The Shi'ites won't attack Israel if Hezbollah does not want to, and one thing that this entire mess has made clear isthat Hezbollah is a professional army. If Nasrallah gives the order to stand down, I have no doubt that Hezbollah will. I am quite confident that Nasrallah can enforce a peace if he wants to and I also believe Nasrallah can be negotiated with. I also believe that since Hezbollah wants legitimacy, Hezbollah will keep its deals as long as the other side can.

Negotiation is the way to peace, but it will require Israel to accept certain things it doesn't want to accept. That's what happens when you make peace with a strong enemy - it isn't one sided.

If Hezbollah wins a fair democratic election I am willing to live with it. Shi'a do not make up a majority of Lebanon yet, and I doubt that Hezbollah will get a majority, but if they do, so be it. (I also doubt Nasrallah would try and impose Sharia law, but even if wrong, so be it, so long as he wins legitimately.)

The Ontario parallell (and I opposed it) is not applicable - Sharia law in that case only applied to voluntary civil cases and most people in Ontario had no real idea about it. Lebanese know what the stakes are.

This disease of trying to tell other people how to live their lives has got to stop.

And let's be clear - Hezbollah ain't going away. Israel is not going to destroy it, and neither is some UN "peacekeeping" force. You can negotiate, or you can fight, and if you fight, you will be doing nothing more than sticking your finger in the dyke. You aren't going to get a long term victory, but you will bleed a lot in the meantime.

There are better ways to deal with Hezbollah than fighting them, which only pushes them further into the Iranian and Syrian orbit and which only pushes the hardliners to the forefront.

Finally - the US is going to have a much worse loss than Lebanon - Iraq. As for Israel, they chose this war, if they lose it, so be it. A nuclear armed Israel with the most powerful armed force in the region is in no existential danger from the surrounding states and we need to stop pretending that it is.

Infrastructure yes. Materiel - I think Iran will be willing to replace it fairly fast.

not infrastructure.

What's the (physical side of the - ES) HA military infrastructure replaceable with? Concrete for tunnels, cheap small arms, cheap radios, obsolete AA weapons - all so cheap and easily replaceable (pretty much the only thing that is expensive in HA's arsenal are the missiles that the same parties will be quite likely more than happy to supply them with again, either free or at firesale prices, just to have the razor next to Israel's throat).

But simultaneously destroying Lebanese social infrastructure only provides a vast interlocking series of billboards advertising "Come work for Hezbollah! The only organization that give you any realistic chance at striking back at the people that did this to you!" Every single bombed bridge, smashed apartment block, every bit of ruined civilian infrastructure a lasting, enduring recruiting poster for HA until replaced or repaired - and everyone who lost a family member, a friend, a livelihood, an apartment, a prospective new supporter.

Trading infrastructure for that sort of recruiting boost? Disastrously, suicidally bad trade.

...Hizbullah's strength absolutely is infrastructure. The whole reason why they are fighting as effectively as they are against the IDF is that they are fighting on an extensively prepared battlefield - they've had many years to prepare for this conflict and they have made an absolutely massive investment in infrastructure preparing that battlefield. The cashing of the investment that they've made since the Israelis pulled out is what's sustaining them. Take that away from them, and they really will be just a bunch of guys running about with crap small arms and a few advanced systems that they won't be able to make maximal use of until they can regenerate that infrastructure.

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.

Cut rate version of the way the Swiss used to prepare their country, perhaps.

but find it hard to conceptualize that extensively prepared battlefield as "infrastructure".

IMHO that battlefield is a bike helmet, designed to crack - once - to protect your noggin through that act of yielding, and then be discarded and replaced, presumably in the next window between conflicts.

I don't think Hezbollah had any more intention of retaining that particular sort of infrastructure than a tank has any intention of retaining a panel of ablative armor after it has done its duty of soaking up penetrating energy to protect true core infrastructure like crew or engine.

The "interval of protection" needed for a bike helmet is a negligible instant of impact; similarly with HA I think their calculation of necessary interval of protection is "one impact" - that "impact" being "one conflict", duration of that conflict in their eyes pre-limited by "the maximum plausible length permitted by external political concerns".

I guess I simply see Hezbollah's core infrastructure as more essentially sociopolitical than traditionally military, the prepared battlefield designed to soak up force by yielding. The Israelis saying "we neutralized HA infrastructure in South Lebanon" seems to me like the pavement saying "I neutralized a bike helmet".

Maybe I'm just confused about what constitutes "infrastructure"; in my understanding it has always been underlying and supporting core systems. I don't have a vision of those structures qualifying; they seem conceptually more like a consumable and replaceable item writ large to me.

...said. I would agree that there's a core social infrastructure and that it's very, very central for them. There's something of an argument to be made that the distinctions between the military, social, and political wings of Hizbullah shouldn't be viewed as so hard and fast as they are by many outside observers. (I would tend to agree with this, if one cuts out that small core of folks that operate as proxies for Iran - I tend to conceptualize of them as an SMU that is frequently used to project Iranian power using unconventional means - which then makes four major groups, three of which are quite tightly integrated.)

I would substantially agree with the analogies that you've expressed above; definitely it's all consumable - the thing is, when conventional infrastructure meets military force, it breaks (and this is frequently the point of strategic air campaigns) and becomes a consumable as well - this is just a specialized type of infrastructure for conflict. Where I think the infrastructure concept is important is that it explains to a large degree why it is that this force is potent in some circumstances, but not others - if fights really well on its home ground, but can't project; it's not capable of large scale maneuver, but the expertise that it has on home ground, its density/ubiquity on that ground and the independence of individual cells can make maneuver much less relevant.

The only way that any of this makes sense to me from the Israeli perspective is if, as I've said from the beginning, the goals are limited - if they bash the bike helmet with a baseball bat a couple of times, as a means not of destroying the rider, but getting a chance to strip the parts off his bike (i.e., long range weapons systems) that are most threatening to them and buy themselves some time in the hopes that someone else will take out the Hizbullah team support vehicle. If they've ever though they were really going to get more than that, then they have badly deceived themselves.

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.

Fisk put the Hezbollah's KIA's at about 50. I'm not making any claims to his reliabilty on miltary matters (I remember the errors he made during the invasion of Iraq) but I imagine, living in Beruit, his sources must be better than most, no?

...but Hizbullah's got a pretty strong interest in lowballing the figures. The IDF's also got an interest in highballing the estimate, but my judgement is that one doesn't see the level of fighting that we've seen and the amount of ordnance slung about in the form of close air support that we've seen without killing more enemy than 50. I think it's likely that they've overcounted the enemy killed by the strategic air campaign, but an increasing fraction of the KIAs are coming from the ground fight. As I say, in the larger perspective, these counts really don't matter much.

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.