Anytime I disagree with Pat Buchanan, I think long and hard about it, because he is seldom wrong and is usually ahead of the curve. I think he has some valid points regarding the general issue of Israel, and I am quite sure he carries scars from his battles with them and their lobby during his service in the Nixon administration.
The point I think he has wrong though is his belief that Hezbollah is some kind of occupying force that the vast majority of Lebanese oppose. In fact, I think most Lebanese, even the Christians, look at Hezbollah as heroes that forced an end to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon and carry on the struggle today. I watched PBS News HOur tonight and they interviewed a lot of American Lebanese. Not one of them condemned Hezbollah, and several went out of their way to say how much the Lebanese admire them. They talked about Hezbollah as though they were maybe the local Jaycees, only with long range rockets.
It is surreal that people actually think you can have a terrorist army living openly in your country, have them as part of the elected government (Hezbollah have two Ministers in the "democratic" Lebanese government that we support), yet there are no consequences when they commit acts of war toward a neighboring country.
To me its an obvious point, but the media seem to ignore it. If you fire rockets into another country from civilian areas, what is the other country supposed to do? Just take it because they might injure some civilians if they retaliate? Was that the way we fought WW II? It's great for arm chair moralists like Koffi Annan to lecture Israel, but is it more moral for Israel to send its soldiers in to be killed in urban ambushes, just to spare civilians who are being used as shields? The ugly fact is that most of those civilian support Hezbollah. We are talking about people who don;t mind strapping bombs on their children and sending them into an Israel pizza parlor.
All this talk of "proportionality" is really just a complaint that it is somehow unfair that Israel's weapons are more accurate than Hezbollah's Iranian rockets. If Hezbollah was inflicting massive civilian casualties on israel, I doubt very much we would be hearing those complaints, certainly not from the UN.
The people who bear the complete moral responsibility for Qana are Hezbollah.