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Two excellent stories in Asia Times reinforce what I said the other day regarding the Israel-Hezbollah war in Lebanon.

Sami Moubayed writes tha Hezbollah is banking on home-ground advantage to withstand the Israeli assault. Moubayed notes that Hezbollah is indigenous to Lebanon. Unlike the Palestinians when they were driven out of Lebanon by the Israelis in 1982, Hezbollah has strong allies in its home country. He also notes another strength of Hezbollah: its guerilla doctine.

Guerrilla warfare, by definition, operates with small, mobile and flexible combat groups that do not wear uniforms and can blend with society, hide in forests, mountains and bunkers, and avoid being spotted as "the enemy target". They do not have a front line. Today, one cannot find similar Hezbollah military bases and training camps in Lebanon. As a Western observer put it, when walking through south Lebanon, one can feel Hezbollah but one cannot see Hezbollah.

Pepe Escobar reiterates this theme:

...Hezbollah's asymmetrical war effort is absorbing everything thrown at it. Resistance is fueled by a mix of beggar's banquet anger, creative military solutions and Shi'ite martyr spirit. Hezbollah fighters are using olive-green uniforms to confuse the Israelis. According to Jane's Weekly, Hezbollah has done a perfect Vietcong - its fighters operating in a network of underground reinforced bunkers and command posts near the Lebanese-Israeli border almost unassailable by Israel Defense Force bombs.

Escobar also ties the invasion to the Neo-Conservative plans for the new middle east and finds those plans lacking.

So this is the way the "war on terror" ends - not with a single bang but with the multi-sonic bangs of asymmetrical actors getting re-energized in their fight against the US-Israel axis. The Israeli army could not put down a Shi'ite guerrilla outfit in southern Lebanon - nor a bunch of stone-throwing Palestinian kids, for that matter. The US Army could not cope with a bunch of scruffy Sunni Arabs armed with fake Kalashnikovs. Sunnis or Shi'ites, stateless or in failed states, freedom fighters or "terrorists", they simply will not go away.

Pursuing their own logic, equally impatient Washington neo-cons and Israeli Likudniks would cherish nothing better than the wholesale destruction of civilian infrastructure in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon, and then in Syria and Iran.

What happened in Iraq, and is still happening in Gaza and now in Lebanon, spells that the world will have to get used to a new reality. But against this, the asymmetricals will not only be lurking in the shadows; they will retaliate.

Another "quick victory" turns to dust in the harsh reality of the Mid-East.