Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: the Second Lebanon War was a collective suicide operation

On July 12th a year and a half ago, Israel  faced a genuine problem.
Hizbullah  provoked us, killed our soldiers, and abducted  two of
them. Just like a conditioned reflex, following a brief meeting, the
government rushed to respond with a military operation. What for? As
is traditionally the case, the leaders resorted to doublespeak:
Officially they declared that it was meant to bring the abducted
soldiers back home. Unofficially they said that this operation was
meant to eliminate Hizbullah once and for all.
What logic is there in embarking on such operation? Without
intelligence information, how could we find the abducted soldiers in
that cursed country? Without knowing the exact location, how could we
hurt Hizbullah fighters who know the terrain better than us?
Yet what could we do - a whole country was swept into a baseless
fantasy and demanded to see some blood. And when the people want
blood, the government gives it what it wants.
And that's what happened. Massive bombings of civilian populations.
Attacks on infrastructure. The killing of innocents who were not even
related to the abductions or to Hizbullah. We all saw what we were
doing, to them and to ourselves, yet we still demanded more. And more.
The typical discourse in those days was belligerent and merciless: How
we were going to blow the hell out of them. How we were going to hit
them hard. How we were going to sever Nasrallah's head. This is how
many people spoke back then. Maybe even you, the ones reading these
lines, spoke like that.
And when one embarks on a pathetic mission, the result is disastrous.
We don't need Winograd to know that.
So why did we embark on that war? Because in Israel force is still the
default choice in any security crisis. Even the serial refutation of
the force thesis in Sderot, Gaza, the territories and Lebanon failed
to break this Pavlovian conditioning of ours. It is true that we had
some sobering moments in these past few years, yet the force and the
complete confidence that we are completely right still blinds us.
The question is how to act when we don't have the answer to a painful
problem. Do we need to do something, just in order to do something?
Does the fact we have no answer require us to act at any price, even
at the price of suicide?
The Second Lebanon War was a collective suicide operation. The
government led it, the media offered massive support, yet the
overwhelming majority of the public demanded this blood. We did not
even try a diplomatic move. We did not even wait a week to weigh,
examine, consult, exert international pressure, see if we can utilize
secret diplomatic channels, drum up global support. All of this was
not right for us. We took the gun, and fired. We shot ourselves too.
I wish to remind everyone who reads these lines that they likely also
have a part in this blindness. I certainly hope that the commission
will throw the leaders who led this move to history's graveyard. Yet
what about us? What will we learn from this war? And when will we
learn it?
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3500330,00.html

 The Second Lebanon War was a collective suicide operation.
Il numero degli idioti cresce esponenzialmente.
-Stefano