Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

It has been awhile since I last written anything. I was waiting to see what happens to the cease fire. So far not much has happened. Hezbollah is taking advantage of the cease fire to regroup and do some rebuilding among the populace and thus gain more support in the future. As I have said when this started, all Hezbollah has to do is survive and they win. As it turned out things went worse than I expected for the Israelis. I thought they will at least crippled Hezbollah and may kill some of their leaders, possibly Nasrallah. Even then I thought Hezbollah could rebuild given the anger directed at the Israelis for the destructions. I thought Israel would win the battles but become less safe later as a result of this. This and the number of innocent lives that would be lost caused me to say a cease fire should have been imposed by the U.S. and the UN after that first week. Unfortunately the battle dragged on for more than 4 weeks with many lives lost and now the Israelis and the U.S. are no better off than 4 weeks ago. In fact the ability of Hezbollah to fight much better than expected along with the blunders of the Israelis military, it can be argued that things are worse off for the Israelis than if they had agreed to a cease fire 4 weeks ago. The Israeli military machine does not seem as invincible to the Arabs now as before. This can only encourage more confrontation attempts by Hezbollah, Hamas and possibly the Iranians in the future.

In terms of the peacekeeping force it will be interesting who will actually show up. The French are sending troops but not in great numbers. Some of the nations willing to send significant numbers include Bagadesh, Indonesia and Malaysia. These are Muslim nations which the Israelis don't want. Turkey is an acceptable Muslim nation but they will want some reward later, perhaps against the Kurds in Turkey who want to form an independent country. Also it will be ironic that the sons of the Ottoman empire which dominated this region will be back! The Lebanese troops will not be much use and won't disarm Hezbollah. So the peackeeping effort won't be sufficient. The only good thing is that Hezbollah wants to regroup as it already achieved most what it wanted. So I don't think there will be restart of the war in the near future. But given time, I predict Lebanon will be a battle ground again.