"exposing the real nature of the war"

Captain Ed, on the Lebanese general who has been jailed for appearing in a videotape with friendly Israelis...

...Daoud finds himself in jail not for fraternization, but for exposing the real nature of the war. Israel had no beef with the kind of military police force Daoud commanded. In fact, Israel wants to have precisely these kinds of forces across their northern border, rather than the Hezbollah terrorists that have held the territory for years. That is why Israeli soldiers treated Daoud so chivalrously.

The Siniora government cannot afford to have the Lebanese see the Israelis treating the LA well, however, at least not while Hassan Nasrallah is still in charge. It interferes with the preferred terrorist narrative that the Israelis committed a war of aggression on Lebanon instead of a war against the terrorists that committed a casus belli in the first place. If Israel treats Lebanese people in a friendly manner, then the Lebanese people will wonder why they need Hezbollah protecting them from the IDF....

It's just another example of how the meaning of the word "war" has changed. War between nation-states is still what we associate with the word. But war between nation-states is virtually extinct. Everything we now label war is actually internal violence within failed states, or interventions by Western powers (normally just the Anglosphere) to try to prevent such violence. Our war against the nation-state of Iraq lasted only a couple of weeks, and was, in fact, never seriously fought by the Iraqis. The huge Iraqi army, with mountains of fairly modern equipment, simply evaporated.

(But within days our troops started to see un-uniformed guys with AK-47's driving around in Toyota pickups. We didn't know at first what that meant, but within a few days we did, most painfully. Actually, most of the real fighting before we over-ran Iraq was against terrorists. Read this, for an example.)

Pacifists and leftists don't dare admit that war has changed. To do so would be to confront the fact that there are obvious good guys and bad guys. And that implies a moral demand to support the good.