... and get those rocket launchers out of the garage.

All well and good, but one must remember that Hezbollah DOES want civilians to get killed. In fact, that's the basis for its whole strategy.

Look, the bad guys completely understand what they are doing. This entire war has been brought to the world by the peace-creeps , mostly European, although we have some at home, who have been distorting all the Law of War concepts so as to reder our way of fighting illegal.

Because of the intellectual treatment of war as a children's schoolyard game, people like Hezbollah have been encouraged to imagine that they could shoot rockets at Israel from civilian quarters and not be shot back.

I do not concur that the position apparently attributed to the IDF that a building from which the enemy is firing may not be atacked unless we are sure that no civilians are present. That is not the LoW, and making noises as though it were encourages the enemy to fight from behind protected persons and places.

The laws of armed conflict are never a suicide pact. Human shields are not protection against return fire, only against disproportionate and indiscriminate return fire. The idea here is that this principle is not to be used to justify an intentional targeting of civilians for terror purposes on the sham excuse that some enemy combatants are present.

Lou- oj would like to know if you ever seen drawings of the minutemen firing on British regulars from farm houses along the road fron Concord to Boston. Basically the same as Hezzbolah firing rockets across national boundries from residential neighborhoods.

Hardly comparable. The Brits were the legitimate government of America. The Israelis are invaders.

And what of the "legitimate" government of Lebanon? You know, the one battered by the "legitimate" governments in Damascus and Tehran.

Wait. There are similarities between Lebanon and the minuteman hypothetical which may yield useful exposition of the Law of War.

There would be nothing wrong with the British regulars returning fire on the farmhouses from which they were receiving fire. It such case it was the minutemen who changed the status of a civilian farmhouse from a protected place to a fortification. If women and children were being exploited by the minutemen as human shields, then, as we say, stuff happens.

What the British could not do would be to punitively retaliate against the American civilians generally, by mass shootings of hostages or indiscriminate destruction of civilian property, as the Germans did in France and Belgium in WW I.

The Law of War never requires suicide. If an enemy is shooting at you from behind a human shield, you are permitted to shoot back. In such a case, the war crime was comitted by the one who fired from behind a protected person, not by the one who defended himself.

I hold that distorting the LoW in the direction of legitimizing the use of human shields and delegitimizing engaging those who are using human shields runs directly contrary to the law's purpose of preventing unnecessary suffering on the part on non-combatants.
What is happening is that the use of human shields is being rewarded and thus encouraged.

rat:

exactly--Iran and Syria have committed acts of war for which no one is holding them responsible.

The Law of War is always just a way for the powerful to claim the moral right. Neither the Colonists nor their successors could afford to observe legal niceties.