Wednesday, July 19, 2006

19-Jul-06: Quotation for the day

A senior military official in the IDF's top brass, speaking anonymously to Israel's Yediot Aharanot daily newspaper yesterday:
For 10 years Hizbullah has been building capabilities, and in a number of days a considerable part of them has been destroyed. Hizbullah leaders know that what was won't be anymore. For six years we did not respond, we settled for limited operations in light of Hizbullah's provocations. We wanted calm for the residents of the north. Suddenly we took off the gloves. We said, no more, and we are now creating a situation which can cause the diplomatic campaign to create a new situation, which is much better... It's not right to look at how many rockets were fired today or yesterday, like it isn't right to look at how many sorties we carried out. What matters is the end, what these activities tell Hizbullah, and what they convey to the whole of the Middle East.
Though Israeli society surely does not want things to be this way, what we - and most of the world - have on our hands, even if it is not obvious yet to everyone, is an ongoing war.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Well put. This particular part of the war looks and feels like conventional war but it is not a conventional enemy on the other side, it is a terror organization working from inside a sovereign country (Leb.) that has basically lost it's sovereignty and doesn't even seem to know it. How do you make peace with a country that has so many innocent civilians and which wants to protect them but which surrenders it's territory and it's foreign policy to a man like Nasrallah and his cohort? This is a much more complex situation than almost any other war.