Beware of cavemen bearing missiles

Almost five years since 9-11 and we still haven't learned a thing about our enemies, James Wolcott argues. Sounding unnervingly like Bill O'Reilly – or the most intelligent neo-con in the room – Wolcott argues that our inclination to view al Qaeda, Sunni insurgents, and now Hezbollah as smelly cave-dwellers is precisely what has made victories over all three forces impossible (but it has made the Beltway Boys and its liberal and conservative consultants healthy, wealthy, and wise):

We still regard them as savage primitives of low cunning who sporadically lash out. Our commentators and military strategists suffer from a catastrophic failure of imagination, unable or unwilling to see the world through our enemies' eye and to think like them, assuming that our thought processes are superior, sufficient, and will prevail. Victor Davis Hanson's Western way of war always wins, except when it doesn't (Vietnam and, now, Iraq).

It doesn't help that nearly every Retired Military Expert on cable news spouts the same Rumsfeldian faith in technopower and the supremacy of Western intel (through spy satellites, unmanned drones, etc) and fighting capability, pointing at terrain maps as if grabbing landscape had much relevance in the era of Fourth Generation warfare. They still talk confidently about air strikes "softening up" pockets of resistance, with "mopping up" operations later to clear out the remaining riffraff.

Now it's Israeli soldiers' turn to sound stunned at the ferocity of Hezbollah fighters. I suppose these precision bombs will crush our Luddite foes.

Elsewhere, Robert Fisk describes the quandary which arises when you have American-made rockets killing Lebanese evacuees and missles of Iranian origin vaporizing Israeli citizens in Haifa.