Whether Damascus or Tehran gave tacit or real support to Hezbollah's actions I am sure they gave their support.

Wars and military action rarely solve problems...they just put off resolution and lead to more wars.  Like WWI directly lead to WWII and a genocide...and then it took razing a continent and dropping a couple of nukes on another country to put an end to it.  By contrast we defeated the USSR without firing a shot...I doubt that pacificism is the answer but military action definitely isn't and is probably worse.

Read this analysis from the Los Angeles Times:

"Despite Hezbollah's Ties to Iran and Syria, It Also Acts Alone."

Money quote:

'"I don't have evidence that there were direct instructions," said one Israeli official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the issue. "But they were under the influence of the Iranian government."'

"If one is really to adopt the view that it's never permissable to undertake actions that lead, even accidentally, to innocent loss of life this leads to some conclusions I find indefensible."

I don't believe that was being advocated.

"A certain amount of killing of bad guys is going to have to get done in this world, and I seriously doubt that there's any feasible way of doing that without ever inflicting any "collateral damage.""

Yes, there is, if you have the smarts. This doesn't mean that there will NEVER be "accidental" deaths - but it does mean that you NEVER have to engage in operations that will INEVITABLY result in civilian deaths.

There's a difference between a SEAL Team breaking in on a hostage situation and accidentally shooting a hostage because the hostage stood up in the middle of a firefight or a terrorist grabbed the hostage and shoved him in the line of fire, and launching a missile with a 500-foot kill radius in a civilian neighborhood - no matter WHO is in that house, bin Laden himself is no justification.

"A policy of total passive inaction in the face of terrorism is going to have costs that are every bit as real as the costs of overly aggressive action."

Again, nobody is advocating "total passive inaction" - where the hell do you get that idea?

Isn't the point of terror sponsorship the idea that you can, you know, hide your responsibility?

I will admit to giving Quiggin a lot more leeway than most, because I think he is one of the better bloggers out there (top 10 at least).

The key word for me is "retaliation". None of this is justified in retaliation, but collateral damage is justified in actions that are intended to prevent and fix problems in the future. Some will argue that retaliation has this effect, but evidence suggests otherwise -- unless we are talking about the truly awful levels of force which can bring about peace.

So, for me, use a cost benefit analysis for collateral damage, but retaliation in and of itself is not a justification.

Iran?? How convenient for the neocons who have had their puppet selectident saber-rattling at Iran for months. Too bad Kenneth Baer has been unwittingly seduced into their cause.

Has everyone forgotten that the democratically elected government of Gaza tacitly recognized Israel's "right to exist" in the midst of Israel killing families on a Gazan beach one sunny afternoon in June? Israel wants to deny that there is a negotiating partner so it rains bombs on everyone from Gaza to Beirut and starts whispering campaigns about Iranian and Syrian involvement.

Negotiate permanent borders, dismantle the settlements outside of those borders, agree to an internationally controlled Jerusalem, and settle on some economic inducements to jump start the Palestinian economy and presto-chango the terrorists and militants lose and everybody else wins. We all know what it will take and none of it includes bombs or rockets or oppression or abductions or prisons.

I fear, however, that Israel doesn't, and perhaps hasn't in the last 30 years, wanted everybody to win. They have become drunk with their own power.

So our government should go about the business of taking that power (money, weapons deals, etc.) away and forcing Israel to do what's right. That's what Bush should be doing.

Stephen Erlanger had an analysis piece on this general topic that could have been written at AIPAC.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/13/world/middleeast/13assess.html

Most of the "larger context" stuff like this I've seen seems to be aimed at justifying US military action against Iran. Equating these "kidnappings," as we are supposed to call them, with a "Don't mess with us" message from Iran is really extremely farfetched, but this unsupported idea that Hezbollah-Hamas-Muslim Brotherhood constitutes a mere tentacle of Iraqi policy has become instant conventional wisdom. How, one wonders?

Thesis 1: the Soviet Union fell because the Mujaheddin proved to be an implacable foe in Afganistan

Thesis 2: the Soviet Union fell under its own weight due to the intrinsic unwieldiness of its economic model, combined with widespread corruption, indifference, and the burden of excessive military spending.

I know Thesis 1 is sexier, but I'm going with Thesis 2. And, truth be told, the Soviet Union was never as much of a threat to the US as it was popularly viewed to be, even in the 1940s and 1950s.

<>To tell you the truth, I often wonder if this "collateral damage" meme is a fluke.  I mean, is it actually intended?  You don't see, for example, 500 pounders being dropped on terrorist strongholds in London or New York. 

The strategery would go like this:  Terrorize a neighborhood with indiscriminate ordinance and they will be less likely to passively accept the presence of known terrorists in their midst.

Neoboho

Quiggin gives us the proper perspective on the so called “collateral damage”: “the murder of ordinary people going about their business…”.

I’ve had a problem with this military term for killing innocent people for some time. It has now been internalized by nearly everyone. Oh, “collateral damage” is inevitable, “collateral damage” is just part of war, “collateral damage” is something we just hate, but can’t be helped, there was some amount of “collateral damage”, etc.

So, at what point do we recognize that “collateral damage” is the bloody and extensive slaughter of innocent people? Because that’s what it is! It’s so much easier to create military plans when “collateral damage” is accepted. Those unlucky innocents just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. If they happen to be in the way of a 500 lb bomb, oh well. It’s easier than providing better intelligence, than using more precision in identifying attack targets. It makes “lashing out” justifiable, because “collateral damage” is just one of things we see as impossible to avoid.

“RT” said in his comment that “Smashing is easy”. It sure is. It’s even easier if “collateral “damage” is accepted as something that can’t be helped, and so it becomes “unavoidable”. I don’t think that the families of the “collaterally damaged” look at this so dispassionately. Maybe that’s one reason this thing never seems to end.

Ii sure is easy accepting “collateral damage” from the comfy confines of our computer chairs. That way we don’t need to see those disturbing images of little boys and girls with half of their face missing, and their brain exposed, and falling in chunks to the ground, or their head hanging from their neck by a slender piece of skin, and smoke coming from the hole in their body where their head used to be, or their mother or father, who in a seconds time, had their intestines erupt from their body unto the street, as they were returning from the produce market. Or the uncle screaming and dying in agony, as his body is consumed by flames, and his skin literally melts off of his body – just because he happens to be in the wrong house during that tank shelling.

We should start all plans with zero tolerance for slaughtering and killing and maiming innocent people. We declare it unacceptable to disembowel, burn alive, or tear the flesh off of innocents. As long as we accept the antiseptic term “collateral damage” as just something unavoidable, not enough will be done to avoid it.

I hope “joejoejoe” doesn’t mind me quoting him, but “That’s not being a dove, that’s being sane” is exactly right.

I agree. It could be said that the men responsible for 9/11 wanted to demolish symbols of American power and that the resulting 3000 deaths were merely "collateral damage."

Yes, but I think Matt's point is simply that if you are going to make allegations in the media, you should provide at least some evidence, perhaps historical evidence if need be. If not, it's just hard for the average person to judge (which goes to your point that that's on purpose).

I sure the writers he references think it's self-evident, but others may be more skeptical.

Let's say we declare that collateral damage is unacceptable. Then how do we use military power? Or do we simply never use it again?

And history has shown that the CIA drastically got Soviet military spending wrong.

Could you elucidate on that?  What came to my mind was the "Team B" report during Ford's Admin.  You aren't citing that by any chance, are you? (As in Robert Sherer's With Enough Shovels).

Neoboho

I don't recall asserting either Thesis, Rick. I didn't even assert that we defeated the USSR at all. Shots were fired at Soviet troops, and we supplied the guns -- that's all I said.

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Matt must have been reading "Clean Break" . He's rightly suspicious of the Same Old Shit.

In 1996, a group of pro-Israeli Americans – including Richard Perle, James Colbert, Charles Fairbanks Jr., Douglas Feith, Robert Loewenberg, David Wurmser, and Meyrav Wurmser – prepared a policy statement for then-Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that proposed a strategy of regime change as the only solution for Israel's growing encirclement and isolation. The main problem, they averred in "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm," was Syria, and the troublesome border with Lebanon:

"Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil. An effective approach, and one with which American can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon."

But this could occur only if Iraq was taken out first:

"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions."

With Saddam out of the way, the second phase of the "Clean Break" scenario is unfolding before our eyes. And the propaganda war is going just as well as the military aspect of the campaign: the Israelis are no fools. They realize they can't proceed without the tacit complicity of the U.S. and the Europeans, who must be made to look the other way as the IDF commits war crimes on the ground. Under the pretext of avenging the "kidnapping" of one of their soldiers – and, more recently, two more – they have unleashed a military assault planned well in advance of the allegedly precipitating incidents.

Israel Crosses the Line: Justin Raimondo

"Sure they had the ability to turn the entire United States into a plate of steaming radioactive glass, and Krushchev pounding his shoe on the podium at the UN and yelling "We will bury you" but the notion that they were in any way a real threat can be breezily dismissed.'

Yes - because we had a superior ability to turn Russia into glass - and they knew it.

"Look I don't know how old you are but people in my generation were pretty much convinced that total thermonuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States was more a question of "when" than "if"."

Since when is the public always right?

"And right through the Reagan Administration the same crazies who started as "China Firsters" and ended up as "PNAC Vulcans" were itching for the fight."

Now THERE you have something - but that doesn't make RUSSIA the "threat" - it makes US the threat.

You use it the way a SEAL Teams hostage rescue operation does - with precision.

If a civilian gets killed then, it's purely an accident - and accidents happen. What you don't do is engage in operations that have a near-certainty of killing civilians - which is by far the bulk of the operations the US engages in under current military doctrine.

As I said above, there's a difference between a SEAL Team hostage raid and dropping a 500-lb. bomb on a civilian neighborhood.

The US military, if it was so oriented and developed the doctrine and the enabling technologies, could have a military capability of taking out any other military force or national leader in the world without harming a single civilian except purely by accident.

But we don't. Because most people believe mistakenly that "collateral damage" is acceptable - because most humans don't give a rat's ass about "the enemy" or the "enemy's" civilians. And that includes practically everybody who isn't an out-and-out pacifist - including so-called "progressives".

As I've recently posted elsewhere, I think it's clear that Olmert is (willingly) being led by the hardliners in the Israeli military and on the right in this matter.

He has no military background, so he's letting the military run with this, regardless of the consequences. Politically he's doing this for his own purposes and the purpose of dragging the US into a war with Syria and Iran.

They may not have their military ducks all in a row, but Israel is almost certainly using this situation to achieve strategic and tactical goals unrelated to the kidnapping incidents. It is VERY clear that those incidents were merely the "triggers" and the excuses.

J. McCutchen "JmacSF"

San Francisco. CA

Righteous Anger: Condemnation of Israeli action mounts -