Thursday, July 20, 2006

Rubble Does Cause Trouble

After some talk of how brilliantly Israel is isolating the battlefield prior to launching a ground attack, some are questioning the target set the Israelis are going through.

It is not isolating the battlefield.

And it is not pressuring the Lebanese government or people to turn on Hizbollah.

And just forget Michael O'Hanlon's analysis. This is not like Kosovo. First of all, the war isn't over so comparisons of this nature are a little premature. Second, even if Israel never sends in ground troops in large numbers, this is not like Kosovo. In Kosovo, we bombed Serbia to stop Serbian (Yugoslavian) conventional troops from committing ethnic cleansing against Moslems in Kosovo and to support Kosovo rebels.

Lebanon is not like Serbia. Lebanon is not inflicting pain on the local Shias who are protected by Hizbollah against Lebanese conventional forces trying to commit genocide. Perhaps if Israel was running an aerial campaign against Syria to get them to rein in Hizbollah you could make a better case to compare it to Kosovo; but even then you wouldn't be talking about stopping Syrian troops so the comparison would still be weak.

The point is that Israel's targets don't make sense to me. And to others.