Liberal Talk Radio

Wondering WTF the Israelis are thinking with this apparently over the top campaign in Lebanon? Some thoughts occurred to me, in the form of the several run-on sentences below:

Assuming that I understand the recent situation correctly, UN Security Council Resolution 1559 called for the Syrian military to leave Lebanon, and for all armed militias in the country to disarm.

Illustrating the universal principal that bastards will find a way to parse the letter of a text to their own best advantage, the Lebanese government declared that Hezbollah was a resistance movement, not a militia, and therefore the disarmament provision of UNSC Resolution 1559 applied to Hezbollah to only “to a certain extent.” Brilliant.

If we can trust Wikipedia on this one (I know, I know), Hezbollah not only refused to disarm, but following a gain of seats in the Lebanese parliamentary election of 2005, launched another series of military attacks against Israel, even before this month’s raid that resulted in Hezbollah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers.

Imagining myself in the Israeli position, I find myself in a geographically small country bordered to the north by a de-facto regional government and military force that does not answer to the official government whose territory it calls home (ignoring for the moment that Hezbollah actually participates in the Lebanese government). This proto-state apparently considers itself in a state of war with me, and feels free to take shots at me on a regular basis, usually by lobbing rockets in my general direction, but also sometimes in the form of cross-border incursions into my territory.

Given all of the above, and given the talk that the Lebanese government couldn’t disarm Hezbollah if it wanted to, and finally given the new diplomatic blather about the need for an international force to separate the warring parties, is it a rational move on Israel’s part to act so aggressively that the only real choice for stabilizing the situation bring in a well-armed outside force to physically separate Israel and Hezbollah?