Hrm.  Dunno.  I’m definitely anti-Hezbollah.  Because their actions are, quite frankly, as close to “evil” as I can come up with.  They have had total autonomy, and could have spent years rebuilding the devastated infrastructure from the 1980s had they wanted to be anything other than totally focused on beating down the Israelis.  Yeah, they built some schools and hospitals and that sort of thing, but they also spent years and years creating a gigantic freaking maginot line while leaving swaths of territory still in ruins.  Any idea how many apartment complexes you can build with the concrete required for ONE modern bunker’s supply tunnel?  And, I don’t have even the vaguest thing against the Shia in general.

On the other hand, far as I’m concerned, the Israelis may be our allies, but they’re sure as hell not our friends, as evidenced by their habit of selling our military secrets to the Chinese (a point I’ve read recently, and have blogged about before).  If the Israelis don’t care about their policies directly getting my country’s servicemen killed trying to defend 22 million Taiwanese from having their island levelled by the PLA… it’s kind of a borderline call why I should particularly care whether Israel’s neighbors push their 5 million into the sea and back to New York, Russia, and wherever else they came from.  Nothing personal: stop selling our miltech to guys we’re barely figuring out how to avoid fighting in the next fifty years, and we’ll talk.

On the other hand, there’s a principal at stake here.  Actually, several.  And, loosely speaking, they all boil down to “Hezbollah has explored whole new kingdoms of suckage.” First:

• Hezbollah is a bully.  A special kind of bully.  The mean and deranged smaller kid who’s constantly pulling outrageous crap against a bigger kid, precisely because he knows that the playground monitors will always step into keep him from suffering any consequences.  And a couple of the playground monitors are actually encouraging him in the behavior, b/c they don’t like the bigger kid’s hairstyle.
• In this case, HA committed blatant acts of war.  The kind you just can’t roll over and ignore without announcing to the world that you are, to use an ugly phrase, a “prison bitch.”
• Consequently, it follows that every now and then, actual justice involves letting a big guy pummel the dog snot out of a smaller guy who is constantly asking for it.

Second:

• Hezbollah has specialized in trying to make this a Lebanese-at-large fight.  By parking military equipment in civilian neighborhoods (including Christian and Druze neighborhoods), and by not allowing non-combatants to flee a goddamned war zone.  The Geneva Convention specifically forbids the use of civilians as human shields.  (Convention IV, Art. 28 and Protocol I, Art. 51 Sec 7)
• Lebanon’s screwed.  Acts of war were committed from their territory, and the combatant on their soil is doing everything it possibly can in order to guarantee that the fight gets as ugly as humanly possible.  The fact that the Lebanese military supplied telemetry data for the Hezbollah anti-ship rocket attack also means that at least portions of the Lebanese milgov complex can’t simply sit back and say “but why are they bombing us?”
• Israel, otoh, is perfectly justified hitting the airport and other means by which their enemy may be resupplied. I hope that in retrospect it turns out that the number of innocent deaths turned out to be relatively close to military necessity given the shit HA is pulling.
• And Israel really does need to freaking LET UP and let more humanitarian and oil supplies in through the ports.

And a lot of innocent people are getting screwed in the process, because Syria and Iran may be pushing for an immediate cease-fire, but Hezbollah’s having none of it unless Israel agrees to go home and roll over whenever Hezbollah provokes them. So, you have a choice between an ugly kid who’ll screw you in a heartbeat for a buck, but who you’re propping up in the hopes that he might grow up and make something of himself, and a deranged little schoolyard psychopath who likes to play with matches and stab people with forks whenever the teacher’s head is turned. No matter what happens, it’s going to be ugly.  I don’t think I’m pro-Israeli, and I may definitely have gotten callous studying warfare too long, but I do think that letting Israel pound the snot out of the schoolyard psycopath until something decisive happens is the only way that anything resembling a long-term peace is going to come about.

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I don’t usually do this, but I am closing comments on this one.  The folks I know could go around on this and be totally reasonable — and the original post that prompted me to write this one made some damned fine points on the “contra” side (you know who you are:  good post, dude).  But threads like this inevitably turn into trollbait, and I just don’t feel like moderating a bunch of moonbats nutriding their personal heroes for the next month and a half.

Ynet reports 6 brigades involved in “bitter battles.”  And yet, they report ONE Israeli KIA, and seven wounded, of whom only one is a serious casualty.

We remain hamstrung by Hezbollah’s… um, messianic… approach to reporting.  As discussed earlier, w/o any Hezbollah casualty figures, we’re stuck, but how do you have half-a-dozen brigades engaged in combat, and lose only two guys?

Meaning either they’re encountering HA’s spear carriers and wiping them away like a coffee stain, or else “bitter battles” is Israeli media’s term for “occasional light skirmishing.”