Dan Gordon wrote:

Hezb’allah is not your father’s terrorist organization. This is not a group of loosely affiliated cells of would-be hijackers or suicide bombers. Hezb’allah is a terrorist Army, trained like an army, organized like an army, funded and equipped like an army, with one glaring difference. The main use of its arsenal was terror aimed at Israel’s civilian population while hiding behind Lebanon’s civilian population. Its intent was to cause maximum civilian casualties amongst both. This was not by accident. This was by design.

This is the world we are now facing: militias, armies, military groups that are not organized along national lines, but are paramilitary, often focused along religious lines, that sometimes, and often do transcend national boundaries. In Iraq, for instance, and in Afghanistan during the Taliban period, these groups were composed of people who came together for training, but were often from various countries: Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and others. Their binding has been faith traditions. Sunni joining groups that ally with Al Qada. In Lebanon, the Shiites backed Hezbollah, which was funded by Syria and Iran, in a sort of Shia triangle.

We can get into situations where it's not the government of one country at war with another, but a militia within that country at war with another group or even nation. This was the situation in Lebanon when the war between Hezbollah and Israel broke out.

The current rules of war don't really cover these situations. And those rules often cripple nations who stand up to the bullying of militias. When militias break the regular rules and position themselves deeply within a civilian population, so that that population is horribly impacted when hostilities break out, there is little redress, or even outcry yet. But when countries go for these targets, the outcry is outrageously loud.

But the truth is, because of the way we think about warfare, we are giving a great tool to these paramilitary groups. And this edge will hurt all of Western Civilization unless we realize and deal with the modern reality.

They are counting on our outrage. They set it up, they sometimes stage photos to make it look worse than it was, and still we take the bait.

Are we that haunted by the ghosts of our ancestors that we cannot see the reality for what it is?