And of course there IS reportage that DOES ask questions!

How could both sides have blundered so badly?

See the full story from the Guardian

Miscalculations by Israel and Hizbullah have weakened Lebanon's fragile unity. A ceasefire is needed immediately

Jonathan Steele in Beirut
Friday July 21, 2006
The Guardian

Fear and anger pervade this city in equal measure - fear that Israel's airstrikes may intensify once the foreigners have all escaped, and anger that the world has failed to impose a ceasefire. But behind this mixture of emotions the few people who are able to think calmly about the extraordinary events of the past week are filled with shock and awe. How could the protagonists have miscalculated so badly? Where is Israel's exit strategy? What did Hizbullah, the radical Shia militia, expect when it launched the attacks that captured two Israeli soldiers and left eight others dead?

Timur Goksel used to be the senior adviser to the UN mission on the Lebanese border. The day before the Hizbullah raid, he went down to the seaside resort of Tyre with a group of students from Beirut's American University where he now teaches. "The beaches were packed. It was like Florida," he recalls. "Many of them were well-off Lebanese Shia from the diaspora in west Africa and the US. They don't support Hizbullah politically but they finance its welfare services, and I remember thinking Hizbullah would never start anything at least until the end of the season. How wrong I was."