Middle East thread continued

[SlowwHand]

I guess they got in the way.

[chequita guevara]

How do enighborhoods get in the way?

[SlowwHand]

Are they mobile homes?

[Spiffor]

Originally posted by SlowwHand
Are they mobile homes?

Smartassery aside, why is Israel bombing the Christians?

[Guardian]

Originally posted by MOBIUS


...So when the civilians flee they can make nice targets for the Israelis...

Israel does not deliberately target civilians. But you can some times wonder if they do enough not to hit them.

I like the irony whereby Israel's precision strikes have killed 20 times as many Lebanese civilians (including about 100 children) than Hezbollah's random unguided missiles have killed Israeli citizens...

Yes, it is ironic and it does tend to make Israel look bad. But on the other hand, Israel at least tries to go after military targets most of the time and limit civilian losses, while the other side are just lobbing rockets and shells all over the place. They have no idea who or what they'll end up hitting and they obviously don't care. If Israel had acted like that, you would have been talking about thousands, probably tens of thousands of dead civilians by now.

Hezbollah is to blame, not the Lebanese Govt, not Lebanon and certainly not innocent Lebanese civilians...

Absolutely. We all know this. Even the Israelis.

Still then next time neighbour's kid throws a ball through my window, at least I'll know I can go over to his house, kill his dog, smash up his car, kill his kids that weren't even responsible and then systematically destroy his house around him while he's inside - because that folks, is Israeli Justice...

Then when the dust has settled the kid that did it can come back and throw another ball through another window...

Well, what can I say, that actually sounds a lot like the Middle East!
But I don't think Israel alone can be blamed for this.

Let's say it wasn't a ball your neighbor's kid threw in your window but a hand grenade, and let's say it exploded in your children's bedroom and one of your kids was almost killed. Let's say you called the police and they just said "Yeah, this is nasty, we want this to stop immediately" and then didn't do anything else about it. Let's say this happened about once a week or so.

Would you really just sit there and take it?

[Sikander]

Originally posted by Sandman

You could have been all over them in two weeks.

You really don't know what you are talking about. Which country's sovereignty were we going to violate by flying missions over their airspace? Which bases were we going to launch air attacks from? How were we going to deploy and supply ground forces? How were we going to gather enough actionable intel, from the air? All these things take time and cooperation. We went in about as fast as we could have.

Originally posted by Sandman

Also note the sabre-rattling with Iraq - even when America lauches a stupid and wrong war, it plays by the book better than Israel ever would.

We had many allies to consider, Israel doesn't. What do you think the prospects of negotiations with Hezb. were for Israel? About the same as our prospects with AQ imo. By waiting around Israel would simply give Hezb. more time to prepare for what would inevitibly be a very public and predictable response, whether it was from the U.N. or from Israel alone. Instead they wrested the initiative from Hezb. and have a chance to weaken them enough to allow the implementation of the appropriate Security Council resolutions. They have also incentivized the Lebanese government to implement those resolutions, something that previously hadn't been seriously considered. What were the chances that the government was going to forcibly remove a coalition partner from the South?

[Sikander]

Originally posted by MOBIUS

I like the irony whereby Israel's precision strikes have killed 20 times as many Lebanese civilians (including about 100 children) than Hezbollah's random unguided missiles have killed Israeli citizens...

How many seperate war crimes is Hezb. committing by hiding behind civilians? Thousands? How many of these casualties are actually Hezb. personnel? How many sorties and artillery barrages are being fired by Israel relative to Hezb.?

Originally posted by MOBIUS

But then Israel is no stranger to war crimes is it - how many civilians were killed the last time Israel systematically destroyed Beirut? 20,000?

I well remember Beirut in 1982. It was already largely destroyed by the civil war. Israel was going after people in that war, namely Syrian troops and Palestinian groups at war with Israel. They did not "systematically" destroy Beirut.

Originally posted by MOBIUS

Hezbollah is to blame, not the Lebanese Govt, not Lebanon and certainly not innocent Lebanese civilians...

Hezb. is part of the Lebanese government and is made up largely of Lebanese civilians.

[MOBIUS]

Originally posted by Spiffor

Smartassery aside, why is Israel bombing the Christians?

Uh, because there were a couple of derelict drilling trucks that had been there for years that the IDF thought looked like katyushas...

[MOBIUS]

Originally posted by Guardian
Israel does not deliberately target civilians. But you can some times wonder if they do enough not to hit them.

only sometimes!? Over 330 civs dead, nary a word on hezb casualties...

Yes, it is ironic and it does tend to make Israel look bad. But on the other hand, Israel at least tries to go after military targets most of the time and limit civilian losses, while the other side are just lobbing rockets and shells all over the place. They have no idea who or what they'll end up hitting and they obviously don't care. If Israel had acted like that, you would have been talking about thousands, probably tens of thousands of dead civilians by now.

You guys are choking on your own propaganda...

Of the 34 Israel dead so far, 19 are military meaning that their success rate is over 50% enemy combatants killed of total casualties!

As I said earlier, it seems to me that the Hezb are far more accurate with their inaccurate weapons instead of the odd hezb killed here and there - cos lets face it if Israel had had a significant military success we'd know about it...

[Proteus_MST]

These guys don´t wear uniforms or carry shields with them with "I´m member of Hizbzullah" painted in large letters onto them
So it´s really a problem to distinguish between civilian casualties and Hizbullah casualties.
A lot of the "civilian" casualties in reality are Hizbullah.

Especially hard to distinguish if for example a Katyusha launcher is hit which was hidden in a civilian neighborhood.
You will probably have Hizbullah deaths mixed with dead that are clearly civilians (for example children).

[Spiffor]

From the Independent

*The child lies like a rag doll - a symbol of the latest Lebanon war *
*By Robert Fisk in Beirut *
*Published: 20 July 2006 *

How soon must we use the words "war crime"? How many children must be scattered in the rubble of Israeli air attacks before we reject the obscene phrase "collateral damage" and start talking about prosecution for crimes against humanity?

The child whose dead body lies like a rag doll beside the cars which were supposedly taking her and her family to safety is a symbol of the latest Lebanon war; she was hurled from the vehicle in which she and her family were travelling in southern Lebanon as they fled their village - on Israel's own instructions. Because her parents were apparently killed in the same Israeli air attack, her name is still unknown. Not an unknown warrior, but an unknown child.

The story of her death, however, is well documented. On Saturday, the inhabitants of the tiny border village of Marwaheen were ordered by Israeli troops - apparently using a bullhorn - to leave their homes by 6pm. Marwaheen lies closest to the spot where Hizbollah guerrillas broke through the frontier wire a week ago to capture two Israeli soldiers and kill three others, the attack which provoked this latest cruel war in Lebanon. The villagers obeyed the Israeli orders and initially appealed to local UN troops of the Ghanaian battalion for protection.

But the Ghanaian soldiers, obeying guidelines set down by the UN's headquarters in New York in 1996, refused to permit the Lebanese civilians to enter their base. By terrible irony, the UN's rules had been drawn up after their soldiers gave protection to civilians during an Israeli bombardment of southern Lebanon in 1996 in which 106 Lebanese, more than half of them children, were slaughtered when the Israelis shelled the UN compound at Qana, in which they had been given sanctuary.

So the people of Marwaheen set off for the north in a convoy of cars which only minutes later, close to the village of Tel Harfa, were attacked by an Israeli F-16 fighter-bomber. It bombed all the cars and killed at least 20 of the civilians travelling in them, many of them women and children. Twelve people were burnt alive in their vehicles but others, including the child who lies like a rag doll near the charred civilian convoy, whose photograph was taken - at great risk - by an Associated Press photographer, Nasser Nasser, were blown clear of the cars by the blast of the bombs and fell into fields and a valley near the scene of the attack. There has been no apology or expression of regret from Israel for these deaths.

The innocent continued to die yesterday in Israeli air attacks across Lebanon. Five civilians were killed when an Israeli missile struck a house near the town of Nabatea. Three members of the Hamed family were killed along with their Sri Lankan maid. In the village of Srifa, in the south, Israeli air strikes flattened 15 houses which were homes to at least 23 people but - with no lifting vehicles able to reach that part of the country - there was no way of rescuing anyone alive trapped in the buildings.

The Lebanese civil authorities, however, were able to give names to the dead after an Israeli air raid on the Bekaa Valley village of Nabi Chit; they included Ali Suleiman; Daoud Hazima; Khadija Moussawi and her children Bilal, Talal and Yasmine; Maouffaq Diab; Ahmed and Khairallah Mouawad; Mustafa Jroud and Bushra Shuqr. At least three of the names were female. Another four civilians were killed in an air raid on the village of Loussi in eastern Lebanon.

The Israelis constantly boast of their "pin-point" or "surgical" precision in air attacks. If this is true, then there are far too many civilians being killed in the Lebanese bloodbath to make every one of them an accident. And since Israel's target list now includes obviously civilian targets - deliberately bombed to punish the civilian population - the evidence is mounting that these air raids are intended to kill the innocent as well as the Hizbollah guerrillas whom Israel claims to be fighting.

True, the Hizbollah are killing civilians in Israel, but their missiles are inaccurate and the West, which has done no more than mildly disapprove of Israel's retaliatory onslaught, must surely expect higher standards of the Israeli armed forces than of the men whom both Israel and President George Bush describe as "terrorists".

Why, for example, did the Israelis attack and destroy the headquarters of the Liban-Lait company in the Bekaa Valley, the largest milk factory in Lebanon? Why did they bomb out the factory of the main importer for Proctor and Gamble products in Lebanon, based in Bchmoun? Why did they destroy a paper box factory outside Beirut? And why did Israeli planes attack a convoy of new ambulances being brought into Lebanon from Syria yesterday, vehicles which were the gift of the medical authorities of the United Arab Emirates? The ambulances were clearly marked as a relief aid convoy, according to an Emirates official. Were all these "terrorist" targets? Was the little girl in the field at Tel Harfa a "terrorist" target?

An example of Israel's lack of care in targeting Lebanon came yesterday morning when an Israeli plane fired four missiles into a disused parking lot in the Christian district of Ashrafieh in Beirut. Their targets turned out to be two derelict water drilling lorries which were standing tyre-deep in weeds. Were the tubes on the back of the lorries supposed to be missile launchers? And if so, who imagined that Hizbollah would ever try to conceal such weapons in a Christian area of Beirut where Hizbollah believe many of Israel's own collaborators live.

In Beirut and Nabatea, Lebanese security men claim to have arrested "collaborators" who were "painting" houses and cars with phosphorus to guide in Israeli jets to destroy them. At the same time, the Lebanese Minister of Finance, Jihad Azour, stated that 45 bridges had been destroyed across Lebanon and 60,000 families - 500,000 civilians - have been displaced.

Thousands of foreigners - many of them Lebanese holding dual citizenship - continued to leave the country by bus and ship yesterday, including hundreds of Britons who started the evacuation on Monday in HMS Gloucester. Americans were leaving by sea, although a French security company in Amman - SPO Middle East - was reported to have been hired by the US to evacuate its citizens by bus at a cost of $3,000 (£1,700) a head.

They, of course, are the lucky ones, who will finish their journeys in Damascus or Cyprus rather than beside a burnt convoy at Tel Harfa.

---

*The conflict: Day eight*
* The deadliest day of the war as Israeli air strikes on Lebanon kill 58 civilians. At least 17 people, including several children, die during attacks on the southern village of Srifa. One Hizbollah guerrilla killed.

* Hizbollah rockets kill two Arab-Israeli children playing outside their house in the holy city of Nazareth.
* The International Committee of the Red Cross said it was "extremely concerned about the grave consequences that military action is still having on the civilian population".

* Tony Blair rejects calls for a ceasefire and tells Hizbollah to hand over Israeli soldiers and cease bombardment. "This would stop now if the soldiers who were kidnapped... were released," he said.

* Lebanon's Prime Minister, Fuad Siniora, right, says his country "has been torn to shreds". He chided those who said Israel was acting in self-defence. "Is this what the international community calls the right of self-defence?"

* The first official Lebanese death toll confirms that 300 people have been killed, 1,000 wounded and 500,000 displaced. On the Israeli side, 29 people have been killed, including 14 soldiers and 15 civilians.

* A cruise liner brings out more than 1,000 Americans as evacuation of foreigners continues; First Britons are flown home from Cyprus after 510 are evacuated by HMS Gloucester and HMS York.

* Israel says its air strikes have destroyed "about 50 per cent" of Hizbollah's arsenal. "It will take us time to destroy what is left," says Brigadier-General Alon Friedman.

* Washington rejects French ceasefire proposals. President Bush turns to Syria, saying: "Syria's trying to get back into Lebanon. The world must deal with Hizbollah, Syria and continue to isolate Iran." More than a week since the conflict erupted, signs of a diplomatic solution to the
conflict remain elusive.

* Israeli troops kill 12 Palestinians, including two civilians, in Gaza and the occupied West Bank. Tanks move into Mughazi refugee camp.

* Israeli and Hizbollah leaders may face war crimes charges over civilian casualties, says Louise Arbour, UN high commissioner for human rights.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Spiffor

Smartassery aside, why is Israel bombing the Christians?

Pour encourager les autres ?

[Spiffor]

From The Independent

*Paradise Lost: Robert Fisk's elegy for Beirut *

*Elegant buildings lie in ruins. The heady scent of gardenias gives way to the acrid stench of bombed-out oil installations. And everywhere terrified people are scrambling to get out of a city that seems tragically doomed to chaos and destruction. As Beirut - 'the Paris of the East' - is defiled yet again, Robert Fisk, a resident for 30 years, asks: how much more punishment can it take? *

*Published: 19 July 2006 *
In the year 551, the magnificent, wealthy city of Berytus - headquarters of the imperial East Mediterranean Roman fleet - was struck by a massive earthquake. In its aftermath, the sea withdrew several miles and the survivors - ancestors of the present-day Lebanese - walked out on the sands to loot the long-sunken merchant ships revealed in front of them.

That was when a tidal wall higher than a tsunami returned to swamp the city and kill them all. So savagely was the old Beirut damaged that the Emperor Justinian sent gold from Constantinople as compensation to every family left alive.

Some cities seem forever doomed. When the Crusaders arrived at Beirut on their way to Jerusalem in the 11th century, they slaughtered every man, woman and child in the city. In the First World War, Ottoman Beirut suffered a terrible famine; the Turkish army had commandeered all the grain and the Allied powers blockaded the coast. I still have some ancient postcards I bought here 30 years ago of stick-like children standing in an orphanage, naked and abandoned.

An American woman living in Beirut in 1916 described how she "passed women and children lying by the roadside with closed eyes and ghastly, pale faces. It was a common thing to find people searching the garbage heaps for orange peel, old bones or other refuse, and eating them greedily when found. Everywhere women could be seen seeking eatable weeds among the grass along the roads..."

How does this happen to Beirut? For 30 years, I've watched this place die and then rise from the grave and then die again, its apartment blocks pitted with so many bullets they looked like Irish lace, its people massacring each other.

I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000 of its people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of
houses. Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost always ignore.

They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite. But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis - in some of their cruellest attacks on this city and the surrounding countryside - tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water and electricity? We say that they started this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties - 240 in all of Lebanon by last night - with Israel's 24 dead, as if the figures are the same.

And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel's "disproportionate" response to the capture of its soldiers by Hizbollah.

I walked through the deserted city centre of Beirut yesterday and it reminded more than ever of a film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful to last, a phoenix from the ashes of civil war whose plumage was so brightly coloured that it blinded its own people. This part of the city
- once a Dresden of ruins - was rebuilt by Rafiq Hariri, the prime minister who was murdered scarcely a mile away on 14 February last year.

The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful precursor to the present war in which his inheritance is being vandalised by the Israelis, still stands beside the Mediterranean, waiting for the last UN investigator to look for clues to the assassination - an investigator who has long ago abandoned this besieged city for the safety of Cyprus.

At the empty Etoile restaurant - best snails and cappuccino in Beirut, where Hariri once dined Jacques Chirac - I sat on the pavement and watched the parliamentary guard still patrolling the façade of the French-built emporium that houses what is left of Lebanon's democracy.
So many of these streets were built by Parisians under the French mandate and they have been exquisitely restored, their mock Arabian doorways bejewelled with marble Roman columns dug from the ancient Via Maxima a few metres away.

Hariri loved this place and, taking Chirac for a beer one day, he caught sight of me sitting at a table. "Ah Robert, come over here," he roared and then turned to Chirac like a cat that was about to eat a canary. "I want to introduce you, Jacques, to the reporter who said I couldn't rebuild Beirut!"

And now it is being un-built. The Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport has been attacked three times by the Israelis, its glistening halls and shopping malls vibrating to the missiles that thunder into the runways and fuel depots. Hariri's wonderful transnational highway
viaduct has been broken by Israeli bombers. Most of his motorway bridges have been destroyed. The Roman-style lighthouse has been smashed by a missile from an Apache helicopter. Only this small jewel of a restaurant in the centre of Beirut has been spared. So far.

It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and Shiyah that have been levelled and "rubble-ised" and pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a million Shia Muslims to seek sanctuary in schools and abandoned parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hizbollah, another of those "centres of world terror" which the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands. Here lived Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of God's leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man; and Sayad Mohamed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of clerics; and many of Hizbollah's top military planners - including, no doubt, the men who planned over many months the capture of the two Israeli soldiers last Wednesday.

But did the tens of thousands of poor who live here deserve this act of mass punishment? For a country that boasts of its pin-point accuracy - a doubtful notion in any case, but that's not the issue - what does this act of destruction tell us about Israel? Or about ourselves?

In a modern building in an undamaged part of Beirut, I come, quite by chance, across a well known and prominent Hizbollah figure, open-neck white shirt, dark suit, clean shoes. "We will go on if we have to for days or weeks or months or..." And he counts these awful statistics off on the fingers of his left hand. "Believe me, we have bigger surprises still to come for the Israelis - much bigger, you will see. Then we will get our prisoners and it will take just a few small concessions."

I walk outside, feeling as if I have been beaten over the head. Over the wall opposite there is purple bougainvillaea and white jasmine and a swamp of gardenias. The Lebanese love flowers, their colour and scent, and Beirut is draped in trees and bushes that smell like paradise.

As for the huddled masses from the powder of the bombed-out southern slums of Haret Hreik, I found hundreds of them yesterday, sitting under trees and lying on the parched grass beside an ancient fountain donated to the city of Beirut by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid. How empires fall.

Far away, across the Mediterranean, two American helicopters from the USS Iwo Jima could be seen, heading through the mist and smoke towards the US embassy bunker complex at Awkar to evacuate more citizens of the American Empire. There was not a word from that same empire to help the people lying in the park, to offer them food or medical aid.

And across them all has spread a dark grey smoke that works its way through the entire city, the fires of oil terminals and burning buildings turning into a cocktail of sulphurous air that moves below our doors and through our windows. I smell it when I wake in the morning. Half the people of Beirut are coughing in this filth, breathing their own destruction as they contemplate their dead.

The anger that any human soul should feel at such suffering and loss was expressed so well by Lebanon's greatest poet, the mystic Khalil Gibran, when he wrote of the half million Lebanese who died in the 1916 famine, most of them residents of Beirut:

My people died of hunger, and he who
Did not perish from starvation was
Butchered with the sword;
They perished from hunger
In a land rich with milk and honey.
They died because the vipers and
Sons of vipers spat out poison into
The space where the Holy Cedars and
The roses and the jasmine breathe
Their fragrance.


And the sword continues to cut its way through Beirut. When part of an aircraft - perhaps the wing-tip of an F-16 hit by a missile, although the Israelis deny this - came streaking out of the sky over the eastern suburbs at the weekend, I raced to the scene to find a partly decapitated driver in his car and three Lebanese soldiers from the army's logistics unit. These are the tough, brave non-combat soldiers of Kfar Chim, who have been mending power and water lines these past six days to keep Beirut alive.

I knew one of them. "Hello Robert, be quick because I think the Israelis will bomb again but we'll show you everything we can." And they took me through the fires to show me what they could of the wreckage, standing around me to protect me.

And a few hours later, the Israelis did come back, as the men of the small logistics unit were going to bed, and they bombed the barracks and killed 10 soldiers, including those three kind men who looked after me amid the fires of Kfar Chim.

And why? Be sure - the Israelis know what they are hitting. That's why they killed nine soldiers near Tripoli when they bombed the military radio antennas. But a logistics unit? Men whose sole job was to mend electricity lines? And then it dawns on me. Beirut is to die. It is to
be starved of electricity now that the power station in Jiyeh is on fire. No one is to be allowed to keep Beirut alive. So those poor men had to be liquidated.

Beirutis are tough people and are not easily moved. But at the end of last week, many of them were overcome by a photograph in their daily papers of a small girl, discarded like a broken flower in a field near Ter Harfa, her feet curled up, her hand resting on her torn blue pyjamas, her eyes - beneath long, soft hair - closed, turned away from the camera. She had been another "terrorist" target of Israel and several people, myself among them, saw a frightening similarity between this picture and the photograph of a Polish girl lying dead in a field beside her weeping sister in 1939.

I go home and flick through my files, old pictures of the Israeli invasion of 1982. There are more photographs of dead children, of broken bridges. "Israelis Threaten to Storm Beirut", says one headline. "Israelis Retaliate". "Lebanon At War". "Beirut Under Siege". "Massacre at Sabra and Chatila".

Yes, how easily we forget these earlier slaughters. Up to 1,700 Palestinians were butchered at Sabra and Chatila by Israel's proxy Christian militia allies in September of 1982 while Israeli troops - as they later testified to Israel's own court of inquiry - watched the killings. I was there. I stopped counting the corpses when I reached 100. Many of the women had been raped before being knifed or shot.

Yet when I was fleeing the bombing of Ghobeiri with my driver Abed last week, we swept right past the entrance of the camp, the very spot where I saw the first murdered Palestinians. And we did not think of them. We did not remember them. They were dead in Beirut and we were trying to stay alive in Beirut, as I have been trying to stay alive here for 30 years.

I am back on the sea coast when my mobile phone rings. It is an Israeli woman calling me from the United States, the author of a fine novel about the Palestinians. "Robert, please take care," she says. "I am so, so sorry about what is being done to the Lebanese. It is unforgivable. I pray for the Lebanese people, and the Palestinians, and the Israelis." I thank her for her thoughtfulness and the graceful, generous way she condemned this slaughter.

Then, on my balcony - a glance to check the location of the Israeli gunboat far out in the sea-smog - I find older clippings. This is from an English paper in 1840, when Beirut was a great Ottoman city.
"Beyrouth" was the dateline. "Anarchy is now the order of the day, our properties and personal safety are endangered, no satisfaction can be obtained, and crimes are committed with impunity. Several Europeans have quitted their houses and suspended their affairs, in order to find protection in more peaceable countries."

On my dining-room wall, I remember, there is a hand-painted lithograph of French troops arriving in Beirut in 1842 to protect the Christian Maronites from the Druze. They are camping in the Jardin des Pins, which will later become the site of the French embassy where, only a few hours ago, I saw French men and women registering for their evacuation. And outside the window, I hear again the whisper of Israeli jets, hidden behind the smoke that now drifts 20 miles out to sea.

Fairouz, the most popular of Lebanese singers, was to have performed at this year's Baalbek festival, cancelled now like all Lebanon's festivals of music, dance, theatre and painting. One of her most popular songs is dedicated to her native city:

To Beirut - peace to Beirut with all my heart
And kisses - to the sea and clouds,
To the rock of a city that looks like an old sailor's face.
From the soul of her people she makes wine,
From their sweat, she makes bread and jasmine.
So how did it come to taste of smoke and fire?

[MOBIUS]

...continued...

Originally posted by Guardian
Absolutely. We all know this. Even the Israelis.

Right. Everyone knows about this, so why is Israel attack Lebanon over and above hezb targets then?

Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora put the death toll at more than 330. He said more than 55 bridges across the country had been destroyed, and that Israeli forces had also targeted ambulances and medical convoys. "This attack is no longer against Hezbollah, it is an attack against the Lebanese and Lebanon," Saniora told CNN.

?????????????????????????????????

Answer me that, Einstein...

Well, what can I say, that actually sounds a lot like the Middle East! But I don't think Israel alone can be blamed for this.

Hey I agree, the Lebanese conflict was precipitated by the Hezb action against a military target - they started it, but as usual the Israelis take a hammer to find a hezb needle by flattening a civ haystack...

BTW, as I said earlier hezb didn't start missile attacks on Israeli civilian areas until after Israel targeted Lebanese civilian areas - so whilst I don't condone retaliation of attacking civ targets, the Israelis attacked civ targets first!

Let's say it wasn't a ball your neighbor's kid threw in your window but a hand grenade, and let's say it exploded in your children's bedroom and one of your kids was almost killed. Let's say you called the police and they just said "Yeah, this is nasty, we want this to stop immediately" and then didn't do anything else about it. Let's say this happened about once a week or so.

Would you really just sit there and take it?

No I wouldn't - however I wouldn't launch the equivalent of an all out war over it...

Besides, using your logic perhaps hezb was just helping their 'brothers' Hamas after they suffered the same retaliation in Gaza.

Remember why that started?

A spate of 'assassination' incidents where a couple of dozen civilians were wiped out due to a callous disregard for their life - including that family wiped out having an innocent picnic on the beach...

That is where I pinpoint this whole mess starting...

[Spiffor]

It has just occured to me that, if Serbia was doing the same thing as Israel does today, for an identical provocation, everybody here would be talking about bombing Serbia.

Feel free to object if I'm wrong.