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Part of it, perhaps, stems from a sense of offended morality: How can people who send suicide bombers to blow up buses and night clubs possibly be considered "worthy" opponents? The Palestinians and the Lebanese might ask the same question about people who fire missiles at old men in wheel chairs or wreak death and destruction on an entire country because a single Army patrol was ambushed. But that's not the point. Effectiveness in war isn't a moral attribute, and leaders who forget that fact do so at their peril -- or rather, at the peril of their troops.

This is even more speculative, but I think there could be an additional, if subtle, psychological incentive for the Israeli defense establishment to underestimate the country's non-conventional enemies. As one of my favorite Israeli writers, Meron Benvenisti, has pointed out, the IDF, like the Israeli Labor Party, has always been more comfortable treating the dispute with the Arabs as a war between states, instead of an inter-communal conflict. (Interestingly, it was the old Likud, under Menachem Begin, that was most willing to do the opposite, but then Begin was one of the hard men of the old Jewish underground, and had no illusions.)

For many Israelis, even those on the left, admitting that the war is at its core a struggle between two communities inhabiting the same piece of land opens up too many cans of worms. It calls into question the artificial distinction between Israel "proper" and the occupied territories, which in turn casts doubt on the justness and feasibility of the two-state solution -- that sacred political icon which all right-thinking people are supposed to kneel before and worship. It also tends to reduce the Israeli Army to the same status as the Bosnian Serb militia (albeit with much better hardware) and nobody, least of all the proud officers of the IDF, wants to look at themselves that way.

But discounting the inter-communal conflict as something other than "real" war also requires that those fighting it be discounted as something other than "real" soldiers. If Pappe is right, this seems to have begat a peculiar mixture of loathing and self-loathing in the minds of many Israeli officers -- not the best psychological state for accurately estimating the enemy's capabilities and intentions.

If this revulsion (and painful memories of past misadventures in South Lebanon) have carried over into similar attitudes towards Hezbollah, then the Israelis have made a very big mistake, and are paying for it now.

That is the real problem. Peace would require either concessions Israel doesn't want to make, or a major change in Palestinian public opinion. Outside actors -- others states in particular -- most certainly do inject themselves in the situation for more-or-less cynical reasons, but they don't create the situation. Rather, they inject themselves into it because the situation exists and doing so serves their ends.

Moreover, the idea of the United States simultaneously giving a blank check to the all-out war he wishes Israel would wage, pursuing a war against the Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon and the mullahs of Iran and this not somehow turning in to a disaster in Baghdad isn't even crazy - it's just stupid. Were Bush to do as Kristol reccomends, the US Army would find itself immediately besieged by Sadr and the rest of the Shia population. A war against Syria, Iran, and Hezbollah could easily be the one thing to end the ongoing Iraqi civil war - uniting the Iraqis against the Americans.

You would think that Kristol, given his advocacy of America's current Middle East disaster, would either a) have the good sense to not advocate further nonsense, or b) have no further paid employment. Obviously, the iron law of right-wing punditry still holds: It is impossible for conservatives to say anything too stupid or wrong.