And how is bombing the airport going to accomplish that? For that matter, how is bombing anyting going to accomplish that? My understanding is that they are just propped up on whatever is lying around in the proper direction and fired. THe only way you're going to stop them from being fired is to either destroy the supply, which hasn't happened and probably won't, or convince the people firing them that it is not in their best interests to do so.
That simply won't work. I could go into a whole set of psychological explanations as to how terrorists think, but I won't bore you. All you have to understand that they are basically ineffectual people who feel important and powerful when they sow terror and affect other people's lives. So they don't want to "win". If they win, the game is over, and they really just want to keep playing the game. All their political rethoric is just superficial justification for what they do; don't get distracted by that. As I have said before: evil is not out to win, it's out to keep doing evil. So as long as you shell Lebanon, you are playing the Hezbollah's game. And since that is their whole raison d'etre, they will try to keep it going forever. You want to stop the Katyushas? Stop playing the game. Get together with the Lebanese (through their government), and try to make ordinary civilians' lives better and more peaceful on both sides of the border. The Hezbollah are then unmasked for the sh*t-stirrers they are and they can't play anymore and look all brave and freedom-fightery; they get ostracised by the Lebanese. They lose political support. They can't hide amongst the civilians because the civilians will run them out of town. But as long as you keep shelling back, you are providing propaganda for the Hezbollah; you are playing their game and they love you for it.
Our air force bombed the airport to prevent the Hezbollah from getting the kidnapped soldiers out of the country by planes. The air force also destroyed supplies, but they aren't just laid up there in military bases, they are deep within civilian territory. Also, our intelligence can't find ALL of their stashes. It's pretty hard to convince fundementalist muslims to stop firing when they have that power. It's sad to say this, but they only understand force, I guess. Nexxo, your sollution is too idyllic. Of course it would be perfect for the Lebanese civilians to take out Hezbollah's power, but the problem is that the Hezbollah is too strong to be put out of business in a short time, and we don't have this time. Our whole northern region is paralyzed, and the rocket attacks are getting closer and closer to the center. We need an immediate sollution, like I said, that would bring us back to the situation we were in for the last six years, and then we can work on negotiations.
Is it just me or have the reports of rocket and missile attacks seriously intensified since the conflict heated up? Intresting that. From what I've read, the Hezbollah have gone from using some fairly basic home made rockets to using decent Iranian technology and even a top of the line Chinese anti-ship missile. Sounds like they've been saving up their toys. I'm really unsure of what's going to happen here tbh. My hope would obviously be for international intervention and brokerage of peace, but with each day that passes and each attempt the US blocks this seems less and less likely. All out war in that region would be horrific. Lebanon may not have much of a military(about 70,000 troops, no decent kit) but Syria have bio and chem weapons and the missiles to hit anywhere in Israel. Likewise Israel have bio chem and nukes, and have the capacity to hit anywhere in Syria. That's without even contemplating the sh*t storm that'd happen if Iran got dragged in somehow. I don't think Israel is going to succeed doing what it's doing right now. Even if they manage to destroy a lot of the infrastructure of Hezbollah, with the number of people they're going to have pissed off with this little show The Hez will surely be back on their feet in a few years, firing innaccurate rockets into the north of Israel. The military solution may provide a short term answer to this crisis, but certainly you can't keep a group like that down when the very action you use to deplete them also replenishes them(albeit in a slow manner). The main thing that's struck me as stupid during this conflict is people blaming one side or the other. That seems to have been the number 1 problem in the entire history of Israel, different people blame others for starting things, and so no-one ever stops. Israel says Hezbollah started this by capturing 2 soldiers, Hezbollah and many Arab nations say Israel started this by capturing civilians and people from within Lebanon. Israel responds that they were terrorists, the terrorists would say they're responding to Israeli aggression, the Israeli's would say that they were stopping the previous generation of terrorists. See what I'm getting at here? Just like my description this could go on forever. Let's hope eventually we get some decent progress on middle eastern harmony.
Now where did I hear that one before? Oh, right: Idyllic my foot. It is the only viable long-term policy. Your "immediate solution" in fact only serves to escalate the conflict, as specofdust outlines. You are on a highway to a long, drawn out messy war, that nobody will ever win. Now that's just fine with the Hezbollah. But is it what you want? I can't help but thinking that Israel was all too eager to join in with the Hezbollah's game. Perhaps Israel thinks that it has been receiving a lot of bad press lately, and that it needs to stir up the hornet's nest a bit just to remind people again who supposedly are the Bad Guys. If the extremists behave bad enough, that gives Israel more or less a carte-blanche to retaliate with impunity --perhaps even invade or carpet-bomb a neighbour or two. Hey, they started it, right? But your Arab neighbours are thinking exactly the same thing: if Israel behaves badly enough, surely (in the eyes of the Arab nations) any retaliatory action is justified? After all, if they only speak the language of force... Strap in. This will be a long and bumpy ride.
Idyllic my foot. It is the only viable long-term policy. Your "immediate solution" in fact only serves to escalate the conflict, as specofdust outlines. You are on a highway to a long, drawn out messy war, that nobody will ever win. Now that's just fine with the Hezbollah. But is it what you want? .[/QUOTE] Someone will win this war, and it will be us. We have a strong army and the Hezbollah wouldn't hold on much longer, I hope. It's just hard to explain our aggression to someone who hasn't fled his home for a few weeks because it was under constant rocket attacks.
You really won't though. Hizbullah aren't fighting a war, do you see uniformed hiz troops out and about? I don't think so. They're a gurilla orginisation supported on a grass-roots level. Even if you manage to cut them down a bit they'll just grow back stronger. And let's not forget it was the Hiz who caused Israel to leave lebanon in 2000. They may not have the military to fight a heavy ground war, but they're very good guerilla troops, and that'll hurt if you guys send a land force in.
WHat has your strong army done for you so far? Have they stopped the attacks? Have they convinced the Lebeneese people not to support Hezbollah? Have they encouraged the rest of the world to suport Isreal's position? You're missing the point; Hezbollah is not a nation. They cannot be destroyed by force. They are a political entity, a movement, and they have won more by being attacked than they have lost in materials. As Nexxo says, they don't have to win, they just have to endurem and they're doing an excellent job of that.
Someone will win this war, and it will be us. We have a strong army and the Hezbollah wouldn't hold on much longer, I hope. It's just hard to explain our aggression to someone who hasn't fled his home for a few weeks because it was under constant rocket attacks.[/QUOTE] Your army being strong makes no difference. You are not fighting a conventional enemy. No army in the world has defeated a terrorist/gorilla force. There is no way you can defeat them by conventional means. At the moment Isreal has made no attempt to retreve their kidnapped soldier either in Lebanon or the West Bank does this not stink of finding an escuse to fight? Also as you are an Isreali I am interested to find out what your reaction to the bombing of civilians trying to flee southern lebanon at the orders of the Isreali armed forces? Also at the killing of about 350 civilians since the bombing started. Surely even for an Isreali this cannot be acceptable collateral damage?
It doesnt work like that. (in responce to ^^ quoted post also) Gorilla warfare works by Hizbolla just accepting people who are willing to fight against Iseral all over the middle east: just like Iraq, just like Afganistan. It doesnt matter how strong you are. The Iseralis just see their own news and what they want to hear, just like the Lebonese. The Iseralis ARE just using it as an excuse to bomb the **** out of targets that are indescriminat between civilians and actual targets because it is a gorilla organisation who mix between civilians. Six of one and half a dozen of the other and the civilians on BOTH sides, suffer.
guerilla, not gorilla. israel attacking hezbollah just gives hezbollah legitimacy (and i'm sure aids in their recruitment). there is no conventional way to defeat them, just as bindi, lynx and cthippo said.
You really are not getting it, are you? The Hezbollah are not out to win. They are out to keep on fighting, for ever. For ever. Think of gambling addicts. They do not play to win or to lose. They play to play. Every loss/defeat is a reason to play again. Every gain/victory is a reason to play again. They keep on playing, because it is the Game that matters, not the losing or winning. For every Hezbollah terrorist you kill, you kill a hundred Lebanese citizens. For every hundred citizens you kill, you recruit their several hundred children to the Hezbollah cause. All you manage to do is create a massive recruitment drive for the Hez. More fighters to keep on fighting. Perhaps this is hard to understand for someone who has fled his home for a few weeks because it was under constant rocket attacks, but that is how it is.
The best comparison i can can come up with is the vietnam war. Well trained well equipped armys (the French and then the US) got their collective arses well and truely kicked in a guerilla warfare situation. If you go further back in history the British Army also had their arse kicked in the War of Independence (US) by revolutionaries using basic guerilla tactics. The same rings true throughout history, Terrorists, freedom fighters etc. have always bested organised military forces, they are mobile, inventive and very highly motivated whereas an organised military force is bound by strict regulations and the chain of command.
One question, how do you negotiate with terrorists? Better question, do all you people telling Israel to back down even think Hezbollah are terrorists? You can only kick the dog so many times before he bites back.............
same way you negotiate with everyone else yes true that but then again we are apparently talking about human beings who are meant to have the ability of logical thought as has been said before isreal cannot win this by force of arms and just referring to specofdusts comment earlier homemade stuff has improved a fair bit recently
No, you cant negotiate with terrorists like everyone else. When negotiating with a nation you have people in power, you have civilians, you have actual property. When dealing with terrorists all you have is terrorists, who is in charge? if terrorists don't abide by the negotiations what do you do? I guess you can just say please..... Just think if your neighbor came into your house one night and took one of your family members, what do you do? Call the cops? The cops in this case is the UN, wow big help they have been in the past 30 years. Didn't they already pass a resolution that Hezbollah is to be disarmed..........Who started the incident...hezbollah.....When an organization has stated they want the total destruction of your religion and don't even recognize your nation what are you expected to do? Send a death threat to your heads of state and see what happens, maybe you will get a letter back saying "maybe you would like me if you got to know me", but I bet not. If lebanon would not harbor terrorists their country would not have been targeted, thems the breaks.
OK, let's break down the argument. The situation with the Hez hiding amongst the civilians in Lebanon has frequently been likened to terrorists hiding behind a human shield of hostages. Generally the correct approach in such situations is to deal with the terrorists while taking great care to ensure the safety of the hostages. This regrettably means that often you cannot just go in guns blazing. A well thought out approach that minimises the loss of innocent lives is required. Israel however is doing the equivalent of blowing up the building, terrorists, hostages and all. In a conventional hostage situation this would never be an acceptable approach. Why should it be now? Another analogy is this. Some bad dudes come to your house, shoot through the window, kill some of your family. You reasonably expect that they'll be back and won't stop. But you don't know where they live precisely, so stopping further attacks and exacting revenge is going to be tricky. However you think you know the street in which they live (roughly). So you torch every house on that street to make sure you get them back. Perhaps also the adjacent streets, to cut off their escape route. Of course, many innocent people burn in the process. But hey, you did slip a note through their letterbox earlier warning them that you were going to burn down the street to get the bad guys. So they should have left, right? In any case, they should have shopped the baddies to the police in the first place, since they (you casually presume) do know exactly which house they live in. So they all brought it onto themselves: the men, the women, the four-year old that burned to death, the little granny who couldn't quite make it out of the house fast enough. They were all colluding with the bad guys and deserve what they got. In a court of law, such reasoning would not be an acceptable defense for going on a revenge-motivated killing spree. Although there would perhaps be mitigating circumstances for killing the bad guys specifically, nobody would find it acceptable that you took out a whole street of innocent bystanders in the process. You would go down on multiple Murder One counts. Israel's moral reasoning is heavily flawed, to say the least. It is the sort of reasoning one would expect from an eight-year old, perhaps, but not a halfway intelligent adult. I cannot see how it differs in quality from that of a disgruntled Palestinian youth who, after seeing his home levelled once too many times, decides to take up arms and bombs and take out some innocent Israeli citizens to even the score. Israel has simply put itself on the level of another terrorist group. Obviously the price of being the Good Guys was too high... Fair enough, Israel is entitled to make its choice, but it is not entitled to approval for it. The only way you can stop terrorists is to stop public support for them. They like to look like martyrs and heros. They like to feel special. This has been done before: the most powerful weapon in neutralising the Klu-Klux-Klan in the Southern states in the end turned out not to be military force, or legal prosecution, but to ridicule them in a children's radio show (Superman). Great care was taken to get all the details correct: all their rethoric, rituals, symbols; and then to thoroughly take the piss out of them. Children started to copy this in their play on the street. After a while, being a KKK member became not a source of pride, but of embarrasment. So what Israel could have done, is work together with the Lebanese people and its government in very obvious ways simply to improve everyone's standards of living there: work together on trade, agriculture, irrigation and infrastructure, health care, you name it. Forget about chasing the terrorists; that's just playing their game. If Israel behaved like the Good Guys, the Lebanese people would start to wonder soon enough why the Hez was picking on them and ruining the good thing they all got going together, and whether the Hez' rethoric actually made any sense... A generous and friendly israel makes the Hez look like a bunch of bitter losers with a chip on their shoulder. And nobody in their right mind wants anything to do with those (the trick in psychology is that often you have to do the seemingly counter-intuitive thing to get the desired response. This is what makes it a specialist field). However, the way Israel is behaving now, they are actually massively recruiting to the Hez' cause. They think they are setting the rules, but they are in fact playing the Hez' game. As such, the Hezbollah has already won.
Israel is using a fraction of its firepower, if they wanted to they could wipe Lebanon off the map. Saying Israel is killing civilans unjustly is rediculous. Israel was attacked, they then attacked back, the difference is Israel doesn't hide behind its civilians and Hezbolla does. Maybe these civilians should think "if I don't support hezbollah they won't put a rocket pad on the roof of my appartment complex there by putting the whole building at risk. Terrorists wouldn't exist without the support of civilians, and civilians wouldn't get killed if terrorists wern't their. Seems pritty simple, stop supporting terrorism.......
