James Dobbins, a former Bush administration envoy to Afghanistan who now heads military analysis for the Rand Corp., said choice of targets by Israel was the key and may be misdirected.

"The military rationale seems rather thin, since many of the targets have no conceivable relationship to Hezbollah," he said.

I wish I could find the actual source for this quotation. Its possible that the sentence that followed this in the original source material started with the word "However." Fortunately I have reporters to do the thinking for me.

Having said that, this story finds numerous commentators who seem to be saying that Israel is intentionally punishing the civilian population of Lebanon in order to influence them politically.