Great article, thanks Mr. Plocker!

Congratulations, let us hope that the right people are reading this.

was better to explain this for the israeli people, before 12 of July....

Olmert and Peretz must resign immediately. They will never again be voted to such a trusted position.

The problem is lack of strong and trustworthy leader in Israel. Netaniyahu ? Lat time all he could say was "Clinton cheat me". Israel don't need leader who is cheated so easily. Avifdor Liberaman ? Too much associations with criminals, too radical. Israel will be in turmoil until a new leader prove himself.

Check your shoes-They were proabably made in Vietnam!!!!! Nike & New Balance Won!!

I recently visited an Arab country and was surprised to find 20 domestic newspapers on sale everywhere each with a very low quality - spelling mistakes, factual mistakes, all articles as op ed pieces etc. Well Yedioth seems worse. The 'facts' are totally wrong here. From idiotic trivialities such as Mark Kurlansky's "new book" 1968 (it was published a few years ago) to Hezbollah planned the "Tet Offensive" for "years". What crap! Hezbollah and Israel have been at war for years. No cease-fire, no treaty. Israel regularly raids Lebanon and kidnaps Lebanese. So Hezbollah simply saw an opportunity to take 2 POWs and did so. As for the Tet Offensive, it should be pretty obvious that the scale is hugely different. Lastly, Israel DID lose in Lebanon - and Israel continues to exist just fine. That should put an end to the idiot messianism of "we are in an existential struggle", but instead idiot losers like this man keep churning up their crud. Israel is clearly a place where there is too much money going into the Lie Industry.

Walker Cronkite is alive and well and in retirement although he still makes very special comments and still contributes to journalism in his highly influential manner. He is not a "late" anything.

I've read some of your articles. The one on 'Qana' was revealing! You should read more of Caroline Glick's articles - you still won't have an original thought, but you'll get better information to repeat. And as a MORAL guide - you may find more rewarding work at the BBC. About that little country called Viet Nam - "Hizbullah is not the Vietcong. The United States does not share a border with Vietnam, and its military presence there was a mistake to begin with. America had the luxury to allow itself to be beaten in the Tet Offensive". - Like Viet Nam, you can call your neighbors FIRST, then, call us! And if our 'Walter Cronkite's' feel up to the challenge - well, you get the picture! Since we don't share a border and all that.

Hi, Benjamin, by Lieberman's"criminal connections" you probably mean Haydamak. We couls live with it. Russian-Orange coalition liedership can save Israel from corrupt and higly unprofessional liedership. You need different mind-set to survive the islamofashist attack. Dont forget that Russians defeated Hitler.

Il confronto non è valido: gli USA non erano a casa loro. Israele invece è a casa sua!

i think from the moment when israele knew that they lost the war and their soldier were only as arabic probaganda in the old arabic war , they should start thinking in the logic way i think from now u should start think in effort how to defend yourself and how can u prevent the israele "monarci" from destroy that will happen when u only giving the palastinian their lands and stop your vulgarity cause u see your vulgarity lead u to where so best wishes for u to think logicaly for one day and stop elect those leader . peace give u benefit more than benefits arab gets so choose leader for peace and in this way i think u will save zion land

America didn't share border with Vietnam, it's soldiers didn't give a crap sometimes about fighting in another country far away from their families, where they got raised, their neighborhood.. etc. The Israelis think they share borders with lebanon, but it's a mistake, Israel is a created by force country, most of the people on it has immigrated from different countries, and the army is a part of this mix. lebanese and Palastinians are the locals here, they can fight, but they have no where else to go, No where. so, for them, it's like it was was for the Vietnamis army, they have to fight for their lives, and they will win cause the other side has the luxery of going somewhere else.

Victory will always be with the right. And the right here is with Lebanon as it was with Vietnam. Vietnam didn't go to USA and fought it over there. and Lebanon didn't go to fight Israel, infact it was Israel who occupied lebanon land for many many years, and it's them who still in other people's land. in a short run, they can keep it. but in the long run, Israel will have to give up and leave. fight or no fight it's not their land.

Ah,so that's why we lost Vietnam because of the media and politicians; if only it wasn't for them, we would have won easily! When the New York Times published the Pentagon Papers, the big scandal was that these papers (internal Pentagon documents going back to the beginning of the war) were extremely pessimistic about our chances, but publicly the government was telling us that everything was fine, they are on their last legs, just a few more weeks, etc. etc. In other words they had been systematically lying to us. I strongly suspect that somewhere in the Pentagon today there is a huge cache of internal documents showing that the Generals are privately pessimistic about Iraq and have been for years. Anyways, to say that we were on the verge of victory but the media held us back is ridiculous (actually, the media for the most part reflected official propaganda; hmm, that sounds familiar as well). We were locked in a war with no end; the harder we hit the more hatred we stirred up, and the harder it would come back to us. Sure we won each battle, and hurt the Viet Cong, but when the Viet Cong was out of the picture the peasants simply started helping the NVA (who were running around in the jungle like guerrillas anyways). It's not that we were winning but had it "seared into our consciousness" that we were losing; it's that we actually lost. "The media and the politicians did it" is an excuse grasped onto by people who don't want to admit that. You know what happened in Lebanon? You actually lost, just like you lost the last time you were there. You are destined to lose in the West Bank and Gaza, and we are destined to lose in Iraq, and Iran if we're dumb enough to invade there. When you go charging around occupying other countries that hate you, and they have an organized guerrilla force fighting you, you're probably going to lose. Michael Herr was a journalist in Vietnam and sometimes had drunk pro-war people ask him, "Would you rather fight them here or in Pasadena?" He writes, "Maybe we could beat them in Pasadena, I'd think, but I wouldn't say it...."

The author says that "Israel must undergo immediate political change" - i.e. there must be a change of government - but quite frankly, whatever your opinions of Olmert and Co, this will not solve the issue of Hizbullah. As I said on talkback many times, Hizbullah had to be eradicated or Israel would never have peace in the north. For a number of reasons it was decided to stop short of achieving this and Israel, with extraordinary stupidity, accepted a UN resolution designed to protect Hizbullah. It doesn't matter whether Olmert's government stands or falls, any future government will have to deal with the unresolved issues of the kidnapped soldiers and the rearmament of Hizbullah which is going on right now and which the "peacekeeping force" will do nothing to stop.

Commenter #7 has a good point - American corporations "won" anyway [and indeed Vietnam, it seems, seeks to join the fully capitalist world], so - he implies - what would have been the ultimate 'point' of further American loss of life [let's put aside for this purpose the then-extant 'domino theory' and issues of Amerian prestige]. But, that lesson really doesn't apply to Israel; as Mr. Plocker says, its army [and of course citizenry] have no sending country to 'return' to. Well, it's an interesting world. With nuclear [and other WMD] weapons, anyone - including Israel - can feel - possibly quite reasonably in their eyes - that they have an ultimate answer to an existential threat. But others - nations, small groups, 'nutty professor' individuals - may not see the 'rationality' of that answer in quite the same way, and may not be deterred. Is it simply humanity's nature and destiny to continually fight? If so, can that 'nature' be changed by concerted effort and education towards a more humanistic outlook? The problem now is that the continued expression of the agggressive and fighting side of mankind can lead to the destruction of the entire human enterprise. Unfortunately I do not have clear answers. [I do happen to think that if more women were in positions of power there might be more openness to non-aggressive policies]. But perhaps if more of us express these concerns this will prompt the kind of worldwide soul-searching which may lead to answers.