I consider this to be the equivalent of human shields:

The IDF has found that Hizbullah is preventing civilians from leaving villages in southern Lebanon. Roadblocks have been set up outside some of the villages to prevent residents from leaving, while in other villages Hizbullah is preventing UN representatives from entering, who are trying to help residents leave. In two villages, exchanges of fire between residents and Hizbullah have broken out. (Hanan Greenberg)

There isn’t a Nickel’s worth of difference between pulling a child in front of you to block a bullet and what Hezbollah is doing right now in Lebanon.  It is all the same.  They are cowardly, villainous scoundrels and they deserve to die.

I consider this to be the equivalent of human shields:

The IDF has found that Hizbullah is preventing civilians from leaving villages in southern Lebanon. Roadblocks have been set up outside some of the villages to prevent residents from leaving, while in other villages Hizbullah is preventing UN representatives from entering, who are trying to help residents leave. In two villages, exchanges of fire between residents and Hizbullah have broken out. (Hanan Greenberg)

There isn’t a Nickel’s worth of difference between pulling a child in front of you to block a bullet and what Hezbollah is doing right now in Lebanon.  It is all the same.  They are cowardly, villainous scoundrels and they deserve to die.

On July 16 I posted “Are we Prepared for Hezbollah Attacks in the U.S.?”

I followed up with “Hezbollah Reiterates Threat to Attack U.S. Interests Around Globe.”

The Counterterrorism Blog has a good entry by Walid Phares entitled “To Repeat: Are we Ready for Hizbollah Attacks in the U.S.”

Blogs of War has a piece entitled Hezbollah in America.

Michelle Malkin has more on this developing story with pictures of militant rumblings in San Francisco.

It looks like Israel is trying to destroy Hezbollah’s capabilities with a sanitized air campaign (it will fail).  It also looks like the U.S. is blinking and giving Israel another week.  If this happens, Hezbollah will come out on the other end of this whole thing politically stronger, and we will face down Hezbollah not just in the middle east, but on our own home soil.  We will not close down our borders because the Senate lacks the will, and we will have no defense against Hezbollah cells in the U.S. before the real battle begins.  The attacks on 9/11 by Al Qaida were just a prelude to the coming battle with radical Islam.  Al Qaida was the bench team.  Hezbollah is the first string.

You think the U.S. will wake from our slumber before the war begins?

Editorial Remark: Edited to correct typographical error in title line from “Treat” to “Threat.”  Hmmm … Hezbollah … trick or treat indeed.

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We blogged a few days ago (Are we Prepared for Hezbollah Attacks in the U.S.?) on Hezbollah cells in the U.S. awaiting orders to attack people and infrastructure.  Today Reuters reports:

TEHRAN (Reuters) – Iran’s Hizbollah, which claims links to the Lebanese group of the same name, said on Tuesday it stood ready to attack Israeli and U.S. interests worldwide.

“We have 2,000 volunteers who have registered since last year,” said Iranian Hizbollah’s spokesman Mojtaba Bigdeli, speaking by telephone from the central seminary city of Qom.

“They have been trained and they can become fully armed. We are ready to dispatch them to every corner of the world to jeopardise Israel and America’s interests. We are only waiting for the Supreme Leader’s green light to take action. If America wants to ignite World War Three … we welcome it,” he said.

Will we allow these thugs to dictate our national security and foreign policy?

**** UPDATE ****

The U.S. has given Israel one more week to inflict maximum damage to Hezbollah.  This is too bizarre to be true!  I feel like I am in an episode of the Twilight Zone.  In other news, the FBI is concerned about Hezbollah members on U.S. soil and what they will do if the violence escalate.  Of course, we blogged on this several days ago.

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The Jerusalem Post is reporting that:

Forty to fifty percent of Hizbullah’s military capability has been destroyed in the six days of the IDF counter-attack following last Wednesday’s Hizbullah raid in northern Israel, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

The IDF, it is understood, believes it needs another week or so minimum to achieve its military goals in terms of alleviating Hizbullah’s capacity to threaten Israel. 

My question: how would they know this without boots on the ground?  Here is the problem.  As long as Hezbollah has men with AK-47s who can run around screaming Allahu Akbar after this is all over, they will claim victory.  This absolutely has to be a grand slam by Israel.  There is no in between, and I fear that Israel holds the fate of the war on terror in their hands.  Radical, militant Islam is emboldened, or it is defeated, and this battle will prove decisive.

Will Israel send boots in, or will they try to do this with sanitized air power and stand-off weapons like artillery?  How will they know about those thousands of rockets inside of homes, buried in the hillsides …

Still watching.

**** UPDATE #1 ****

Iran says through the AP:

TEHRAN, Iran – No part of Israel is safe in the current fighting with Lebanon, Iran’s parliamentary speaker warned Tuesday, referring to the range of guerrilla rockets.

Speaking to a crowd of thousands of anti-Israel demonstrators in Palestine Square, Tehran, Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad Adel told Israelis: “The towns you have built in northern Palestine (Israel) are within the range of the brave Lebanese children. No part of Israel will be safe.”

While the speaker is not among the most influential office-bearers in Iran, Haddad Adel’s comments call into question the Tehran government’s official position that it is not involved in the conflict between Israel and Lebanon. 

There is nothing called into question because there is no question.  Iran is behind it all.

Still watching …

**** UPDATE #2 ****

Bill Roggio over at the Counterterrorism Blog has a roundup of information related to a potential new “buffer zone” right at the border.  It appears that the calculus is not an overwhelming destruction of Hezbollah:

Israel is currently signaling it is interested in establishing a buffer zone on the Israeli border, and not planning a major ground invasion of Lebanon and a large scale advance into the Bekaa Valley. “One of the aims of the [military] operation is to establish a security area in Lebanon, without the presence of IDF soldiers,” Defense Minister Amir Peretz said. “Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz declared that the IDF currently had much better alternatives than to launch a major ground incursion into Lebanon,” reports the Jerusalem Post.

The post ends by saying:

The continual launch of longer range rockets into Israel may change the calculus. Today, the Israeli Air Force destroyed “at least one long-range Iranian missile capable of hitting Tel Aviv.”

I rather hope that Israel revisits the calculus of the current battle.  I am not entirely sure what one long range missile has to do with anything?

***** UPDATE #3 *****

The Washington Times has a good piece on Israeli air capabilities:

Israel is in the best position militarily in its history to mount air strikes against Iran, after a decade of buying U.S.-produced long-range aircraft, penetrating bombs and aerial refueling tankers.
    Tel Aviv has ratcheted up the volume in attacking the hard-line Islamic regime as it fights the Iranian-backed Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. In the past, Israeli politicians have talked openly of attacking Iranian nuclear sites to prevent the U.S.-designated terror state from building atomic warheads.
    Israel has purchased 25 $84 million F-15I (I for Israel) Ra’am, a special version of the U.S. F-15E long-range interdiction bomber. It also is buying 102 of another long-range tactical jet, the $45 million F-16I Sufa. About 60 have been delivered.
    The Jewish state also is buying 500 U.S. BLU-109 “bunker buster” bombs that could penetrate the concrete protection around some of Iran’s underground facilities, such as the uranium enrichment site at Natanz. The final piece of the enterprise is a fleet of B-707 air-to-air refuelers that could nurse strike aircraft as they made the 900-mile-plus trip inside Iran, dropped their bombs and returned to Israel.
    “They have the capability to strike Iran,” said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas G. McInerney, a former fighter pilot who has trained with Israelis. “It would be limited, though. They could do 30 to 40 ‘aim points’ in the array. I’m not worried about them hitting the targets. They will suffer losses, but they are capable of doing it.” 

The piece goes on to discuss the fact that Israel has pressured the U.S. on Iran and potential nuclear weapons.

Still watching … and wondering if and when Iran will be dealt with and by whom?

**** UPDATE #4 ****

A view from Israel.  Saul Singer writes a piece carried over at NRO today.  A tantalizing paragraph follows:

Not a single mayor, or even a man-on-the-street can be found, even in the bomb shelters of our bombarded cities, who wants this war to stop a moment before the IDF has finished the job, and the threat from the north is permanently erased.

While the secularists want to bury it, ignore it, deny it and otherwise erase the memory of it, America has Christianity as its roots.  It is at its foundation a Christian nation.  This is true not only in the cultural morays, but in the system of laws we follow down to the customary expectations for smaller social units such as family and church.  One case in point would be the expectation for honesty.

The idea of honesty is embedded in our professional organizations, state licenses, medical system, judicial system, voting system, tax collection system, and most if not all other social “systems” in our country.  While it is recognized that sin has affected man and thus we all need to be wary rather than gullible, it is common to see dishonesty as a scandal.  It isn’t a good thing to get caught with your “hand in the cookie jar,” or cheating on an examination, or lying on a resume, or cutting corners in your profession.  People do it, but it is still generally understood to be morally wrong, and so this understanding suppresses the practice of it.  This understanding comes from our heritage.

We have treated Iraqi testimony and statements essentially like we would the testimony of Americans (i.e., assume that there is a general expectation of honesty).  This may be a fatal flaw in how we see the country of Iraq (or in fact, the entire middle east).  I have posted before on the fact that I believe that we can find someone to testify to just about anything in at least certain sections of Iraq (when speaking of so-called U.S. “atrocities”).  See Truth or Consequences in Iraq, for example.  But until reading what I did today, I did not know how ingrained deceipt was in Iraqi culture.  In my search of Haditha coverage during my “Haditha Roundups,” I don’t know how I missed this perspective entitled “Haditha: Reasonable Doubt.”  I will quote from it at length:

There is a possibility that Iraqi eyewitness sources’ credibility may fall apart in the event of a trial. It has happened before in similar cases. The reasons are deep rooted in tribal culture.

A British case which speaks directly to the credibility of tribal witnesses and to the Islamic tribal tradition of “blood money

I have said before that I wanted to write a post on “100 Reasons that McCain will Never be President.”  It would simply be too wearisome to write, but I will give a little primer on this subject as well as a few links that may clear up some things.

First, read a commentary out of the L.A. Times (hat tip to Polipundit) entitled “The hunt for the real McCain.”  Then, go over and look at a Slate commentary entitled “The Closet McCain.”  Then, go read Mark Levin’s “John McCain, Weak on Defense.”  Finally, go read “The Liberal Case for McCain.”

Here are some points to ponder for anyone who truly considers themselves to be conservative:

1. He is in favor of government-funded embryonic stem-cell research.
2. He has said, “certainly in the short term or even in the long term, I would not support the repeal of Roe vs. Wade.”
3. With Joe Lieberman he co-sponsored legislation to close the gun-show loophole and reduce greenhouse gas emissions in compliance with Kyoto accords.
4. He was one of only six Republican Senators to vote against the Federal Marriage Amendment.
5. He betrayed his party to join the so-called “gang of fourteen” to end the filibuster threat of judicial nominees.
6. He supported the Dubai port deal.
7. He was the father of the manifestly unconstitutional campaign finance reform.
8. He is an open-border advocate (i.e., he favors the amnesty program and increased legal immigration, legal immigration that in the end would make illegal immigration unnecessary, another way of saying that he supports the Senate immigration bill).
9. He has led an effort to diminish the traditional war-power authority of the President.
10. He is no friend of religious conservatives, having said that he would kick the religious-right leaders “right in the ass.”

Well, this is only ten reasons John McCain will never be President (i.e., he will not get the Republican nomination — ever).  I’m winded now, so I will catalogue the other 90 reasons for a later time.

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In followup to my commentary “Israel Hesitating on Hezbollah,” I would point to a good analysis entitled Israel-Hezbollah Fighting Yet to Reach its Zenith.  The commentary begins:

The fighting between Israel and the Hezbollah, which is backed by Syria and Iran, has still not reached its zenith. The Israel Defense Forces’ operational plans against the Shi’ite organizations have not yet been carried out. The next two days are the most critical and a lot depends on whether Tehran decides to take a chance and authorize Hezbollah to launch long-range missiles with more powerful warheads. This is a capability Hezbollah still retains, despite the heavy blows it has suffered in the IDF air strikes. 

It appears that our initial assessment was correct, that this is a staged and progressive response, but also an incomplete one.  I still doubt that Hezbollah will be utterly destroyed.  Further, the U.S. may put pressure to accept U.N. peacekeepers (Putin has said he would consider them), and Israel may cave to international pressure.

This would be profoundly stolid and dense.  The U.N. has proven for decades that they are impotent to the point of being laughingstocks, and Hezbollah has proven for decades that they will not stop until Israel is destroyed.

What is Israel waiting on?

**** UPDATE ****

Michele Malkin is blogging on Israel-Hezbollah.  She has a link to a recent article “Israel Hammers at Lebanese Infrastructure,” which discusses the recent incursion of infantry into southern Lebanon but the rapid withdrawal of the same.  This is about the most schizophrenic thing I have ever seen.

**** UPDATE #2 ****

Ehud Olmert appears defiant.  It is hard to know what their intentions are.  Also, minor typographical and editorial corrections to original post.  Not enough coffee before posting …

**** UPDATE #3 ****

Matt Drudge is reporting:

Israeli police detain Al Jazeera Jerusalem bureau chief for second time in two days
Mon Jul 17 2006 08:15:48 ETIsraeli police on Monday detained the Jerusalem bureau chief of the Arab satellite station Al-Jazeera for the second time in two days, the journalist told Israel Radio as he was being taken into custody for questioning.

It is a sign of the times.  Why are they concerned about Al-Jazeera informing Hezbollah about the efficiency of their target aquisition and hitting (even if accidentally by showing footage)?  Because they appear to be treating this as a low-intensity conflict.  I can be persuaded otherwise, but it seems that Israel is concerned about tape footage assisting Hezbollah when they should already have been inside southern Lebanon dismantling Hezbollah.  Israel appears on the surface to be weak in this fight when police are hounding so-called “journalists” rather than tanks destroying Hezbollah installations.

**** UPDATE #4 ****

Hezbollah rejects cease-fire talky-talk.

Michael Fumento sent me a note linking to an update of his “Band of Brothers” article (The Weekly Standard).  Go on over to his web site and take a look at both his blog and two newsletters directly from Ramadi.  Oh, by the way.  Michael intends to go back to Ramadi in September.

Band of Brothers Update

Michael Fumento sent me a note linking to an update of his “Band of Brothers” article (The Weekly Standard).  Go on over to his web site and take a look at both his blog and two newsletters directly from Ramadi.  Oh, by the way.  Michael intends to go back to Ramadi in September.

Band of Brothers Update