Good For the Foreign Office

I haven't had a lot of cause to say that recently, but this time, they're saying more or less what I've been thinking:

And it's very difficult, I think, to understand the kind of military tactics that have been used. You know, if they're chasing Hezbollah, then go for Hezbollah. You don't go for the entire Lebanese nation.--Kim Howells, British Foreign Office Minister.

Yeah. I'm afraid this is what's been bothering me about the whole mess. Is it really a sensible strategy for Israel (with tacit U.S. encouragement) to devastate Lebanon in order to pursue a cadre of terrorists in the southern part of the country? Doesn't that risk busting up the Lebanese central government and restarting the factional warfare that helped fuel the formation of these terrorist groups in the 1970s and 1980s? Why would Israel want to have that nightmare on their northern borders again? Hell, the Lebanese only recently kicked the Syrians out of Lebanon. Doesn't chaos there form a basis for their coming back in?

Israeli officials, in every interview I've seen, tend to focus on their right to engage in this kind of warfare. They were attacked, they say, and they're responding. Fine. But wouldn't it be better if their response actually brought Israel closer to desirable goals, instead of prolonging the misery and spreading it around?

I don't like the various World War analogies that local opportunists have been spewing in hopes of attracting the stupid vote, but there is one thing that George Kennan said about World War I that seems appropriate. I don't have the book with me, but he observed that World War I was evidence that suffering didn't always make people better, that war frequently gave people the excuse to believe self-flattering lies and imagine only the worst about their adversaries. War is intoxicating stuff, and it looks to me as if the Israeli government is already pretty sloshed.