There are no more wars that end in victorious parades and such. There is no more 'land' to conquer. All victories are strictly in terms of stable long term strategic and tactical intent. How would Israel conquer an enemy that doesn't claim to exist like country or an army in the traditional sense - one who's al Manar TV channel is more important to them than the Chinese cruise missiles they used against the Israeli navy?

Israel's intent was to dramaticall diminish Hezbollah's physical ability to wage war on northern Israel and to slow down, dramatically the ability of Syria and Iran to rearm and support them. At the same time Hezbollah, the self professed army and support infrastructure of the people now has to take a big chunk of the 500-600 million/year they receive from Iran and spend it not on weapons but on reconstruction if only not to alienate the human shields they hide behind. To their credit the IDF used what can only be described as a textbook 3:1 numerical advantage against an enemy in an entrenched defensive position. Had they unleashed a full sized assault then the facts on the ground would more closely align with the overheated rhetoric of destruction gushing from the Arab PR machine.

So? What it conclusive? no more so than any of the previous wars of Israeli extinction were in preventing the war or intifada that came after it.

As any sampling of my many posts will clarify, I am both a moderate supporter of Israel and a critic of the Bush administration. Still, as long as the Israelis are gearing up for some soul-searching, let me try to snip one tendency that I've noticed in a couple Haaretz columns right in the bud.

Namely, the tendency to try to shift blame for this whole situation onto the Bush administration, by implying that the Israelis went to war expecting to be restrained by the US, thus preventing the fighting from going on so long. Benn calls this the Bush administration's failure to flip the "normal diplomatic hourglass."

I personally think that the Bush administration should have intervened much sooner, and that if they did, this whole situation would be less tragic. I also think that the reason the Bush government didn't intervene is that they wanted to use Israel as a proxy for their greater strategic goals. As we say in the US, no duh!

But as for passive-aggressive finger pointing, and implications that the Israeli plan would have worked better if only the US had done its job, no dice! This is as lame as the architects of our current fiasco in Iraq (Kenneth Pollack, the people at the New Republic, and of course the neo-cons) saying "the war was a good idea, but they didn't fight it the way I wanted."

That, my friend, is the nature of war. It's messy, tragic, and almost always the worst possible choice. Pundits, politicians, and of course the general populace should understand this . You never get the war you want; and if you go to war, you shouldn't defend yourself by blaming others that it went badly.

I say this not just because my remaining national pride is offended (though it is) but rather because I'm tired of abstract arguments for war--and even more clinical post-facto analyses--that seem to avoid dealing with war's essential nature, and its predictable costs every goddamn time.

"Lebanon's government decided to enforce its sovereignty in the south, along the Israeli border, and deploy its army -- strengthened with U.N. forces -- instead of Hezbollah. From Israel's perspective, it's an important step for stability. It's better to deal with a government, even a weak one like Lebanon's, than a private army like Hezbollah."

Let's be real here. Lebanon's government was only able to "deal" with the UN and with Israel because Hezbollah allowed it to do so. Lebanon will only "enforce its sovereignty... and deploy its army" because Hezbollah allows it do so.

Hezbollah is no "private army" or rag-tag group of guerrillas. It was at one time, but now it is the de facto state apparatus in Southern Lebanon. Nasrallah is more than happy to have this cessation in hostilities in order to re-arm and absorb the waves (and there will be) of new recruits and volunteers that it has gained from this conflict and the heroic status it has gained in Lebanon (and the Muslim and Arab world generally) - but it is (or will be) a cease-fire only because he and Hezbollah wish it to be so.

Make no mistake - I oppose Hezbollah, its tactics, and its goals. But it is they who have won a victory here.

Seymour Hersh is back with another piece in the New Yorker and I'd say it was a doozy but these bombshells (pun only partially intended) are becoming routine by now. In this article he shows how the US helped to give training and planning to Israel in its conflict with Hezbollah.

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060821fa_fact

quote ->

The United States and Israel have shared intelligence and enjoyed close military coöperation for decades, but early this spring, according to a former senior intelligence official, high-level planners from the U.S. Air Force—under pressure from the White House to develop a war plan for a decisive strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities—began consulting with their counterparts in the Israeli Air Force.

“The big question for our Air Force was how to hit a series of hard targets in Iran successfully,” the former senior intelligence official said. “Who is the closest ally of the U.S. Air Force in its planning? It’s not Congo—it’s Israel. Everybody knows that Iranian engineers have been advising Hezbollah on tunnels and underground gun emplacements. And so the Air Force went to the Israelis with some new tactics and said to them, ‘Let’s concentrate on the bombing and share what we have on Iran and what you have on Lebanon.’ ” The discussions reached the Joint Chiefs of Staff and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, he said.

“The Israelis told us it would be a cheap war with many benefits,” a U.S. government consultant with close ties to Israel said. “Why oppose it? We’ll be able to hunt down and bomb missiles, tunnels, and bunkers from the air. It would be a demo for Iran.”

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This widens the scope of the soul searching from just Israel to the US as well. If the amount of US soul searching is anything comparable to what Israel is supposedly doing then there will be little accountability by the top brass and the common man will feel utterly helpless to change the situation.

What we do know is that there is a long established tradition of "terrorist" activities being used by non-state actors in the middle east towards regimes they wanted no part of. This tradition includes bands of men led by Messiahs (of which Jesus is the most famous but also includes Simon Bar Kokhba, leader of the Second Jewish Revolt from 132–135CE). Lest it seem that I'm taking an unprovoked shot at Christianity, know that the concept of Messiah is not part of biblical Judaism and developed as an informal folk tradition with many variants and different understandings. Messiah is the subject of numerous folk tales and Hassidic songs. One concept of the Messiah is given by Maimonides (Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon), in his commentary on tractate Sanhedrin, of the Babylonian Talmud: "The Messianic age is when the Jews will regain their independence and all return to the land of Israel."

Now that the shoe is on the other foot, meaning that the Jews are defending their territory rather than fighting for it, do not assume that the methods that persisted through the ages have changed. Only 2000 years ago the battles were fought by bands of Jews against the Roman empire and now there are bands of Arabs fighting against the US/Israeli "occupation".

The real problem is that the threat comes from people who are non-state actors. That makes them civilians. To promise to limit civilian casualties while bringing all the strategic war power that the US and Israel care to use does nothing to resolve the situation. If a military solution is the only option, the real question is whether or not "terrorism" as it is labeled can be stopped without killing every civilian living among the "terrorists". The answer to this question shows precisely the reason that a military solution is impossible.