Israel attacks on Lebanon

Hahaha.

Has anybody heard what's going on with Atrios/Eschaton? The last post was last Thursday afternoon and there's not even threadbot/open thread action.

Lowry in NROland posts this wonderfully scabrous mail from someone after all the reflexive hoohah there recently:

Gentlemen:

Some thoughts on your recent exchange:

I continue to read from conservative bloggers that the alternative to a ceasefire arrangement (leaving aside how it was reached) was/is the "dismantlement"(JPod) or "destruction" (JGoldberg) or "eradication" (MRubin) of hizbullah. So tell me: Why, exactly, does anyone actually believe this was a possible goal, or remains so? And if it is, why don’t we use our much more powerful army in Iraq to just "destroy" that insurgency in the same way?

Even before this conflict, Hizbullah had overwhelming support among the population in which it resides, the Shia of southern Lebanon. Any Israeli occupation of the hundreds of Shia villages in the south would, therefore, inevitably be met by hizbullah fighters melting into the population, and forming a well-armed and locally-backed insurgency. It seems to me that such an insurgency can be defeated only by winning over that populace - which would never happen - or by methods of such brutality that they could never be employed, and might well backfire if they were. Am I missing something? Is there some secret strategy you have that I am unaware of?

Israel itself tried all of this before. In 1982, it sought in just the way you propose to resolve its problems in Lebanon by force. Its initial success proved extraordinary pyrrhic. It wound up retreating from much of the country under duress in 1985, and by then the Shia population that had welcomed it intially had given its support to a far more formidable foe than Israel had previously faced….

In the same way as the Israeli left and its supporters have never really come to terms with the failure of Oslo, the right in Israel and those who hold similar views have never really come to terms with the fiasco that resulted from 1982. They simply propose it all over again, without apparent recognition of its disastrous prior outcome. Why do you think this time it would be different?

It seems to me that the great lesson of the last couple of decades in Israel - and of the American experience in Iraq for that matter - is the need to end thinking magically about security challenges. Neither the military nor diplomacy are capable of "ending" conflicts or "destroying" adversaries, except in very rare circumstances. (Even after its great defeat in 1967, Egypt was able to inflict hundreds of casualties on Israel in the war of attrition that soon followed.) Problems are almost always solved incrementally. Had Israel had the minimal but useful goal of driving Hibullah's presence on the border underground, it might have taken advantage of its initial international support to improve its deterrence and security, albeit in a limited way. Instead, its great mistake was not that it pursued its goals halfway, but that the goals it embraced rhetorically were wholly unrealistic in the first instance, even if it had employed much greater means…

So far no response from the peanut gallery. But this does strike rather close to home for them.

It's all been interesting watching comments over from guest bloggers at Hewitt and Malkin's sites all rapidly looking to blame Olmert. They would, of course.

Then there's this Ha'aretz piece.