And the truce be told. Enon did not win our informal lottery. There was no prize anyhow, so it was just for fun. I myself actually thought the cease fire would not hold this long.

“But it’s only been a day,” said Kite. “You gotta give ‘em more credit than that.”

“Yeah, right,” spouted Enon. “These people want to fight. This cease fire is akin to a child’s ‘time out’.”

I imagined two dirty little nasty boys, one watchful eye on the sitter, and one disdainful eye on each other, waiting behind their respective wooden scissor gates for the opportunity to resume hostilities. I looked around and saw how nicely the other kids were playing together as long as these two offenders were kept locked up. I imagined how pleasant it would be to take those two little nasty boys and paddle their little asses, but everybody knows you can’t hit kids these days.

George Bush proclaimed that the Israelis won this war, while at the same time, the Arabs insist that Hezbollah were the winners. I don’t really see it either way. I know who lost though, and it was the Lebanese people. If anybody got spanked here, it was them. I don’t feel for the Lebanese government because they are ultimately responsible for what happens within their borders, and whether they were impotent, unable, or unwilling to deal with a militia like Hezbollah, the simple fact is that they did nothing for years, essentially allowing Hezbollah to grow and strengthen to the point they are at now, where even the Israelis can find them to be a formidable opponent.

That’s kind of the point I think in Hezbollah declaring victory. The simple truth is that a conventional army is ineffectual against the style of fighting that presented itself in Lebanon over the past month. In a public relations war, which is essentially what this became, the numbers of dead Lebanese civilians became more important than anything.

And the Israelis never seem to get it. They haven’t got it in Gaza either, and they’ve been killing Palestinian civilians for decades there. It doesn’t weaken their opposition, but only strengthens their opposition’s resolve. Using a helicopter gunship to fire a missile at a car, whether or not they succeed in the objective of killing a militant fighter is lost in the noise of all the nearby civilians who were also killed by the explosion. Likewise, in Lebanon, it doesn’t seem rational to drop a 500-pound bomb on an apartment building just because one of the tenants might be the enemy. All you succeed in doing is making more enemies.

Like it or not, the Israelis are in for a long haul if they don't start spending to effort on getting people to like them.