Ok, I'm getting tired of analyses like this one which buy into Israeli frames about Hezbollah being an irrational terrorist organization.

Leaving aside the bad blood caused by, oh, 18 years of occupation, Hezbollah has two real and entirely legitimate grievances against Israel that are much larger than Israel's grievances against Hezbollah.

First, Israel continues to hold Lebanese prisoners. Those are Prisoners of War (what do you call people held because they resisted an occupation if not POWs?) Hezbollah had repeatedly warned, for years, that if Israel did not release them, Hezbollah would have to seize some Israeli prisoners for an exchange. It is entirely believable that the seizure of the Israeli soldiers was in the works for months.

Anyone remember the POW hysteria of the 80's in the US? The left behind stuff? Well this is the same, except that Hezbollah knows they're in Israel. It's not in question. What would you do to get your prisoners of war back?

Second, although Israel gave Lebanon some maps of the mine fields they left behind during the last prisoner swap, Lebanon and Hezbollah still don't have maps to all of them. Which means people keep dying.

Now, let's examine the BS about terrorism. Larry Johnson at No Quarter has said it best, so here it is:

Hamas and Hezbollah attacked military targets--kidnapping soldiers on military patrols may be an act of war and a provocation, but it is not terrorism. (And yes, Hezbollah and Hamas have carried out terrorist attacks in the past against Israeli civilians. I'm not ignoring those acts, I condemn them, but we need to understand what the dynamics are right now.) Israel is not attacking the individuals who hit their soldiers. Israel is engaged in mass punishment.

How did Israel respond? They bombed civilian targets and civilian infrastructure and have killed many civilians. Let's see if I have this right. The Arab "terrorists" attack military units, destroy at least one tank, and are therefore terrorists. Israel retaliates by launching aerial, naval, and artillery bombardments of civilian areas and they are engaging in self-defense. If we are unable to recognize the hypocrisy of this construct then we ourselves are so enveloped by propaganda and emotion that, like the Israelis, Hezbollah, and Hamas, we can't think rationally. We can only think in terms of tribalism and revenge.

All of the emotive crap that is going on, the eternal rush to judgement, is obscuring the facts.

There has never been a peace treaty or between Hezbollah and Israel. They spend, as Laura Rozen noted, every day staring at each other on the border through binoculars, waiting for the other side to let down its guard. They're still at war. Just because Israel withdrew from their occupation didn't end the conflict. It doesn't end till both sides agree it does, and obviously neither does.

Next, Hezbollah is indeed a government (yes, a government) with strong terrorism capacity. Arguably they are the best technical terrorists in the world today (the Tamils would be the only other group in contention, because they too are damn near a government.) There are a lot of Shia Lebanese refugees in Europe. The Germans, Italians and French who are muttering about sending their forces into Lebanon to disarm Hezbollah for Israel (yes, that's the way Hezbollah will see it) had better think really carefully about whether they want to try and impose an agreement on Hezbollah by force. Really, really, really carefully.

What, exactly, is the problem with negotiating with Hezbollah?

Here's a deal you can probably get:

1) A prisoner exchange. (Yeah, yeah, Israel's done them before. Suck it up.)

2) Either the Lebanese army or a peacekeeping force takes over the border, plus a buffer zone of X miles in the south of Lebanon.

3) The remainder of the mine field maps to the Lebanese army.

4) Hezbollah (as the southern army of Lebanon or some other such legal fiction that pretends this is about Lebanon and not Hezbollah) signs a peace treaty with Israel.

Now here's the next thing you do if you're smart, humane and not cheap fucks. You start opening free clinics and schools in southern Lebanon. Good ones. Find a way to fund them. Open food banks and social centers.

Hezbollah has power because Hezbollah provides for the people things they legitimately need - like penicillin shots. Like picking up the bloody garbage. A smart policy by people who want to undermine Hezbollah, or to reassert Lebanese sovereignty over the south, is to create a social service network for the poor Shia who are Hezbollah's base.

It'll take time. Years even. But Hezbollah wasn't created in a day, and the dire illusion that Hezbollah will go away in a day (or turn into a nice civilian political party in a day) is delusional. You have to work at it. Day in, day out. Just like Hezbollah does.

So maybe, instead of trying to throw its muscle around in Lebanon, France should dig deep into its pockets and find the money to fund the Lebanese government doing this sort of work in the south of Lebanon.

Their choice. Some mighty nice transit systems they have in France. Lots of Lebanese Muslims in France. They aren't too happy with France right now, are they? Be a shame if someone decided to start teaching them how to make better bombs, wouldn't it?

You push people around too long, they decide to push back.

France, Israel and the US don't seem to get that, do they?

Israel invaded Lebanon to get rid of one enemy and wound up with a lot stronger one - Hezbollah. They undermined the PLO for years in Palestine and wound up with Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Bin Laden first got the idea for 9/11 when he saw the Lebanese skyscrapers being destroyed by Israel in the first invasion. And strangely, his first thought was to hit the US with them. Israel = US. Get this identity straight in your heads. Everything Israel does, the US wears.

Get the trend line? Get the picture? Enjoying blowback?

You make peace with your enemies. And you do it by negotiation. You don't do it by pretending they're a bunch of irrational insane people with no legitimate grievances who can't be talked to.