You keep trying to draw some sort of analogy between the attacks on Palestinian strongholds and, for example, a police raid on a U.S. suburb to find a bunch of murderers.

This analogy fails on an important point: When the cops come into a suburb to find a killer, the assumption is that the inhabitants of the suburb want the bad guy caught as badly as the cops do, and are on the cops' side. In other words, there is the presumption that everyone except the bad guys are on the side of law and order.

Do the Palestinians call up the Palestinian cops on the phone and say, "Hey, there's a group building a bomb factory next door?" Oh, yeah, that's right. The Palestinian "cops" are in cahoots with the ones building the bombs. Okay, do they call the Israelis and point out exactly where the bad guys are building bombs? Not if they are sympathetic to the bomb makers, or if not sympathetic, not if they want to live another day. The terrorists are in complete control of the civilian Palestinian population. Whether by natural sympathy for their cause, or by instilling fear, is really not relevant to the picture presented to anyone trying to pry the bad guys out from among their civilian shields.

I'm sure if it had been feasible for a couple of Israeli cops to come into Jenin and start knocking politely on doors, and asking questions until they found the bad guys, and then arrested them without a struggle, that this would have been preferable. I don't think this was in the cards.

If American suburbanites hid murderers in their basements, allowed them the use of their homes for planning crimes, booby-trapped their driveways for when the cop cars pulled in, and started shooting and throwing rocks at the cops when they came into the neighborhood, you might find a different set of tactics being used even here in America.

At times, and in some ghetto areas of America, this has almost been the case, and although missiles have not been used (yet), there are armored police vehicles with battering rams for just such an occasion, and certain U.S. Attorney Generals have been known to flatten and burn a few compounds too.