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Originally Posted by ziggytrix
Were you discouraged?
I never really saw a whole heck of a lot of people saying Israel did not have the right to retaliate against Hezbollah or Hamas.
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Right, people give the token gesture to Israel, but when Israel responds it's "disproportionate force."
If they use targeted bombings against hezbollah (with bombs bought from the U.$.), they're killing children. it doesn't matter that Israel has gone to great lengths to keep civilian casualties low. Israel drops leaflets, makes phone calls, and places warnings with local media. Hezbollah loads shrapnel and ball bearings into their rockets in order to maximize innocent casualties. Where do hezbollah rockets get fired? I wish the Left could try to be a little consistent here. These diatribes against Israel will often have the token sentence about Hezbollah, "oh yeah, they're really bad and need to stop." Israel on the other hand has commiteed massacres, and are "invading" Lebanon.
Go read
http://www.commondreams.org/, check out some of the articles there:
"Silvia Tennenbaum:
Why Doesn't Israel Work For Peace?"
"Peter Bouckaert:
For Israel, Innocent Civilians Are Fair Game"
"Robert Scheer:
Israel’s Dependency on the Drug of Militarism"
Good reading, although I think you make a valid point. Lucklily, those who would sooner ask Israel to lay over and die, or deal with terrorists, happen to find themselves on the fringes of the Left Wing (and some on the fringee of the other end). Those who happen to see this is just a really, really, really confusing mess with no clear bad guys and good guys are
surely on the fringes, right?
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The problem Israel has is that a lot of their actions were being percieved as going further than targettign Hezbollah.
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Yeah, I wonder where this perception comes from. Could it be that people on the far Left jump at the opportunity to call this an "invasion", even though it was Israel that was attacked? Maybe because "rescue workers" at Qana took the opportunity to parade the corpses of children around, cursing israel's name, without even asking themselves why Hezbollah guerillas may have been in the area to begin with? Maybe because Human Rights Watch decided to condemn Israel for human rights violations in Qana, long before any serious investigation could
possibly be conducted? i mean, it's not like HRW is quick to always blame Israel, even though they've had to
recant what they had initially said regarding the Gaza beach bombings in early June.
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And the you've got the complaints of nobodies like me who worry that when the dust settles, the attitudes of both sides won't have changed one bit, and really nothing will have been done to fix the problem, beyond a temporary fix to the symptoms, which if taken too far will just worsen the underlying problem. 
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The problem is that people like you take the attitude that there are two attitudes in need for adjustment. There aren't.
And I agree about not accepting temporary solutions. Israel accepted a temporary solution with Hezbollah before, and it has resulted in more attacks, more death, and more war.
A good solution would be the destruction of an armed hezbollah. When Lebanon can negotiate peace for their own country, rather than having an armed party that represents less than 20% of their population, then you'll see a change. Otherwise, Israel needs to clear out southern Lebanon for their own security. The UN won't do it, nor will the Lebanese government (needless to say Syria and Iran won't do it).
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