A few somewhat disparate thoughts.
Following this thread, I'm starting to find myself a little overwhelmed by some of the different points being made, and their implications. Responding to these with a few somewhat disjointed thoughts of my own, I'll start off by saying that Hizbullah is, in some ways, the archetypal la bete noire of contemporary warfare: it is likely to outlive Al-Qaeda, already has a "state" of its own, effectively, and also unlike AQ, has demonstrated a more or less consistent ability to achieve victory at the Strategic level, against all comers, regular or irregular. Hizbullah rarely, if ever, takes its eyes off the political objective, which of couse is what it's all about. As long as they stick to that, and Israel stumbles a few times at critical moments, ultimate victory may well pass to Hizbullah - whether it is in possession of potent regular forces by then or not.
There is a "recent" precedent for irregular forces utterly defeating and disposing of a regular opponent and state, and an opponent that was a true master of irregular warfare itself at that - Rhodesia. Zanu-PF and the like may have lost the war, may even have lost the free and fair election that immediately followed the end of the war in 1980, but it never took its eyes off the political prize, and in the finest Sunzian tradition, shaped, manipulated, and rode the international and regional political situation, forces, and trends to its own supreme advantage. All they otherwise had to do was to continue to maintain a military/paramilitary threat in being - however ineffective tactically or operationally that was in and of itself.
Hizbullah enjoys many of the same advantages as Zanu-PF did, and for many of the same sorts of reasons - Israel can take little comfort in comparing her own position to that of Rhodesia's. That said, Rhodesia's own military performance, generally superlative as it was, though incapable of winning the war by itself, would have been indispensible to victory in any case even had it been coupled to a successful political strategy. Israel so far has has been able to avoid the international ostracism that doomed Rhodesia, and ultimately, South Africa. But when you are on the strategic defensive as Rhodesia found itself and as Israel finds itself, and the enemy is not only on the strategic offensive, but is principally an irregular enemy at that, there is no substitute for superlative leadership and training at the individual, sub-unit, and minor-unit levels.
Rhodesia found Pseudo-Operations to be particularly effective against its irregular enemies, and much the same sort of approach, provided there was a sustained political will to persevere in their use, might go some way to not only wearing down Hizbullah's military strength, but even eroding its political position as well. Hizbullah has no shortage of other enemies, who might not hesitate to pounce at signs of weakness. Not least the Lebanese Government itself.
Pseudo-Operations have rather about as much in common with espionage as they do with "warfare" per se. I doubt that they are covered under the Geneva Conventions - except by the same provisions regarding spying, and they certainly blur the Law of Armed Conflict, probably beyond usefulness. That is a problem for lawyers and the like however; soldiers do not get too concerned, considering the enemies they fight often do not to observe the Geneva Conventions anyway. Where this becomes a problem is when the civil authorities oppose, equivocate, or lose heart in support of such operations; where there is solid support, such legal niceties may become meaningless. War is like pornography; you may not be able to fully and cleary define it in theory, but you recognize it when you see it. War is war, and an enemy is an enemy, and if you can maintain basic morality whilst engaging in such operations, you're okay; if you run into serious problems there, then you're probably engaging in something that you shouldn't be undertaking in the first place. And that usually goes back to decisions made at the political level, and subsequently the soldiers find themselves in the impossible position of being required to carry out.
The old Colonial Wars observed few, and recognized even fewer, if any, of the legal definitions that existed even then, let alone now. There was little to no distinction made between soldiers performing a deliberate company attack on a guerrilla hideout, or sending a capable individual or small party behind the lines to infiltrate the enemy's territory and spy away, or destroy some hideout, or raid some enemy caravan. Those were operations directed towards the same political end; nowadays we tend to try to formalize, create technical language and categories, make artificial or inappropriate distinctions where they shouldn't exist or at least should not be so hard, and generally get too abstract and ignore the organic nature of these things. Hizbullah doesn't.
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