Independent Institute
by Alvaro Vargas Llosa
08/16/06
Hezbollah has not been disarmed or defeated; its leadership is intact -- and ever more loquacious on al-Manar, Hezbollah's intractable TV network. The two Israeli soldiers have not been recovered and will now likely be the object of a prisoner swap that Israel said would never happen. Israel's deterrent looks less deterring than four weeks ago. And Tehran's despotic President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is now a lot more powerful in the eyes of the Muslim masses. Even the pro-western Arab dictatorships that originally rooted for Israel, convinced this was a great opportunity to curb Iran's rise in the region, ended up praising Hezbollah's resistance. Hezbollah has achieved what no Arab army had achieved since 1948, including Egypt and Syria's strong performance in the Yom Kippur conflict of 1973 that eventually led to a settlement over the Sinai...
http://www.independent.org/newsroom/article.asp?id=1790
Bombing to lose
Reason
by James Joyner
08/16/06
Just hours after the cease-fire with Lebanon took effect Monday, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert gave a speech to the Knesset acknowledging 'deficiencies' in the way the war was conducted. Buffeted by critics on the left and right, he added that, 'We will have to review ourselves in all the battles' and pledged, 'We won't sweep things under the carpet.' At the same time, though, he proclaimed that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) had crippled Hezbollah as a 'state within a state as an arm of the axis of evil' and that the 'strategic balance' in the region had shifted against Hezbollah. President Bush agreed, proclaiming, 'There's going to be a new power in the south of Lebanon.' Like O.J. Simpson's search for the real killer, however, Olmert's review begins with a false premise. By any meaningful measure, Israel lost this war...
http://www.reason.com/hod/jj081606.shtml
Lebanon's pain grows by the hour
Independent [UK]
by Robert Fisk
08/17/06
They are digging them up by the hour, the swelling death toll of the Lebanon conflict. The American poet Carl Sandburg spoke of the dead in other wars and imagined that he was the grass under which they would be buried. 'Shovel them under and let me work,' he said of the dead of Ypres and Verdun. But across Lebanon, they are systematically lifting the tons of rubble of old roofs and apartment blocks and finding families below, their arms wrapped around each other in the moment of death as their homes were beaten down upon them by the Israeli air force. By last night, they had found 61 more bodies, taking the Lebanese dead of the 33-day war to almost 1,300...
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1219684.ece
Post invasion dread
Common Dreams
by Joyce Marcel
08/16/06
The Israeli attack on Lebanon horrified me, but nothing prepared me for the sense of dread that has come in its wake. Despite my opposition to the attack, my view that it was mad anger and senseless aggression, it never occurred to me that the over-armed and over-amped Israeli military would lose. But they did lose, in too many ways, and in too many ways all too reminiscent of the too many ways that another mighty army, America's, is losing in Iraq...
http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0816-22.htm
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
