(1) Casualty counts: The international media is reporting that almost all of the casualties of Israel's bombing of Lebanon are civilian. This can't be right, because Israel has launched thousands of sorties at Hizbollah missle sites and storage depots. Surely, Israel has killed many more Hizbollah fighters than the four I saw reported this morning. But Hizbollah is being tight-lipped about its casualties, and the media reports only the "official" casualty counts. Can the media at least more accurately report that the civilian deaths are accompanied by an "unknown" number of Hezbollah casualties? Meanwhile, the Israeli media is reporting [I saw this on Ynetnews.com and elsewhere, but didn't save the links and now can't find them, but here's a blog that mentions one such report, and here's a related WSJ piece ] that Hezbollah stores its rockets in specially designed private homes. Accordingly, some significant fraction of "civilian" casualties are the owners and residents of homes destroyed by Israel because they house Katyushas and other weaponry. The idea is to make the missles hard to locate, and also to hide behind a "civilian" facade for propaganda purposes. These are not "civilian" targets, though undoubtedly (and obviously unfortunately) children, intentionally put in harm's way by their parents for the benefit of Hezbollah, are getting killed.

(2) Why are Arab States Taking a Relatively Moderate Line on Israel's Actions: Hamas and Hizbollah are proxies for Iran. Iran is Persian and Shiite. Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia are Arab and Sunni, and have no interest in seeing Iran become a regional superpower. Not to mention that Hamas has been trying to destabilize Jordan (part of "Greater Palestine"), and that Hamas's ally and progenitor, the Moslem Brotherhood, is the most potent enemy of the Mubarak regime.