would be tantamount to a return to counterinsurgency warfare and occupation. He did not recognize early on that Hezbollah was not fighting an insurgency, but rather a conventional war of fixed fortifications.

Olmert did a rational cost-benefit analysis. First, if the principle of the Gaza withdrawal was to be followed, the last place the Israelis wanted to be was in Lebanon. Second, though he recognized that the rocket attacks were intolerable in principle, he also knew that, in point of fact, they were relatively ineffective. The number of casualties they were causing, or were likely to cause, would be much lower than those that would be incurred with an invasion and occupation of Lebanon. Olmert, therefore, sought a low-cost solution to the problem of Hezbollah.

IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz offered an attractive alternative. Advocating what air force officers have advocated since the 1930s, Halutz launched an air campaign designed to destroy Hezbollah. It certainly hurt Hezbollah badly, particularly outside of southern Lebanon, where longer-range rocket launchers were located. However, in the immediate battlefield, limited tactical intelligence and the construction of the bunkers appear to have blunted the air attack. As Israeli troops moved forward across the border, they encountered a well-prepared enemy that undoubtedly was weakened but was not destroyed by the air campaign.

At this point, Olmert had a strategic choice to make. He could mount a multi-divisional invasion of Lebanon, absorb large numbers of casualties and risk being entangled in a new counterinsurgency operation, or he could seek a political settlement. He chose a compromise. After appearing to hesitate, he launched an invasion that seemed to bypass critical Hezbollah positions (isolating them), destroying other positions and then opting for a cease-fire that would transfer responsibility for security to the Lebanese army and a foreign peacekeeping force.

Viewed strictly from the standpoint of cost-benefit analysis, Olmert was probably right. Except that Hezbollah's threat to Israel proper had to be eliminated, Israel had no interests in Lebanon. The cost of destroying Hezbollah's military capability would have been extremely high, since it involved moving into the Bekaa Valley and toward Beirut -- let alone close-quarters infantry combat in the south. And even then, over time, Hezbollah would recover. Since the threat could be eliminated only at a high cost and only for a certain period of time, the casualties required made no sense.

This analysis, however, excluded the political and psychological consequences of leaving an enemy army undefeated on the battlefield. Again, do not overrate what Hezbollah did: The group did not conduct offensive operations; it was not able to conduct maneuver combat; it did not challenge the Israeli air force in the air. All it did was survive and, at the end of the war, retain its ability to threaten Israel with such casualties that Israel declined extended combat. Hezbollah did not defeat Israel on the battlefield. The group merely prevented Israel from defeating it. And that outcome marks a political and psychological triumph for Hezbollah and a massive defeat for Israel.

Implications for the Region

Hezbollah has demonstrated that total Arab defeat is not inevitable -- and with this demonstration, Israel has lost its tremendous psychological advantage. If an operational and tactical defensive need not end in defeat, then there is no reason to assume that, at some point, an Arab offensive operation need not end in defeat. And if the outcome can be a stalemate, there is no reason to assume that it cannot be a victory. If all things are possible, then taking risks against Israel becomes rational.

The outcome of this war creates two political crises.

In Israel, Olmert's decisions will come under serious attack. However correct his cost-benefit analysis might have been, he will be attacked over the political and psychological outcome. The entire legacy of Ariel Sharon -- the doctrine of disengagement -- will now come under attack. If Israel is thrown into political turmoil and indecision, the outcome on the battlefield will have been compounded politically.

There is now also a crisis in Lebanon and in the Muslim world. In Lebanon, Hezbollah has emerged as a massive political force. Even in the multi-confessional society, Hezbollah will be a decisive factor. Syria, marginalized in the region for quite a while, becomes more viable as Hezbollah's patron. Meanwhile, countries like Jordan and Egypt must reexamine their own assumptions about Israel. And in the larger Muslim world, Hezbollah's victory represents a victory for Iran and the Shia. Hezbollah, a *****e force, has done what others could not do. This will profoundly effect the *****e position in Iraq -- where the Shia, having first experienced the limits of American power, are now seeing the expanding boundaries of Iranian power.

We would expect Hezbollah, Syria and Iran to move rapidly to exploit what advantage this has given them, before it dissipates. This will increase pressures not only for Israel, but also for the United States, which is engaged in combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in a vague confrontation with Iran. For the Israelis and the Americans, restabilizing their interests will be difficult.

Now, some would argue that Israel's possession of weapons of mass destruction negates the consequences of regional perception of weakness. That might be the case, but the fact is that Israel's possession of such weapons did not prevent attacks in 1973, nor were those weapons usable in this case. Consider the distances involved: Israeli forces have been fighting 10 miles from the border. And if Damascus were to be struck with the wind blowing the wrong way, northern Israel would be fried as well. Israel could undertake a nuclear strike against Iran, but the threat posed by Iran is indirect -- since it is far away -- and would not determine the outcome of any regional encounter. Certainly, the possession of nuclear weapons provides Israel a final line from which to threaten enemies -- but by the time that became necessary, the issue already would have shifted massively against Israel. Nuclear weapons have not been used since World War II -- in spite of many apparent opportunities to do so -- because, as a weapon, the utility is more apparent than real. Possession of nuclear weapons can help guarantee regime survival, but not, by itself, military success.

As it stands, logic holds that, given the tenuous nature of the cease-fire, casus belli on Israel's part can be found and the war reinitiated. Given the mood in Israel, logic would dictate the fall of Olmert, his replacement by a war coalition and an attempt to change the outcome. But logic has not applied to Israeli thinking during this war. We have been consistently surprised by the choices Israel has made, and it is not clear whether this is simply Olmert's problem or one that has become embedded in Israel.

What is clear is that, if the current outcome stands, it will mean there has been a tremendous earthquake in the Middle East. It is cheap and easy to talk about historic events. But when a reality that has dominated a region for 58 years is shattered, it is historic. Perhaps this paves the way to new wars. Perhaps Olmert's restraint opens the door for some sort of stable peace. But from where we sit, he was sufficiently aggressive to increase hostility toward Israel without being sufficiently decisive to achieve a desired military outcome.

Hezbollah and Iran hoped for this outcome, though they did not really expect it. They got it. The question on the table now is what they will do with it.

Send questions or comments on this article to [email protected].

IIRC Israel had already gotten to striking the airport when the rockets were hitting them, so it's not the trigger to the offensive, as the article seems to pretend.

Hezbollah are not 100 years old and they are not the ruling party of Lebanon - this is why the decision of Israel's military leaders to annihilate Lebanese civilian infrastructure (and civilians) is so completely abhorrent.

Hezbollah is a militant organisation which came into being to resist the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 (and was instrumental in removing the Israeli invaders). Hezbollah as a political party have been elected in some areas of Lebanon and hold some seats in the parliament, but they are a minority. Punishing the Lebanese people for the actions of Hezbollah is a clear and blatant war crime. Hezbollah wanted to swap the captured Israeli troops for Lebanese prisoners but they were ignored in favour of launching Shock & Awe 2.0.

Hezbolla has been using Lebanese people (as well as a UN guardpost) as shields, and has fired a sizeable amount of those rocket propelled explosives on civilians.

The Hizbollah ARE Lebanese people who, as Hankstar says, are seen as EFFECTIVE protectors of the Southern Lebanese people, against the oppressing Israelis. More now than ever before.

I've seen nothing to suggest that they used UNO observation posts as shields. Can you point me the way, please?

I have just finished watching that video about the middle east conflict and the propaganda...

UNBELIVABLE!!! American government calling for democracy all over the world where people are oppresed, recently "Kuba! but what they are doing in the middle easy is just evil and contradicts their views...

jeez!

And because media are one of the main educational tools in usa they can easily manipulate people.. Atleast now they have BBC America