terrifying simplifications:
My own dark suspicion is that the neoconservatives in the U.S. - the powerful and secretive few that they are - actually believe that they can use these kind of provocations to homogenize the Islamic threat, bring everybody forward, radicalize them, and then bomb the hell out of them.LeCarre/Jyllands-Posten/StarTribune 05.09.06
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Instead of "failure in Lebanon", instead of the Israeli army beaten to a stand-off and finally submitting to a cease-fire, with the next stage of the game wide-open and unknown, try seeing it as a controlled and premeditated series of relatively precise and calculated moves.
By invading and then sort of withdrawing from Lebanon - or at least retiring to their corner like a winded boxer, claiming no new territory - the Israelis don't look like a colonizing invader whose might and intent, in context, are becoming scarily parallel to Germany's in the Anschluss.
As in any other military campaign, the element of surprise is key.
Public attitudes have incalculable weight now, and the linkage of information is so profound and rapid that those attitudes can shift dramatically within hours, even though the recognition of that power is almost a proprietary secret. It wouldn't do to have the public, especially the American public, wake up suddenly to how thoroughly and profoundly they've been lied to and taken advantage of, and it won't do to have the underdogs exposed as just as the opposite. Not yet anyway.
Instead they look - from a distance, through the fog of propaganda and an ever more tightly controlled media - like what they're representing themselves as being: victims, defending themselves against terrorist attack.
Flawed, less than glamorously competent, unable to win.
So that the next move will be much easier to sell to the people who are paying for it, and will inevitably require greater force.
In order to win they'll have to...
It's very much as though the stage is being set for a far more blatant and deadly campaign.
To bomb the hell out of them.
