How is this not obvious?

From a Hezbollah fighter quoted in the Guardian:

"Despite Israel's claims to have inflicted heavy losses on Hizbullah, Ali insists his side is in a strong position. "Things are going very well now, whatever happens we are winning. If they keep bombing us we will stay in the shelters, and with each bomb more people support the resistance. If they invade they will repeat the miserable fate they had in 1982, and if they hold one square foot they will give the Islamic resistance all the legitimacy. If they want to kill Hizbullah they have to kill every Shia in the south of Lebanon."

And hey, whatever happened to Hezbollah being so hard to find because they never mix with civilians? Thanks, Salon.

The Israeli military continues to stand ready to pummel any organized Arab army that threatens it...and continues to stand completely unprepared to deal with their actual enemies (or at least the strategies adopted by their nation-state enemies - Syria and Iran).

Rhetoric and reality

Uh-huh. Everyone likes to talk about troops to stabilize Lebanon and - perhaps - allow it to become a real state that can stand alone (minus Syrian, Israeli, or Iranian influence and minus a paramilitary force that is virtually a state unto itself). There's just no one willing to put their troops into the sort of environment that drove France, the US, and Israel out of Hezbollah's 'space' in the past. So, in the end, we abandon the idea of strengthening Lebanon as a state because the political will to commit real forces to dealing with the problem doesn't yet exist. (sigh).

"They only had one small condition for the force to be made up of soldiers from another country,” Mr. Barnea wrote. “The Germans recommended France; the French recommended Egypt, and so on. It is doubtful whether there is a single country in the West currently volunteering to lay down its soldiers on Hezbollah’s fence."

Conventional answer to an unconventional foe?

Prepping the Battlespace?

"Imposing" strategy on Hezbollah?

Come on guys. Comparing this to the Gulf War campaigns (fought against a poorly-trained, equipped, and led Arab army trying to ape Western tactics) is going to lead you to all sorts of wildly inaccurate conjectures (like the belief that an Israeli ground incursion into Lebanon will be more effective this time than it was in 1982...or the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon will go any better than it did prior to retreat in 2000).

The leaders of Hezbollah aren't stupid. They won't sit in southern Lebanon, dug in, waiting for Israeli ground forces to surround and annihilate them. You give far too much credit to Israeli operational planners and far too little to Hezbollah. Israel is faced with an opponent that mastered the Improvised Explosive Device long before anyone knew what it was in Iraq, an opponent whose tactics were copied by the Chechen resistance, an opponent that is not constrained by any laws of warfare. Any casualties inflicted on Israeli soldiers show its weakness against a non-state opponent. The majority of casualties inflicted against Hezbollah will be difficult to identify and just as likely appear as strikes against innocent civilians on the battlefield. How does Israel win in either case?

If Israel's current active opponents (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the militant wing of Fatah...not to mention Hezbollah) could be defeated through simple conventional campaigns, do you really think they'd still be around...?