cheapie said:well...that, and the fact that the bad guys hide out near hospitals, schools, etc. but i still agree with your point.
Kinda tricky to defend your home town by not being near it. This accusation is levelled at Palestinians over and over again, but in practice if the battleground is your neighbourhood you really don't have any choice. The days of fighting in big fields went out with the Battle of the Somme in the last century. Even the US Military knows that, that is what all this 4GW crapola is about.
With reference to Lebanon, the IDF is conducting that war in a manner that is virtually indistinguishable from the Blitzkrieg that ******'s Wehrmacht used against France in '39. The IDF is attacking fixed defences with total air, land and sea superiority. The IDF is using a very old fashioned battle plan to fight an irregular force, it works great against fixed defences and standing armies, but as the Wehrmacht found out it was utterly shite against a Resistance movement comprised of irregulars and volunteers.
While I'm on the topic of the IDF and the seperation of Military and Civillian stuff... The IDF has children hanging around it's Artillery Posts. In return for their company the kids get to scrawl messages of hatred onto 155mm shells at Artillery Posts... This is not a new thing either, and it is somewhat inevitable because IDF barracks exist within communities, as do ammunition dumps, Artillery Posts, Communications Posts, Sentry Towers, Machine Gun Emplacements and so on. The IDF uses conscription which means that practically *every* Israeli household supplies the IDF with personnel, and Conscripts take Army issue weapons and ammunition home with them too... In Israel the military is frequently and intregal part of the household.
Contrast that with the Palestinian or Lebanese "militants", they are *all* volunteers. The average Lebanese and Palestinian household has bugger all to do with the business of terminal violence, yet we see the IDF use this as an excuse over and over again to destroy houses and murder civillians.