Israel should have defeated Hezbollah and Hamas but couldn't. Hezbollah and Hamas did not win the war but some considered them deserving as winners.

ehud barak apparently was an excellent commando noted for his stealth. As prime minister he was a lousy and weak PM standing by while soldiers were being lynched in ramallah. As defence minister, he is another lousy general hiding behind the good works of ashkenazi. Under him, endless talk and threats and he amounts to a little better than peretz. Israel no longer needs him. Yaalon is several times better and is waiting in the wings. Barak should retire . Besides, IDF soldiers are sick of him and his peace now policies.

Israel pulls out from south of Lebanon and locks the SLA behind the fences not allowing them to enter Israel all exposed to the hands of Hizbollah. Israel is not a trust worthy partner indeed

The SLA heroes did not run away. Their order of battle, fortifications, and tactics were all based on cooperation with the IDF. When they saw the IDF running away like a defeated rabble in the middle of the night, they assumed (maybe incorrectly) that Barak had sold them out to Hezbolla: murder the SLA in exchange for leaving Israel alone. The SLA found themselves in their military posts undermanned because of the IDF desertion, their wives and children desperately phoning them to come home and save them. These heroes had no choice but to load what they could on their cars and try to escape into Israel. Adding to his other crimes, Barak refused to let them in, leaving them exposed in long lines at the border. Never in history did the Jews do a more foul, treacherous and unforgivable deed than Ehud Barak's betrayal of the SLA, heroes who gave their lives to protect Israel.

I suppose the only reason some won't admit Israel's Lebanon withdrawl (and all Israel's withdrawls) was a total disaster is because they want to leave the door open to further mad Israeli withdrawls. Israel's Lebanon withdrawl is the ONLY reason for our last Lebanon War. Had we stayed in our South Lebanon security zone, we would never have had to fight it. Now would ever have been bombarded by thousands of rockets from South Lebanon and suffered the resulting casualties and deaths. There is no rational way to paint our South Lebanon withdrawl, or any Israeli withdrawl, as a good thing.

As one who spent time with Haddad's SLA in the 1970s I was (and remain) FURIOUS at Israel's foul desertion of it's committed Muslim and Christian allies.;and stunned at the STUIDITY of the act from a defense of Israel standpoint. Any novice could forsee the result (Hating Hizzbola,armed to the teeth on the border.Will Israel abandon it's loyal citizens in the Golan/ In Judea? In Samaria?In Jerusalem?I wouldn't be surprized.

You should trealize that the old adage:"The enemy of my enemy is my friend'..is a truly stupid idea. For the invader will welcome your assistance but its help is conditional; when its own interests diverge from your own, you will be discarded. In WWII, for example, many Ukrainians, Latviams and Estoniani assisted the invading Nazi armies seeing their chance to throw off the Soviet yoke. Only when theu found that the foreign invader treated them as badly, if not worse than the Soviets, did they begin to 'sit on their hands' if not actively resist the Nazis. Likewise, in Cuba during the Spanish-American War, the Cuban resistance fighting Spain allied themselves with the Americans. Actually, they were assured by the US government (the Teller Amendment) that the US government had no wish to exert control over the Cuban people. Of course, after the war, the US reneged on its commitment for its own domestic reasoning, and held Cuba in thrall until the Castro revolution. In both cases, the allies of the invaders had to flee for their lives once the foreigners left. Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982, ostensibly to remove the PLO from the border area. Then they created their own little enclave, the 'security zone', and refused to leave. They allowd their proxies, the SLA, to live in said zone, by the force of their weaponry. In doing so, they created and maintained the conditions which have created the modern day Hezbollah which rightly saw the Israelis as an occupier and the SLA as their toadies.

even the ones that made it into Israel.

The IDF and their SLA lackeys got bogged down for years fighting in S. Lebanon, and those raggedy-ass Shiite militias eventually forced the IDF to throw it's hands in the air, pack up, and scoot back into their own country. No?

The SLA were real Lebanese patriots fighting against the illegal Syrian occupation of their homeland. Because the Americans and French supported the Syrians, they took help from anyone they could. They did not expect Israel to be led by a worthless failure like Ehud Barak.

for the tripe you espouse. They might have been 'patriots' in their own deluded eyes, but to the Lebanese they were traitorous proxies of Israel. Let me remind you, the Israelis did not go into Lebanon to 'free' the Lebanese from the Syrians. They went into Beirut with the 'strategic' idea of forming an alliance with Bashir Gemayel and thereby allow hiin to prevail in the Lebanese civil war. The SLA were merely the pawns used by Israel to help Israel achieve that goal. When Israel finally realized that their goal of turning Lebanon into a 'pacified' state under the rule of the Gemayels, the Israelis turned tail and left Lebanon but, for domestic PR reasons: i.e to show the Israeli public they hadn't made a huge mistake, Israel claimed the 'security zone' in southern Lebanon. The SLA, hated by the overehelming majority of Lebanese had no choice but to follow their masters. This charade went on for years until Barak decided that the costs involved were not worth the fiction his predecessors created and he withdrew to the Blue Line. An deservedly ignonimous end to a foray of folly.

You are apparently a great expert in Lebanese affairs. Can you tell us what ever happened to Eli Hobeika, the commander of the Sabra and Shatilla forces?

"he cringed with shame"Does anyone remember him saying this at the time Hello hello. Ron must be trying to re invent himself seeing the public winds of change.Ron and the other "Mavens" are only "experts" in retrospect .What we have heard from ole Ron and the other Mavens is a love of Arab culture he simply loved his time in Beirut gushed over it.He symbolizes Israeli media as a whole confused but opinionated and dogmatic always to their credit that only more and more surrenders of strtegically important territory would bring peace. Coming as they all do from Gush Dan I hope they have their bomb shelters ready as it seems the next war will be especially targeting the Center of Ilusionary Politics their very own Tel Aviv "bubble "They are probably very busy stocking up on Latte or have their airline tickets for distant places on them at all times and will leave the rest of us here to clean up the mess they were so imstrumental in making.