Don't take this as an expert opinion.

This quote on Yoni's site pretty well sums up a major rule of warfare:

"[T]his is just not a realistic way to prosecute a war. We need to enter kill the enemy and hold the ground. This is the way armies win wars."

I respect those who have the training and the experience in fighting wars and so my comments are just the thoughts of an amateur.

In conventional warfare, it seems obvious that what Yoni's source notes is true. The sides establish fronts and battle lines and duke it out.

But I'm not sure if that rule applies as well to guerrilla wars where the enemy mixes with the local civilian population and pops up everywhere to kill your troops. The difficulty is in getting the enemy to come out and fight where you can identify them and kill them. If you do it the way Yoni's friend suggests, you can't very well allow people back into the conquered territory without a very good way of sifting out the Hezbollah. An example of failure to hold territory is Vietnam. An example where it failed is Russia's experience in Afghanistan. I think the question is how many troops it takes and how well you can protect them from hit and run attacks.

Another approach is the one the U.S. took in Afghanistan. You take a given area, build a fortified base, then sent out sorties to engage the enemy as intelligence comes in. Of course, that means you may end up taking the same ground again and again.

Again, I'm just trying to think these problems through for myself, unencumbered by training or experience, but it seems to me that the reason for the Geneva Conventions was to protect non-combatants to the extent possible. Israel could send in people out of uniform and try to mix them in with the locals and use the tactics of the terrorists against them, but as we've learned, the world seems to hold Western nations to the Geneva rules even when they give the terrorists a pass for violating them. Liberals tend to think that everybody, even a captured terrorist and illegal combatant, is entitled to the benefit of international law, regardless of whether he has complied with it himself. That seems like saying that we have to fight with one hand tied. These tactics seem to require that you kill as many as you must to achieve your objectives. The innocents who are killed should be charged to the illegal combatants.

I keep coming back to how /Hafez Assad dealt with the Shiite uprising in Hama. These people are used to those rules and anything less just seems to make them think you're not serious. We've done similar things in the firebombing of Dresden and Hamburg and the firebombing and use of nukes in Japan. War is a terrible thing. You have to become hardened to human suffering, yet somehow maintain your own humanity. I think most warriors learn to compartmentalize, but not spend much time feeling sorry for someone who's trying to kill you and yours. You kill him and his.

The lefties will call me a chickenhawk, because I didn't serve, but the response is that civilians opposing the war, chicken-doves if you will, have no moral authority to judge the decisions that have to be made in war.