Playing by the "rules" will get you nowhere.

[Yahoo! News link]

The emasculated West has reached a new low. They seek to go into prisoner exchanges with bloodthirsty thugs who would like nothing more than the destruction of Israel and all Jewry the world over - as these exchanges are just a stop on the way - and the the Western media for once lauds Israel as if to say they're somehow heroes when they swap live Lebanese prisoners for the mangled remains of their own soldiers.

"Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a January 19 speech his group had the heads, hands and legs of soldiers left on the battlefields of the 34-day 2006 war."

Apparently, this sort of conduct is considered an act of good faith to the politically-correct and "culturally sensitive" Western media. A group of animals mutilates captured soldiers - legitimate combatants, unlike the non-state actors of Hezbollah - and demands that its opponent return its own imprisoned soldiers alive and well.

All the talk about the so-called "moral high ground" when it comes to the rules of engagement begin to wear thin after a while. Hezbollah does nothing honorable to its enemies. It wages propaganda campaigns [zombietime on the Qana ambulance attack], uses the bodies of children as props in photos, kills and mutilates legitimate POWs, then complains to the UN and all the other hand-wringing and "socially conscious" leftists about how terrible Israel is. Phrases like "unprovoked war", "illegal war", "Zionist war" come up a lot when the average college student talks about Israel's war with Lebanon in the spring of 2006. Why don't phrases like "not adhering to the Geneva convention", "desecration of soldiers' remains", or "Islamic supremacy" enter the vocabularies of these talking heads? For one, Israel can do no good.

Here's a little diagram for explaining the behaviour of leftists in regard to this situation:

-Islam/Arabs/"brown people" = oppressed, victimized, helpless (never mind the kind of victimizing and oppression that has occurred at the hands of Islamists the world over)
-anti-Israel/anti-Semitism = played off as "anti-Zionism"; as if to say "Oh, but we love Jews! We just don't love them enough to renounce our support for people who would rather see all of them burn in a lake of fire than share a national border with them."
-international law = something that only applies to developed/Western nations, because drawing attention to Saudi treatment of women and non-Muslims is "ethnocentric", "racist", or "culturally insensitive"

Such stalwart defenders of human rights have made a huge fuss over the possibility of a single-digit number of people getting waterboarded, but ask them what they think about the fact that the roads leading to Mecca re-direct non-Muslims to other places, and they'll either give you a confused look or just change the subject. Ask them how many Muslims have committed acts of terrorism in the last 10 years, and they'll stall, re-direct focus on how Muslims have been "marginalized" (gee, even when they blow themselves up in their own countries?), try to call you a "racist" (despite how Islam is a religion and not a race), or bring up the Tamil Tigers' use of suicide bombing.

Fun Fact about the Tamil Tigers: they have used a suicide bomber exactly nine times during this whole year. I guess they're going to have to step up their game if they want to give the soldiers of Muhammad a run for their money.

Anyway, enough about the glaring hypocrisies running rampant among the left, and back to the rules of war.

Are there rules for war? Should protocol be followed when you may be fighting for your own survival? As the old saying goes, "the only 'unfair' fights are the ones you lose". If one's enemy not only disregards the rules of engagement that most of the world's countries and organizations have subscribed to, but actively and flagrantly makes a point of disobeying them, all bets are off. Israel should be free to level cities and kill Hezbollah-affiliated POWs.

"Nissim Nisr, released after a six-year jail term, was greeted by Hezbollah officials in the southern village of Naqoura, where the group unexpectedly announced the release of the soldiers' remains."

Live prisoners with access to the best healthcare in any Middle Eastern prison, exchanged for body parts. Sounds like an even exchange, right? How about 'Beiruit turned to rubble and ash, along with anywhere else that Hezbollah has bases of support' for 'stop making raids into our territory and kidnapping soldiers' for a fair trade?

The Lebanese are complicit not only in their silence, but in their refusal to boot Hezbollah from their territory. For every Israeli POW killed, Israel drops a JDAM on a school, market, or hospital. Maybe that would wake up the Lebanese and get them to throw out Hezbollah (preferably with Hassan Nasrallah's head on a pike).

Rome did the same thing to Carthage: they would no longer suffer the slaughters and humiliation of their men at places like Cannae and at Lake Trasimenus. The Carthaginians had long disobeyed Rome by their refusal to recall Hannibal. They violated the armistice reached at the end of the First Punic War, and the destruction of Carthage ensured that Rome would survive. The Romans never did salt the fields of the Carthaginians, mostly because the Romans figured it would not be a good idea to destroy arable land that could be used by Rome itself. Another misconception is that the Romans slaughtered or enslaved every single civilian inside the city walls. Various sources state that Rome gave ample warning to the Carthaginians - get out, or face the wrath of Rome. Only about 10% of the city's original population remained to defend the city.

Hannibal's forces raided the Roman countryside for years, too weakened to lay siege to Rome or to attack it outright, but Hannibal was a competent enough strategist to keep the Romans on an almost constant lockdown.

Like Hannibal, Hezbollah has no "official support" from the de juris government of Lebanon, but Hezbollah is free to do as it pleases, at least when it's not hiding behind non-combatants from Israeli missiles and small arms fire. If they're willing to kill POWs and use human shields, what would make ANYONE consider them likely to follow any other rule of engagement? When one's enemy doesn't speak the language of diplomacy and instead refuses to learn it, the language of violence often suffices in that it uses no complicated jargon and there is little hidden meaning to decipher.

Long Live Israel.