Informant38

They're freaking out about this, of course, because they're deathly afraid that if Israel is seen to fail, and fail badly, against Hizbullah, everybody and their Palestinian uncle will get it into their heads that they can take a crack at the Zionist entity. (The tough guy realists see this as a disaster in its own right; the "cry and shoot" gang frets the IDF will have to pound the West Bank and Gaza even harder to re-establish the balance of terror. Either way, it's an unacceptable outcome.)

Billmon/whiskeybar
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There's been a thread of shocked surprise in the big news venue stories about Lebanon.
That the Lebanese fighters were dug in, some of them in underground prisons where once members of Hezbullah were tortured by Israelis ironically enough, but that this has come as a surprise to Israel's military.
The lack of finesse generally, the false claims to have taken the village of Bint Jbeil, and that Lebanese ambulance with the two-foot wide whole in the exact center of the red cross on its roof - these don't match up.

During an Israeli offensive against Lebanon in 1996, artillery blasted a U.N. base at Qana in southern Lebanon, killing more than 100 civilians taking refuge with the peacekeepers

Someone's lying, well we knew that. But I mean under that or besides, in a larger context..
Israel having established the necessity of ridding the world of Hezbullah, and then having established their inability to rid the world of Hezbullah using conventional force - what's left? "Pounding them even harder" is almost naively optimistic under the circumstances.
The rumors of phosphor bombs and cluster bombs having been used already

UN monitors made ten phone calls to military commanders before the air strike that killed four of them
UN officials said that the monitors made ten phone calls to the Israeli army between 1.20pm on Tuesday - when an Israeli aircraft dropped a bomb 300 metres from the patrol base - and about 7.20pm, when the building was destroyed.

What it means isn't as clear as it might be.
Maybe Israel has crazy people flying their jets and dropping their bombs.
Right through the center of the cross on its roof.
Or maybe the crazy ones are in charge of the planes and their pilots, telling them what to do.
Or maybe something else is going on, or all three things - crazy, crazy, and something else.