Hezbollah

Thank goodness for what Israel is doing; if it is necessary to limit the ground assault as they've been saying I hope it will be followed by continued attacks from the air.

Seems like the air strikes aren't doing a whole lot to Hezbollah, who is still launching 100+ rockets a day at Israel. ground war is probably necessary, but seems like it could get ugly, esp. since bombed-out cityscape is a guerilla army's paradise (not the paradise with all the virgins, but still...) but helpfully this isn't going to turn into the Spanish Civil War of WWIII. hoorah

Joe, agreed.

Stay Puft, also agreed. Hezbollah's had over two decades of free reign in the region and their infrastructure is huge. If I have one complaint about the Reagan administration, it's that we did nothing when Islamic Jihad (not to be confused with Palestinian Islamic Jihad, a totally different group) bombed out Marines in '83. Although at the time Hezbollah didn't officially exist and we had no idea Islamic Jihad was a part of them, it seems we could have done back then when they were much smaller and less organized.

I think that was the major shortcoming of the Reagan administration. There must have been some geopolitical angle at the time...

Still, you have to admit that there's a difference between lobbing missiles at apartment buildings and attacking a marine base. part of the reason groups like hezbollah get support from the locals is that governments are friendly to the US (ie. allowing US military bases)

say the US gov sold off 100 acres just outside DC to the Chinese, who used it to build an airfield from which they periodically launched attacks on Canada. Would you see yourself feeling closer to the government or the anti-Chinese airbase militia.

don't get me wrong, hezbollah sucks. but we might as well try to understand why people support groups like hezbollah if we're going to think about how to defeat them.

know your enemy!

General SP: On Friday afternoons the analogy-processing part of my brain shuts down, sorry.

I do fully understand why many of the locals in south Lebanon support Hezbollah, because of the social services and such. Lebanon's a broken country.

Still, Israel can't stand by forever while they get bombed and attacked. That's why, regardless of everything else, I think the IDF needs a green light until Hezabollah has been neutralized. Accomplishing this may require more than simply attacking southern Lebanon, though. More here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1668621/posts

SPMMM,

Very little difference, if any. Our Marines were there, along with other nations, on strictly a peacekeeping mission. I mean, the FRENCH were there with us (and also bombed). They were there at the request of the PLO and the Lebanese government after allegations of war crimes were made against the Israelis. We were there to protect the people.

I do think about why these groups act this way in order to better know the enemy. In my opinion, it comes down to racial and religious prejudice.

ok, but we wouldn't call hezbollah a terrorist group if they attacked strictly military targets, we'd say they were a resistance movement. terrorism, by definition, is a tactic used against civilian populations. 'terrorizing' military targets is called guerilla warfare.

speaking of the FRENCH, it's interesting that during WWII the Nazi propaganda machine always referred to the french resistance movement as a terrorist movement. however, "La Resistance" wasn't a terrorist movement, it used hit and run tactics and planting of explosives and all of that, but only targeted the Nazi occupation forces.

hezbollah, on the other hand, is a terrorist group because their main tactic is to blow up civilians. so it seems like there is a general idea out there that there's a difference between attacking military vs. civilian targets.

conversely, it seems like saying that there's no difference between these two sorts of targets is a justification of terrorism. if attacking civilian or military targets is the same thing, why not attack only civilian targets? ...it's easier