Tom Blackburn in the PBPost:

..."The people around the region and the world need to step back," President Bush explained last week, "and recognize that Hezbollah's action created a very strong reaction that, unfortunately, caused some people to lose their life, innocent people to lose their life. But on the other hand, it was Hezbollah that caused the destruction."

No. With all due respect, no. That's a playground reaction, a playground explanation and playground morals: "He called me a name, so it's his fault I hit him with that stone." Grown-ups have to do better.

Hezbollah is responsible for the damage it did. Israel is responsible for the damage it did. The Bush administration is responsible for what it did in slow motion to encourage destruction, and, since this is a democracy, Americans are responsible for what the Bush administration did. That's accountability. It's quite popular when preached to the poor in wallet, but it applies to everyone.

Every moral system with any standing has a variation of the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. For Israel facing an enemy that attacks innocents to make a statement, that isn't easy. It's hard to know what you would want done to you in response to what you wouldn't think of doing.

I'll leave it to Mideast experts (if such beings can exist) to sort out gains and losses from Israel's attack on Lebanon and the aftermath. I will just say that it was pretty depressing to hear Mr. Bush chant about getting to the "root of the problem." Which root did he mean? Careful digging would turn up roots older than the first battle of Jericho. Getting even never works because it changes the score, and if the score changes, the other side has a new need to get even.
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Proportionality is the principle that never enters President Bush's mind while he blames "evildoers." What did enter his mind is the odd notion that Iraq had something to do with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. While the United States physically punished and rhetorically freed Iraq, at the bare least 10 times as many Iraqis died as there were Americans killed on 9/11.
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Giving up the moral high ground, for starters, was not smart. Mr. Bush is now like the playground bully who relied on his brawn and stones and ran into an opponent who knows jujitsu. A lot more brain has to be added to our undoubted brawn. The whole world, including France, knows who started the fight. The onlookers would like to see us quit flailing at everyone in sight and fight smart. For our own sake, we need to consider that point of view.

Terence J. Daly, guest op-ed in NYT

...Counterinsurgency is about gaining control of the population, not killing or detaining enemy fighters. A properly planned counterinsurgency campaign moves the population, by stages, from reluctant acceptance of the counterinsurgent force to, ideally, full support.

American soldiers deride “winning hearts and minds” as the equivalent of sitting around a campfire singing “Kumbaya.” But in fact it is a sophisticated, multifaceted, even ruthless struggle to wrest control of a population from cunning and often brutal foes. The counterinsurgent must be ready and able to kill insurgents — lots of them — but as a means, not an end.

Counterinsurgency is work better suited to a police force than a military one. Military forces — by tradition, organization, equipment and training — are best at killing people and breaking things. Police organizations, on the other hand, operate with minimum force. They know their job can’t be done from miles away by technology. They are accustomed to face-to-face contact with their adversaries, and they know how to draw street-level information and support from the populace.

The police are used to functioning within legal restraints. Our armed forces, however, are used to obeying only the laws of war and the United States Uniform Code of Military Justice. Soldiers and marines are trained to respond to force with massive force. To expect them to switch overnight to using force only as permitted by a foreign legal code, enforced and reviewed by foreign magistrates and judges, is quite unrealistic. It could also threaten their survival the next time they have to fight a conventional enemy.

Forcing the round peg of our military, which has no equal in speed, firepower, maneuver and shock action, into the square hole of international law enforcement and population control isn’t working. We need a peacekeeping force to complement our war-fighters, and we need to start building it now.

If the U.S. is going to continue playing world policeman, only with the police in soldiers' uniforms, you shouldn't dismiss this op-ed as liberal namby-pamby. I think in the middle, there's a group that doesn't believe necessarily in the isolationism brand of independence, yet is realistic enough to acknowledge the limitations of "shock and awe" campaigns.