Israel's Premeditated Assault on Lebanon

As I pointed out earlier, Isreal had planned their current campaign in Lebanon at least a year in advance and simply waited for a convenient excuse to launch it.

...Hezbollah, they say, is responsible for all of this because on July 12th they launched the cross-border raid that ended in the death of 9 Israeli soldiers and the abduction of 2 others. However, if this is a defensive action it is certainly an incredibly prescient one because, as we have recently learned, Israel had been planning this action for the last year and the Hezbollah raid simply provided the pretext for setting it into motion (in self-defense, of course). So, to surmise, we are to believe that Israel is defending itself, as per American policy, by implementing an action they'd decided upon a full year before the attack from which they're defending themselves.

Or we can be reasonable and see that argument for the nonsense it is. We can believe that this is indeed American policy, yes. But it is in no way even comparable to "self-defense". The response we're seeing is disproportionate, collective punishment that we now know was also premeditated. Even the Hezbollah raid against which they are ostensibly defending themselves was perhaps intentionally provoked. Unreported in the major US media is the fact that Israel had been abducting Lebanese civilians and militants, attempting targeted assassinations and firing rockets of their own into Lebanon for months.

Now George Monbiot of the Guardian of London lays it all out in detail. Please check it out.