I don't actually believe that military actions can ever, or perhaps rarely ever, help - I am a pacifist.

But sure, if they wanted to police" Hezbollah, then the only decent way to do it - within the rules of war and the rule of law - where you can be as sure as possible that you are not targetting civilians, wittingly or unwittingly, is to fight face to face - just like we had to do on the streets of Belfast and Derry.

However, Israel said right at the beginning they were "going to set back Lebanon by twenty years" and more recently that the aim *was* in fact to clear the area of everyone.

So you can claim that their aim was "merely" to police Hezbollah. They seem to be saying otherwise, or at least that their idea of policing is to clear a few hundred square kilometers of anything larger than a gnat, regardless of how many innocents that displaces.

It's a right royal fuck up and holding Israel to account for its actions long before now might have shown up the injustice of what they have been doing and prompted different options weeks ago.

The anger that burns in me, however, is righteous anger about the people who are dying and being displaced - and who are increasingly lost in the language of geo-political ambitions.

My contention is that warrior politicians are getting round what was expected in war after the horrendous killing fields of the first half of the twentieth century by claiming that they do this, that and the other to avoid "collateral damage", as if that makes it all okay.

That "collateral damage" is eminently forseeable in the sort of tactics Israel has been playing. That "collateral damage" is someone's mother, someone's child, someone's livelihood, someone's home.

The something more than the population of Northern Ireland has been displaced. What's right or proportionate about that?"

Let's get this very well armed" stuff into some perspective. Even Hezbollah say they have 13,000 various "katyusha" type rockets.

These are crap. They're battlefield saturation weapons - not targetted - you fire off a volley of up to 48 at a time and see where they land.

In the first two weeks, they fired some 2500 of them against Israel's 40,000 artillery munitions - no doubt the numbers are rising proportionately as the weeks go by - the difference is that Israel will have tens of thousands more delivered by air from Oxfordshire while Hezbollah will run out in a few days.

I don't hold a brief for Hezbollah. I think they are criminals and terrorists who chose to take what may well have been a legitemate grievance (the imprisonment of Lebanese by Israel) out by unacceptable means - kidnapping a couple of Israeli military (note - military, at least) personnel.

But the pounding southern Lebanon has taken is no way proportionate to the threat posed by this comparatively definitely NOT "very well armed" criminal gang.

Further, if that criminal gang turns out to be the only group willing and able to stand up to people bombing your villages and, self-avowedly now, clearing whole swathes of the population, is it any different from self-defense to join them?

However, I am a pacifist. I simply do not believe that fighting does anything other than kill innocents, and always the poorest and least able to defend themselves are the worst hit.

While Hezbollah are a criminal terrorist gang, Israel are a nation state. Bound by the rules they have agreed to keeping as a nation state.

Yes, they should have sent in ground troops straight away in some form or another. It's not as if we're talking vast areas here - not much different from sending a few squad cars from Oxford to Chipping Norton of an evening to quell some disturbance - and Israel are reputed to have this in and out SAS type strike capability.

And that's what's needed to avoid civilian casualties. People on the ground fighting eyeball to eyeball with people you can see in front of you are a threat because they're pointing guns at you and won't put them down when asked.

It's not rocket science, it's just political will (to committing soldiers who might die instead of remote control destruction from behind the sights of a 155mm self-propeled gun). The IRA were almost certainly better armed decades ago than Hezbollah are now, and we didn't need or want to do all this. We even held inquiries and inquests whenever a non-combatant ended up dead - will Israel hold an inquest into Qana and god knows wherever else? And what good will it be if they do?

An eye for an eye will make the world go blind. And Hezbollah don't need to agree to anything, there simply needs to be a mechanism by which the rule of law can stop them, or failing that, prosecute and punish them if they continue to behave criminally."

So, Jock, as I understand it you advocate a ground invasion. Given this is what Israel are now doing, I take it you support them? Or does the previous action (involving air strikes) invalidate your preferred course of action (ground invasion). If so you are in a curious logical position. That is: in favour of a ground invasion as long as it is not preceded by air-strikes; once air-strikes are undertaken there is no justification for a ground invasion, despite that the original aim for which you thought a ground invasion was justified (disarming Hizbollah, I assume) has not yet been achieved.