Israel and Lebanon....Who Won?

All the blogosphere armchair quarterbacks are parsing the Hezb'alla "win" over Israel these days. Some say Israel won and some say Hezb'allah won, depending on the reader's political and/or religious affiliation.

I think they both lost, and the Lebanese Shia lost the most. They lost their homes and the things that most of us Americans take for granted, like a roof over our heads, the grocery store, electricity and refridgeration, the local gas station, and roads that actually GO somewhere. While Hassan Nassrallah preens from his spider hole and proclaims Hezb'alla's "victory," thousands of his constituents are homeless, jobless and broke. These are regular people who have children to feed and who are now faced with starvation and homelessness, just because Nassrallah decided to kidnap a couple of Israeli soldiers. Of course, in Nasseallah's head, it was "business as usual," behind that kidnapping. In other words, "we take one or two of yours and you return a couple HUNDRED of ours." Fair deal, huh? What he got instead was Israel's refusal to do business as usual, and a near decapitation of Hezb'alla's infrastructure, as well as nearly 1000 Lebanese dead, along with the death rattle of their fledgling economy and the loss of their tourist season for this year, and probably the next 4 or 5 years, due to rebuilding.

Wow, with victories like that, who needs defeat?

The Israelis lost in this conflict, also. They lost some of their vaunted invincibility. They've been shown to have clay feet, and so given the Islamic radicals hope for the eventual possibility that the Israelis might be wiped from the earth some day. Maybe not today, but some day.