Just so everyone's clear on how the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict started.....

[Good Doctor HST]

I really started taking a look at what's been transpiring. I'll share with everyone what I've been looking at:

Here's a snippet from Wikipedia on the status of the Gaza Strip, as of 2005.

"In February 2005, the Israeli government voted to implement Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan for unilateral disengagement (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%27s_unilateral_disengagement_plan_of_2004) from the Gaza Strip beginning on August 15 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_15), 2005 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005). The plan required the dismantling of all Israeli settlements there, transferring the lucrative hot house (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse) industry to Palestinian control to spur economic development, and the removal of all Israeli settlers and military bases from the Strip, a process that was completed on September 12 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_12), 2005 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2005) as the Israeli cabinet formally declared an end to military rule in the Gaza Strip after 38 years of control."

Okay, so since Israel withdrew its citizens from the settlements, things kinda went downhill. Here's more on the conflict, courtesy of Wikipedia:

"After Israel's unilateral disengagement plan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%27s_unilateral_disengagement_plan), pulling 9 thousand settlers from Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005, tensions had remained high in Israel due to Israeli shelling of densely populated areas in the occupied territories and Qassam rocket (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qassam_rocket) attacks launched by Palestinians from Gaza into densely populated areas such as the Israeli city of Sderot (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sderot), reported to have exceeded 800 rockets in the past seven months, although there had been no casualties since Israel's withdrawal from Gaza. Between the end of March and the end of May 2006, Israel fired at least 5,100 artillery shells into the Gaza Strip Qassam launching areas in an attempt to stop them from firing.

On June 9 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_9), during or shortly after an Israeli operation, an explosion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_beach_blast) occurred on a busy Gaza beach, killing eight Palestinian civilians. An investigation was promised by Israeli authorities, Israeli Defence Minister Amir Peretz and Chief of Staff Dan Halutz appeared alongside IDF General Klifi to announce the findings of an internal military enquiry. The enquiry disregarded the chance of Israeli artillery fire causing the deaths as "nil". The Israeli authorities theorised the deaths could have been caused by old ordnance. They also theorised that the deaths were caused by a Palestinian planted mine. A spokesman for the US based Human Rights act aired the opinion that the injuries sustained by the Palestinian victims were "inconsistent" with an explosion from beneath the sand. Israeli shelling was temporarily suspended, but resumed soon after and reached more than a thousand shells per week by the end of the month. Other Israeli missile attacks included one on the Gaza highway on June 13 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_13) that killed 11 Palestinians and injured 30, and on June 20 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_20) that killed 3 Palestinians and wounded 15."

Okay, so both sides haven't been on their best behavior, that's obvious. However, major media in the U.S. would have you believe that Israel went all-out against Hezbollah forces in Lebanon because of the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier, which was the first act that prompted the Israeli bombing campaign. However, that's not exactly the case: Once again, we turn to Wikipedia:

"The conflict began on June 24 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_24), 2006 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006), when Israeli operatives seized Osama and Mustafa Muamar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muamar_family_detention_incident) in the Gaza Strip (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaza_Strip). On June 25 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_25), an allegedly retaliatory Hamas attack resulted in the deaths of two Israeli (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel) soldiers and the capture of Israeli Corporal (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporal#Israel) Gilad Shalit (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilad_Shalit). Israel (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel) then launched Operation Summer Rains (Hebrew (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_language): מבצע גשמי קיץ, Mivtza Gishmey Kayitz), on June 28 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_28)."

Here's what Professor Noam Chomsky said about the events during an August 8th shown on Znet.org:

"Recall the facts. On June 25, Cpl. Gilad Shalit was captured, eliciting huge cries of outrage worldwide, continuing daily at a high pitch, and a sharp escalation in Israeli attacks in Gaza, supported on the grounds that capture of a soldier is a grave crime for which the population must be punished.


One day before, on June 24, Israeli forces kidnapped two Gaza civilians, Osama and Mustafa Muamar, by any standards a far more severe crime than capture of a soldier. The Muamar kidnappings were certainly known to the major world media. They were reported at once in the English-language Israeli press, basically IDF handouts. And there were a few brief, scattered and dismissive reports in several newspapers around the US.

Very revealingly, there was no comment, no follow-up, and no call for military or terrorist attacks against Israel. A Google search will quickly reveal the relative significance in the West of the kidnapping of civilians by the IDF and the capture of an Israeli soldier a day later.
"The paired events, a day apart, demonstrate with harsh clarity that the show of outrage over the Shalit kidnapping was cynical fraud. They reveal that by Western moral standards, kidnapping of civilians is just fine if it is done by "our side," but capture of a soldier on "our side" a day later is a despicable crime that requires severe punishment of the population."

The entire Chomsky interview can be found here (http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2006-08/08chomsky.cfm).

[Gold9472]

So Israel kidnapped two people to push their side to kidnap two people so they could have a war?

[Gold9472]

A War of Escalating Errors
Israelis and their foes are swinging wildly -- and missing their targets.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-oe-carr12aug12,1,4669462.story?coll=la-headlines-pe-california

By Caleb Carr, CALEB CARR is a visiting professor of military studies at Bard College and the author of "The Lessons of Terror: A History of Warfare Against Civilians."
August 12, 2006

'Never interrupt your enemy while he is making a mistake," runs Napoleon's famous dictum, and were either the Israeli government or the groups that are leading the Palestinian people (Hamas and Fatah and international organizations such as Hezbollah) capable of assimilating this basic piece of military sense, we should have already seen a sudden outbreak of peace, or, at least, cautious inactivity, in the border areas of Gaza, the West Bank, Israel and Lebanon.

Both sides have made fundamentally foolish moves in recent weeks, yet each side has consistently been rescued from its mistakes by the errors of the other. And, following this pattern, they have worked themselves and the world to the edge of a crisis that is ominous even by Middle Eastern standards.

Who initiated this sequence of errors? As with all crises in the region, this question is almost impossible to answer. The specific trigger is often said to be the June incursion into Israel by Palestinians from Gaza, which resulted in the seizure of Cpl. Gilad Shalit of the Israel Defense Forces and the death of two other IDF soldiers. But the Palestinians have explained that their commandos were carrying out a reprisal raid after the IDF seized two Palestinian brothers, Osama and Mustafa Muamar, who, they claimed, are innocent of anything save being sons of a known Hamas activist, Ali Muamar.

Viewed in this light, the Palestinian action seems uncharacteristically legitimate, proportionate and even daring. For, unlike the Israeli seizure of the Muamars, the whole of the Palestinian operation was aimed at strictly military targets. Yet the Israelis answered with a sadly predictable full-scale military incursion into Gaza. The Palestinians, meanwhile, abandoned proportionality once again by stating that the release not simply of the Muamars but of hundreds of their people imprisoned in Israel would be the condition of Shalit's release.

More important, perhaps, the Israeli incursion into Gaza gave Hezbollah (or so it felt) the green light to launch its rocket attacks from southern Lebanon. President Bush and Israeli leaders might try to represent the two events — the action in Gaza and that in south Lebanon — as unconnected, but it is an assertion that has failed to gain traction in most of the Muslim world, as well as in many other countries.

Israel's reaction in Gaza had been especially foolish. Although the original Palestinian attack on the IDF post was carried out against a purely military target, the quick demand for the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners in Israel showed the Palestinians' true lack of diplomatic deftness. Had the Israelis limited themselves to the threat of an incursion, while carrying out the kind of special-forces search-and-rescue operations of which they are capable, the Palestinians would have lost their advantage.

Not to fear, however: The Palestinian mistake was indeed interrupted, and grotesquely, by the sight of massively armed IDF conventional forces crossing into one of the poorest and smallest regions on the planet, all to rescue what Israel claimed was a "kidnapped" soldier — an assertion that was absurd because a uniformed, front-line noncommissioned officer can no more be "kidnapped" by the enemy than an innocent, unarmed child can "die in battle." Already, the language of the conflict was taking on the dimensions of events occurring on the other side of Alice's looking glass, and things would only get worse.

The Palestinians' allies, in their turn, soon rescued Israel from this terrible error in judgment. After a border skirmish — the true origins of which may never be known — Hezbollah initiated a rocket offensive against Israeli towns and cities in the north of the country, causing a certain number of civilian casualties but far more widespread civilian panic. So great was the panic that Israel felt the need to once again take its turn at rescuing its enemies from error. It bombarded and finally invaded southern Lebanon in a barrage that would turn out to be, by orders of magnitude, the most savage step in the spiral of horror, miscalculation and interruption of miscalculation.

And now? Now, scarcely anyone on either side of the conflict knows or cares who was the first to break the "rules of war." Civilians on both sides only want relief from the constant anxiety of indiscriminate attacks and revenge for those noncombatants who — whether because they happened to live where a Katyusha rocket landed inside Israel, or because they lived too close to where Hezbollah had parked a launcher of such rockets inside southern Lebanon, or because they simply have nowhere to go to escape the narrow confines of the Gaza corridor or West Bank refugee camps — have met hideous deaths or suffered equally hideous wounds.

IS THERE AN alternative to this pattern of mistakes and countermistakes? There is, but it involves a quality that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians have ever come close to mastering: tactical restraint in order to achieve strategic advantage. Simply put, this involves looking past immediate and all-out retaliation as the best method of countering threat. It is not a call for turning the other cheek; rather, it suggests that savagely swinging back every time one's cheek is dealt so much as a brushing blow does not amount to effective boxing, much less enlightened belligerent behavior.

Imagine, for example, that either Israel (in the case of the initial Palestinian and Hezbollah attacks) or the Palestinians and Hezbollah (in the case of the original Israeli reprisals) had decided: "Patience; we will absorb this assault, and wait to focus our attacks until we can strike at what we know to be — and can prove to the rest of the world are — the enemy military or paramilitary units responsible. That will get us our principal objective: the certain backing of global public opinion. We will refuse throughout to engage in disproportionate assaults on indiscriminate targets, and if for a period we risk suffering more losses than our opponent, we will nonetheless profit in the long run. When we have netted the world's sympathy, we will receive more backing, even as our enemies' support dwindles, and what had seemed to be tactical peril will in fact prove to be strategic advantage."

This notion — absorbing smaller blows in order to deliver decisive later strikes — has important historical precedents. It forms a central tenet of the philosophy of ancient China's Sun Tzu, arguably the world's greatest military thinker. But even during modern American history, we can find the idea at work: For it decisively influenced the pre-World War II steps taken by President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In 1937, when imperial Japanese aircraft "mistakenly" attacked and sank the U.S. gunboat Panay and several other vessels on China's Yangtze River, some in the U.S. called for war; but FDR realized that the U.S. was in fact neither politically nor militarily ready for such a conflict. And so he (rather unhappily) bided his time, accepting what seemed to his enemies a craven reparations deal and awaiting an event that would allow the overwhelming majority of the American public to appreciate the dangers of Japanese medievalist militarism. The wait also gave the American Navy extra years to prepare.

Similarly, when Roosevelt later tried, after the outbreak of the European war in 1939, to engineer American entrance into the conflict through elaborate trickery centered on luring Nazi subs into attacking U.S. warships in the North Atlantic, he quickly found that, much as the Allies might match his own desire to get the U.S. into the war, his own people were still not ready. And so he did not act, convincing Adolf Hitler of his own degeneracy, as well as that of the people he led.

BUT ROOSEVELT WAS, of course, waiting for a precise set of conditions that would allow him not simply to be the just party in the war but to appear to be as much, at home and abroad. And, of course, by the time the U.S. entered the European and the Pacific wars, there was no doubt about our moral rectitude or our increased military and naval strength.

Lives had been lost, shipping endangered, prestige — personal and otherwise — sullied, but FDR had, by bending with the early blows and waiting for what turned out to be the disaster of Pearl Harbor, pulled off the stroke that would garner the United States, over the course of World War II, so much moral authority that even his less internationally adept successors — from Lyndon Johnson to George W. Bush — have not been able to drain it; not quite yet, at any rate.

Unlike FDR, however, the current Palestinian, Hezbollah and Israeli leaderships have been unable to embody anything like military or diplomatic restraint. They have instead displayed ever-increasing and more self-defeating impatience, a wholehearted willingness to bail each other out of their respective worst mistakes and a mutually callous attitude toward civilian death.

Nearly identical mistakes and miscues, interlocked in a sickeningly seamless and seemingly unstoppable pattern: In this as in so many things, these enemies have displayed what Freud called "the narcissism of small differences." Those differences seem far less small, however, when one realizes that the narcissism extends to the belief that their causes are worth not only the lives of the most innocent on both sides of every border, but the risk of a regional — or even a global — conflagration.

Clearly, the combatants can no longer be trusted to make sound judgments, and the time has come for the world to insert that rarest of phenomena, a multinational force with both bullets and a brief: to keep the sides apart, to allow humanitarian relief to be administered and to demonstrate that the rest of the world's patience with their repeated errors, and interruptions of each others' errors, will no longer be tolerated.

Will Friday's United Nations Resolution accomplish this? When one reads the fine print, it seems unlikely. And even if it can, it will not begin to go into effect for days — and days, in this conflict, can narrow possibilities for success dramatically by allowing the terrible error of reciprocal civilian death to go on.