My quite intelligent but very busy 30 year old daughter emailed yesterday:

I’ve been living under a rock for a bit, going to school, raising a toddler, working full time.. and I find that I don’t understand the whole Lebanon/Israel thing. All of the news articles and opinion articles out there seem to be about 3 levels above my understanding of the situation. Can you explain?

My little girl is no dummy, and if she's confused by what's going on I'm sure she's far from the only one.  Instead of just sending her a return email I might as well make my answer available to others as well. Knowing she's not the only one who barely has time to glance a her computer or watch anything my grandson would consider boring on TV between weekends, maybe I can remember to do a follow-up post next week.

So, where do I start? Bottom line first? "You don't throw mud on Superman's cape; you don't spit in the wind; you don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger; and you don't piss off the Israelis."  Maybe a thousand words at once:

Hezbollah is an Iranian and Syrian-backed Islamic Terrorist organization that has been allowed free reign in southern Lebanon for way too long.  At one point in the past Israel took control of that area as a protective measure, then withdrew in 2000 on the premise that UN peacekeepers were going to prevent further attacks on Israel from Lebanon. As always, the UN has turned out to be worse than useless.

The other key piece of background information here is that, for good reasons, Israel has several hundred Hezbollah members and other assorted terrorist scum in prison.

Earlier this month, Hezbollah "stepped in it big time." -- Actually, I mistitled that post; the first word should have been "Hezbollah," not "Lebanon." The Lebanese government isn't at fault, they're just too weak to be useful. -- Apparently Hezbollah was under the mistaken impression that they could work out some sort of prisoner exchange, but Israel didn't follow their script:

In the early days of the fighting, Hezbollah could have defused the situation by simply returning their Israeli hostages; instead they've declared war on the Israeli populace, firing hundreds of missiles at civilian areas. At this point the Israelis are going to settle for nothing less than defanging Hezbollah; returning to the status quo ante is no longer an option.

Unfortunately, dozens of Israeli and hundreds of Lebanese non-combatants have died in the recent fighting, the former due to Hezbollah's deliberate targeting of civilian areas and the latter due to their tactic of hiding among the civilian population. Some would have Israel back off rather than risk more civilian deaths; I am not among them; leaving Hezbollah intact would only result in even more deaths later. So far our government has realized that as well and protected Israel from UN pressure for a premature cease-fire.

At this point it appears Israel is preparing for a major invasion of southern Lebanon to clear out the jihadis before turning the area over to some sort of non-UN multinational force. I wish them luck.

I'll try to keep Old War Dogs updated with the latest developments as they happen and do a follow-up to this post next week.

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See also Off-target Missile Strike Sparks Outrage

Contributed by Bill Faith on July 30, 2006 at 07:53 AM in Bill Faith, Islamism Delenda Est | Permalink

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