The Other News...

While mesmerized by the feeding frenzy on the plot to bomb up to 10 airplanes by British Islamic extremists, I have had some time see that the US-French UN resolution appears headed to a vote on Friday. This is good news, although I'm also seeing discussion that even were a resolution to pass, Israel would still have a month to continue its destruction of Lebanon. ...

Israel should, perhaps, consider its losses and go home. At least that's what Pat Lang's suggesting. Should Israel pursue its course towards the Litani River, he foresees a monumental confrontation.

Lang says:

This is not guerrilla war. Forget that. This is positional warfare waged using field fortifications as the base and pivot so that a heavier force advancing into the "grid" of the defense can be engaged and defeated by attrition. So far, they are doing quite a job. A force in the process of evolution is what I would call HA.

As far as Hizbullah is concerned, Helena Cobban thinks they've proven their point by fighting the Israelis to a stalemate. She writes:

Personally, I think Hizbullah has amply made its point by now and could simply retire from the battlefield with good grace, having proven that it is not beaten and not cowed, and therefore that the fates of Israel and its Arab neighbors are indeed tied together in interdependence rather than the region being in a situation where Israel can exercize its colonial domination as it desires over all its neighbors, quite unchecked from any quarter.

Let's hope she's right. There's some hope in the fact that the Israeli soldiers don't seem to have the stomach for killing unarmed civilians. As recent reports shopw, some Israeli pilots are refusing to bomb their targets out of regard for civilian lives.

Steven Soldz quoting Pacifica Radio:

YONATAN SHAPIRA: Yeah, I know that — I guess there are several of them. I spoke with one of them, who told me especially of one case that he just got a target — it was a house on a hill — and he just didn’t want to shoot at the house, and he shot beside the house, and later on, the commanders told him that it’s okay. And my question is, you know, if they can give pilots a target, and later on when the pilot is not shooting the house and telling him that it’s okay, you know, what is all this idea behind those missions, if, you know, you can shoot the house, you can not shoot the house? I think there is a problem, you know, spilling behind all these missions that these pilots are getting.

As Soldz notes, if only the leaders who issue orders to kill could heed the words of those who will forever live with blood on their hands. That goes as well, Stoldz goes on, for Hizbullah extremists lobbing bombs who the hell knows where but surely into the midst of innocents.