A number of the IDF's operations are actually considered failures by the Israelis themselves. Against a guerilla force of a few thousand men...

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/741794.html

Condi was talking about the necessity to put an end to the status quo, about the "birth pangs" of a New Middle East (an insight into the heartless mindset of the neoconservative, which she seems to have adopted)...
But if things keep going badly for Israel (sure it's not very bad), her next visit will be a plea for peace.

My whole point that began our debate was a response to TheYellowDog, who asserted that if Israel were to lose, Hezbollah would attack the West. I replied that Hezbollah cannot destroy Israel, and will never be able to. I even said that Hezbollah would never be able to invade and secure any portion of Israeli territory.
The rocket attacks are something else entirely, they are terrorist attacks against the civilian population of Israel, but they do not threaten the existence of Israel. They're just a nuisance.
A nuisance that should be adressed ! I'm not calling for inaction here. But you have to put the rocket attacks in perspective (the same applies to 9/11, and to any terrorist attack).
And, BTW, remember that Hezbollah was not raining down its rockets on Israel before the Israeli bombing campaign began... If Israel had used an aerial assault as a last resort solution to the kidnapping crisis, and tried diplomacy first (and diplomacy does not mean appeasement!), things would have, without a doubt, worked out better.
But no, Israel had to overreact and go into BLOW SHIT UP mode, so Hezbollah responded with rockets (I'm not justifying their terrorist actions, just showing the logical, and predictable, course of events), and now solutions are hard to come by.

It started with the death of two kidnapped soldiers and the confirmed death of three Israeli soldiers when Hezbollah raided into Israeli territory. It still goes back to how are they supposed to fight them. They either have to bomb them or they have to invade.

People have been claiming that the kidnapping of two soldiers is not justification, why do we forget about the three others were killed when they were abducted? The fact that Hezbollah began firing rockets after Israel dropped bombs does not change the fact that Hezbollah initiated the action. Bear in mind that Israel's actions as well as Hezbollah's have escalated, Israel was not dropping massive amounts of bombs until the rockets did fly. They began by attacking Hezbollah positions. How is a country supposed to react to the killings of its soldiers? If they did nothing would that not suggest to soldiers that the government does not value them as they should?

Reread my post :

Israel didn't even adress an ultimatum. They did their typical blow-shit-up-we'll-think-of-a-coherent-strategy-later thing.
And it hasn't yet been proven that Hezbollah attacked on Israeli soil. AFP first reported Hezbollah had attacked an Israeli commando operating in Lebanon, in violation of Lebanese sovereignty, but changed their report after the Israeli official news release. But other sources agree with AFP (although this view has not been proven either).

WTF!! Why is this thread even here?? If she wasn't there, there would be screams for "why isn't the Bush administration engaged??"

Make up your minds folks....

__________________
"A committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done."
Fred Allen

"A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
George Bernard Shaw

"Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
John Galbraith

The thread diverged a bit from the original subject.

Yeah, I guess Israel could have gone down the "prisoner exchange" route AGAIN.... you know, where they exchange, say, thousands of terrorists to get two of their citizens back. Been there, done that, got the t-shirt.

Oh, and uh, no calls from the rest of the world for the complete disarming of these terrorist groups either....

__________________
"A committee is a group of people who individually can do nothing but together can decide that nothing can be done."
Fred Allen

"A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul."
George Bernard Shaw

"Politics is the art of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable."
John Galbraith

BS, now pick up the cards. Hezbollah has been sending people to blow up in Israel for years, how is that not attack Israeli soil?

Check this out http://www.cfr.org/publication/9155/

__________________
"If I didn't live in Ohio I would love to live in Texas, it's the only place where drinking beer and kickin' ass is still accepted." -Roman

I agree, the prisoner swap route would only encourage Hezbollah...
But Israel had various courses of action, limiting the options to BLOW SHIT UP or APPEASE A LA CHAMBERLAIN is dishonest. They could have adressed an ultimatum. They could have threatened the UN : have your international force get off of its ass and effectively disarm Hezbollah, or we attack... there were options. Of course, most of these more peaceful approaches required that Israel swallow its immense pride for a moment. But it was so much easier for Olmert, who appears weak to many Israelis, to beat his chest and attack.

The simple fact is: Hezbollah attacked the Israelis because it knew that Israel would respond either by another prisoner exchange (which was highly unlikely) or by massive bombings and/or ground assault. Nasrallah would no doubt have preferred a prisoner swap, but he knew that, whatever the Israeli response, Hezbollah would become once again relevant, would become more popular, and thus more legitimate, and stronger. And that's the only thing that counts.
Military actions have never been a solution in the Mideast. If they were, the whole crisis would have ended years ago.

I checked your link. Where does it say that Hezbollah has been sending people to blow up in Israel for years?

Hezbollah never did that. From 1982 to 2000, it fought against Israel's illegal occupation of Southern Lebanon. And don't retort that if Israel occupied south Lebanon, it's because of bad bad Hezbollah, because that's getting the facts backwards. Hezbollah was founded in 1982 to resist the Israeli invasion.