Israels concern for the civilian population was laudatory. The Hezbollah showed no such concern. The problem is, neither should Israel have. No one else ever has before and it baffles me why it should be incumbent on Israel to do this or why they do it.

Civilians are no more than chaff in the wind in wartime. That’s just how it is. In World War II, the Allies indiscriminately bombed cities even to the point of dropping incendiaries on the German industrial center of Dresden and turning the entire city into one vast firestorm. The Germans and Japanese likewise killed civilians by the millions in the process of destroying their enemies. War has always been this way out of necessity. If you’re going to hold a war, everyone is invited.

By dropping leaflets every single time before initiating bombardment of an area, by actually calling the residents on their telephones to warn them, Israel gave the terrorists lots of time to leave the area and take their rockets with them. In this way Israel failed to achieve its stated objective of defeating Hezbollah and getting their abducted soldiers back. Why in the Hell did they do this?

And that’s the second sore point with me over the way this has gone: Why did Israel not make the return of those abducted men the number one demand for any cease-fire? Isn’t that what originally provoked the war? We all know that it is.

I’ve been commenting on other blogs critical of Israel that there must be some esoteric answer known only to the Israeli inner circle but the more I read of their internal dissent over the handling of this war, the less I believe my own remarks. Either that or I am also buying into a smoke screen they’re putting out. If only that’s true…..

What I think the truth actually is, is that Israel and Hezbollah were both playing the Public Relations game. Hezbollah set civilians up to be killed and then said “Look, Israel, if you kill us you will kill civilians and get really bad publicity” and the Israelis went for it, played into Hezbollahs hands and played the PR game instead of simply ignoring it and bombing away as they should have. Israel cares way too much about its global “approval rating”. Considering the state of anti-Semitism in the world anyway, what’s the point of worrying about it?

Well, if this erupts again, which it must because of the nature of the enemy, at least Israel will know better next time than to try to win the war by sending them CandyGrams and by quitting before finishing the job.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 17th, 2006 at 6:23 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.