Israel v Hezbollah: The Card Game

Says Donald Sensing at Winds of Change:

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Despite the barrages of essays across media and blog sites about Israel's "disproportionate" response, Israel could not retaliate against Hezbollah merely tit-for-tat. Hezbollah raised the stakes with its cross-border raid, setting new terms of the long-going conflict. For Israel to respond similarly would have signaled to Hezbollah that it accepted those terms. But the terms were unacceptable.

A card-game analogy: Hezbollah raised Israel $100 and probably expected Israel to call. Instead, Israel raised Hezbollah $1,000. Hezbollah can't match it in military capital. But Israel may have miscalculated whether Hezbollah can call or even raise in political capital. All Hezbollah's chips may not yet be on the table.

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Commentary

As usual, Donald Sensing thinks and writes well. My initial thoughts on the situation was this action could be prelude to taking on Iran by removal of the threat closer to Israel.

One important thing to consider: whether we or Israel takes on Iran, one of the first things Hezbollah and/or Hamas would do is to conduct operations against Israel. Now, Israel has, and will go on, attriting their forces to make the threat of their terror operations less effective than before. I am sure this benefit was one of the factors in the response to Hezbollah and Hamas once those terror groups foolishly upped the ante.Now, they have lost years of cache-building and tunnel work.

Being of the Jacksonian persuasion, I would like to see similar operations carried out against the United Nations.