Getting to the Truth

At last, an honest, fair and balanced report on the situation in Beirut, Southern Lebanon and Northern Israel, by a Washington Post journalist, William M. Arkin, who went there and wrote about what he saw and experienced:

What struck me about the bombing, in both countries, was that you could see the destruction and completely misread what it meant. In Beirut, the destruction in reality is efficient and impressive. The destruction in Israel, on the other hand, is random and scattered. When Hezbollah rockets were fired on Israel, landing meant success.

So here is the truth: Israel did not do anything close to what it was capable of doing. Hezbollah did all it could.

Because Israel is hyper-modern and it has the technology to exact such a concentrated result, it is capable of creating visible and jarring images.

And, of course, Israel is Israel. That is why the non-aligned countries condemned "Israeli aggression in Lebanon" this weekend, befuddled about Lebanon and Hezbollah: Such an easy target.

I recognize that one can’t analyze what happened in Lebanon in the 34-day, Israel-Hezbollah war without walking into a minefield.

Also, what happened can’t be reduced to 1,000 words. There is complex history, the players are not necessarily as they represent themselves, there are intramural battles going on about military force and politics, there are secrets and there is even the difficulty of reading what one is looking at accurately.

Read the first part of the report here.