Dan,
Where I agree with you, and where I don't:
Agree:
-What happened at Qana was a tragedy. There is no excuse for it.
-It's hard for the idea "IDF wants to minimize civilian casualties on both sides whereas Hezbollah wants to increase them on both sides" to compete with images of destruction.
-Some (maybe many) people will be pushed by this into Hezbollah's arms.
-It's silly (and sometimes worse, depending on what form it takes) to blame domestic critics.
Point of contention:
-I think Siniora, specifically, is fickle. Weaken Hezbollah enough militarily (not that I claim that's easy to do) and watch his pendulum swing back, maybe not to love of Israel, but to greater distance from HA.
Now here's the thing:
You're right, of course, that nobody in the Arab world cares much about blogosphere debates among conservatives.
But any military operation is going to involve tragic errors by the good side. (I'm not using scare quotes around "good," because this isn't, as I see it, a war against Lebanon; it's a war against Hezbollah. That's still the case notwithstanding Qana. (Indeed, even at Qana civilians weren't _targeted._)) There were tragic errors on the Allies' part in WWII as well.
So what does one do if one is Israel or the US? Does one never undertake a military operation? I know that's not your position.
My view: one expresses genuine regret about what happened, one takes special care in one's future actions, and one presses on in order to achieve one's objectives, which in my view at this stage still involves force more than diplomacy.
Just to be clear about those objectives: a cardinal aim of the operation is to _save/secure_ both Israeli and Lebanese lives, odd as that might sound just a day after Qana.
As for the al Jazeera factor... it certainly puts additional pressure on Israel and the US to achieve objectives as quickly as possible. I'll go further: some operations, if bungled, involve so great an al Jazeera factor if they go wrong that they may not be worth undertaking because the risk is too great.
I don't think that's where we're at with the current war. My sense is that it's still possible to set Hezbollah back significantly without too great a cost al Jazeera-wise. Some will say that this means I'm callous about civilian losses. They're wrong.
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