From the Ottawa Citizen

For Israel, the war was equally inevitable. No freely-elected government can stand and watch its citizens attacked and terrorized. For years Hezbollah had been dropping Katyushas into Israel's northern farms, without response. Since the year 2000, Israel had depended upon a final border with Lebanon, agreed by all parties through the U.N., in the hope of containing the problem. Finally Hezbollah performed a provocation larger and cockier than Israel could ignore. The capture of two IDF soldiers, infinitely more than the killing of six, was calculated to force a response. Israelis are rightly horrified at the thought of their own sons and daughters falling captive to such animals. Mere death they are accustomed to.

Those who have argued that Israel's response was "disproportionate" should learn how to feel shame. Hezbollah fired several thousand Katyusha and other rockets, almost all of them aimed at civilian targets -- and fired them from within Lebanese villages, crawling with "human shields". For more than a month, nearly a million Israelis were trapped in air raid shelters, while the devastation accumulated above them.

What would have been a proportionate response? Should Israel have lobbed a few thousand bunker-busters casually into Lebanon's villages and towns? If they had done that, would the Jew-haters and Jew-baiters of the world have shut up?

But now the ceasefire is a catastrophe for Israel to harvest, and Lebanon to share. And it was Israel's fault. Not for trying to destroy Hezbollah, but for failing to do so. A weak and stupid prime minister, Ehud Olmert, spent five crucial weeks changing his mind about what he was doing. The entire ruling establishment exposed itself as crippled by "political correctness", trying to fight against an enemy like Hezbollah, with the chief object of limiting civilian casualties.