Generally, I think you last paragraph is on the mark. I would, however, make a few points:

1. Isn't democratic peace theory all about fitting the data to match the hypothesis? It always seemed that way to me.

2. Randy Schweller wrote in an article about democratic peace theory that it shouldn't apply to Israel because of Israel's relatively vulnerable position, and something about the history of the Jewish people. If you find his argument convincing (I don't), you have a way out.

3. Forget about whether Lebanon is a democracy or not (you could go around and around on that forever), it's not clear that it's a state. Were you to apply the definition of a state that requires having a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within the borders of said state, then Lebanon's democratic or non-democratic status is beside the point.

4. Setting aside (3) for the moment, I wouldn't code Lebanon as a full democracy (even without considering Hizbullah's influence) because it hasn't had more than one election since Syria left. There are a number of other criteria for democracy that it also fails, but I am not near enough to my library to lay them all out with sufficient quality.

The Lebanese government wasn't sovereign in any real sense. They didn't even manage to monopolize force within their borders to any degree. Hezbollah was the real sovereign, and Hezbollah certainly isn't democratic.

Of course, say what you will about Iraq, it *is* a democracy, so the line about the Arab world's only democracy is wrong, like much of Totten's political analysis. He's a good travel writer, but this is a fine example of oversimplifying a situation (seriously, just ignore the group that controls half of our territory and we're a democracy!). Silliness.

This time DD's beaten me to the punch. Rummel's making all sorts of arguments about this, to which I link without endorsement or critique.

http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2006/07/israel-palestinians-lebanona-war-among.html

http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2006/07/answering-questions-on-democratic.html

http://freedomspeace.blogspot.com/2006/07/its-isaeli-iran-war.html

There are a variety of other reasons why one wouldn't expect the DP, even if true, to hold on this case. But it all depends on the mechanisms one thinks explains the putative DP. We often code regime type on grounds unrelated to the relevant causal arguments, and I think that's a major issue here.

To call Lebanon a democracy shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the region.

Lebanon is in no way a democracy. It is better characterized as a failed state. I don't even know how to respond because that characterization is fundamentally false.

Yeah, I would say Totten's failure to take arguments like Snyder and Mansfield's into account is basically a killer for his argument. I would also say, like a couple people before me, that it is difficult to think of this as a state v. state conflict given that Lebanon has never really been a coherent state and because a portion of its government, Hezbollah, bascially sees itself as war with the rest of Lebanon, complicating things a bit.

One might also consider agruments like Zakaria's that "democracy" is an analytically useless term so long as it is defined merely as electing a government. He argues that the basis of the Western democratic peace is less an attachment to to "democracy" than it is the entrenchment of constitutional liberalism. So one might argue that while Lebanon has democratic features, it lacks the characteristics of constitutional liberalism that have worked to keep peace elsewhere.

"This war in the Middle East nearly demolishes the theory that democracies don't go to war with each other."

I always just thought it was a rule of thumb.

Also, as Dan points out, the word "demolishes" really overstates the stability of Lebanon's democracy.

It also doesn't take into account that it is not the democratically elected government making war.

I would guess you won't get much of a debate among IR scholars who know this literature. I think all will agree that this particular case says almost nothing about the purported EMPIRICAL LAW that liberal democracies do not fight each other. Doyle, following Kant, suggests the criteria for identifying liberal democracies (republics) in his APSR article from the 1980s. Lebanon doesn't qualify and is not close to qualifying. Case closed.

While I have not checked the most recent data myself, I will bet that the different measures of liberal democracy that are typically used to test DP hypotheses will reflect the fact the Lebanon in 2006 does not qualify. So, Lebanon won't have a +7 Polity Score and it won't have a +2 Freedom House Score.

So, based on the criteria used in this literature, this case won't "demolish" the empirical law and it says little about the underlying theory of the DP.

As a comparativist, I'd vote for failed state or non-state. Hezbollah is neither an agent of democratically elected principals NOR able to be controlled/subdued by said principals.

"That said, one can argue that it is Israel, the established democracy, that expanded what had been a low-level border skirmish (by IR standards) into a war."

That doesn't matter. Democracies are just as likely to attack non-democracies as non-democracies are likely to attack each other. It's the absense of democracy on democracy wars that is the puzzle.

Re: Do democracies ever go to war?

In modern times, it hasn't happened in Latin America. Skirmishes between Colombians and Venezuelans, sure, but the only real war as such was the Malvinas/Falklands war of '82: democracy vs. military dictatorship.

The real question is this: Do both Israel and Lebanon have a McDonald's? I assume Israel does, but does Lebanon? The McDonald's Theory of International Peace says that two nations with McDonald's have never gone to war.

Dan: Thanks for getting back to I.R.

Not that your commentary on baseball and movies and whatnot isn't valuable and all, but I'd always sort of counted on Drezner and Duck of Minerva for some I.R. blogging that went a bar or two higher than the "Rumor Mill" trash-talk.

Patrick, that one went *poof* back in the '90s- there was at least one McD's in Yugoslavia.

I heard someonce say once that Belgrade had a McDonalds during the NATO bombing back in the 1990s. Does anyone know if this is true?

Ok, you answered my question

Lebanon has many McDonalds.

That's what you get when Tom Friedman tries to IR-theorize.

I think applying a Popperian standard of falsifiability to either DPT or McPT is silly. The judge of a theory in the social sciences is not its inerrancy, but its usefulness. DPT has had several arguable exceptions in the past - the Spanish-American War and the Continuation War being the most notable - but that does not negate the strong pattern it unveils. Similarly, even if some poor saps in Belgrade were serving Big Macs in 1999, Friedman's formulation (more properly attributed to Angell, actually) that economic interrelatedness reduces the chance of conflict between states still has significant power.

Dan,

Aside from the very important question of what Lebanon is (and whether one can get a Big Mac there) I think it's important not to confuse the democratic peace observation--that there are few, if any, cases of war between democratic states--with the theories that have attempted to account for that observation. There are a handful of cases that don't necessarily fit the observation (see 1999 Kargil war between India and Pakistan, fought at a time when their Polity scores were 9 and 7, respectively). However, there is no theory that could plausibly claim that the probability of war between two democracies is exactly zero. The best these theories can do is to say that the probability of war is lower between democratic states, holding all else equal. This case, on its own, doesn't really shed light on this claim. One would have to evaluate the counter-factual: holding all else equal (including the presence of Hezbollah) would war have been more, less, or equally as likely if Lebanon had been non-democratic (if we believe it was ever democratic in the first place)?

Hezbollah was the real sovereign, and Hezbollah certainly isn't democratic.

Everything I've read from people who know the region, aside from Totten , is that Hesbollah is just about the nearest thing to a really democratic force in the region. They seem to me to be very much like the Islamic movements in Turkey (Erdogan's Development and Justice Party). Both have worked among the poor, built foundations and hospitals, served to create neighborhood self help groups. (See White, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A study in vernacular politics) . Moreover, Hesbollah is in parliament and in the cabinet. So this talk about Hesbollah not being democratic is off base.

Now, let's turn to the other democracy involved. Israel is a democracy, but it is an ethnodemocracy. It is explicitly set up to favor one group of people over another. Its hard not to look at Israeli actions and come to the conclusion they don't really care about Arab lives-- whether Hesbollah militants or Christian cosmopolitians in Beirut. Israel is of course not unique. All the parties in the Bosnian conflict were democratic - democratically elected and democratic in that they represented the interests of their group. They still fought warred on each other.

Totten's comment is not supported by the evidence.

Lebanon is a failed state. Its nominal government has no control over large sections of its territory, and is dominated by hostile foreign powers.

The form of its nominal government is irrelevant. It might as well be a hereditary communist monarchy like North Korea.

A lot of the evidence for the democratic peace is the result of overfitting observed data. Some studies claim as many as 800,000 "independent" observations. As a result, we know very little about the predictive (versus retrodictive) ability of this set of ideas.

Most informed commentators are referring to the "Israel-Hezbollah" conflict, not the "Israel-Lebanon" conflict. Totten's statement is far too strong. This is a conflict between a democratic state and a decidedly undemocratic non-state actor, not a conflict between two liberal democracies.

I don't think that the democratic peace theory - or any single IR theory - is going to have anything close to a 100% success rate, but that doesn't mean there isn't a lot we can learn from it in terms of what the special traits of "true" liberal democracies - better signaling, improved prospects for cooperation, fewer transaction costs in international interactions, domestic accountability, and (theoretically) good governance - mean for those democracies' behavior on the international scene.

There is no war between Lebanon and Israel. Israel was attacked by an illegal autonomous organization acting in formally Lebanese territory, and not by Lebanon's more or less democratic State. Israel is punishing and disarming this sovereign organization, avoiding to hurt Lebanese state entities. It is like the US Army fighting outlaw drug cartels in Colombia. Like Pinkerton employees gunning down Bonnie and Clyde in Bolivia.

Lebanon can be seen as a democracy/democratizing state that is not able to exercise sovreignty throughout its nominal territory, perhaps similar to Colombia. If we define Lebanon as "that portion of nominal Lebanon which the Lebanese government is able to control", the situation can be treated as two conflicts: a war between a non-state actor (Hezbollah) and a state, with no possiblity of DPT violation, and one between two states, with some. However, given that Lebanon isn't that much of a democracy and isn't shooting back, I don't see much of a problem for DPT here.

That said, re: Ken's counter-factual, I don't think any degree of democracy or lack thereof could have prevented Beirut from getting bombed. The government of Lebanon, however formed, took no action to initiate this war, and arguably could not have taken any to prevent it.

Re: "the Arab world's only democracy":
Does the PA have a Polity score? They have separation of powers and multiple (relatively) peaceful changes of government. They're doing better than Saudi Arabia, anyway.

Jaimito, a few problems in your comment. First, it wasn't Bonny and Clyde that were gunned down in Bolivia, it was Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (or Che, depending). And they weren't shot by pinkertons, but by the local military/cops. Also, the US military doesn't fight drug cartels in Colombia, or if they do they're not telling anybody. Furthermore, as far as I can tell, Israel doesn't appear to be avoiding to hurt anybody in particular.

Everything I've read from people who know the region, aside from Totten , is that Hesbollah is just about the nearest thing to a really democratic force in the region. They seem to me to be very much like the Islamic movements in Turkey (Erdogan's Development and Justice Party). Both have worked among the poor, built foundations and hospitals, served to create neighborhood self help groups. (See White, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey: A study in vernacular politics) . Moreover, Hesbollah is in parliament and in the cabinet. So this talk about Hesbollah not being democratic is off base.

Populism is not necessarily democratic as such. Try this-Hezbollah was not the democratically elected government of Lebanon.

Just because members of Hezbollah are in the parliament of Lebanon doesn't make Hezbollah democratic in the sense we're talking about, anyway. If Hezbollah were the party in power in the Lebanese government (a la Hamas), then there would be a different issue. As it stands, Hezbollah dominated a part of Lebanon without any democratic legitimacy (if the Lebanese government is the sovereign).

The stuff about Israel is interesting though. Are there any ME states that aren't "ethnostates" by your definition, or do different strands of Islam/Arabism bust the ethnostate? Does the fact that Israel recognizes Arab members of the Knesset matter? What about Jewish members of other government bodies in the ME (I recall one Jewish representative to the Iranian legislature)?

I think it is really funny that all these people above, who seem to believe that they have some theory to provide all the answers to them, now try very hard to justify that their theory falls flat.

The thing that everyone here seems to be missing (and that is not going come up in any data) is that Israelis voted for their center right-wing government (by their standards, extreme right-wing by world standards) in full knowledge that it would attack any country it wanted. Israel is a totally militarized country and it has an Ideology of using massive attacks to confront political problems. So, no matter how democratic its victim is, it will use war to "solve" its problems.

I do not think that Hizbullah is "populist". actually, it is the least "populist" faction in Lebanon. Just look aroud: Little Hariri has no policies but his father's name, the entire March 14 forces only had one policy, Jumblatt is only elected because of his confession, Gaagaa is also only popular because of his religion (despite his war crimes), and, well Awn is more honestly popular, but he had been in france for a decade and was elected without having competition or expressing views, Amal has honest popularity, but has been losing out. Hizbullah has become popular because of its views and work, and has competed against other factions for its position as the most popular faction in the country. If anything, they are the only ones that make the Lebanese government honestly democratic. they legitimatly won their ministers and MPs.

Though, I think there is a good debate as to whether Lebanon is honestly democratic (who knows), it is much harder to make such an argument in Palestine. Hamas is a true democratic force in the country. Fatah is generally populist, but there are other left of center, secular forces in Palestine, and Fatah beats them hands down in elections. also, they have civil institutions and ngos to make the point more real. Again, though the Palestinian "government" is basically democratic, Israel keeps attacking it. Of course, "democracy" is hard being that the Palestinians are under occupation, but again, the wild card here is not them, but Israel.

Israel is a violent democracy. and democratic peace theory will always fall apart when a country is honestly populated with a people who believe it is right to shoot first and never ask questions later.

Regardless of the Lebanon thing (and if Lebanon is a democracy, seems like Iran would have to count as well - they have regular elections), I hope I don't sound too ideological here, but how is Israel a democracy? It's not like everyone governed by it gets to vote. If South Africa before 1992 was a democracy the way these things were coded, then, yes, sure, so is Israel.

So who is the Turkish DJP firing rockets at? I must have missed the news. What color uniforms do Hezbollah wear? Get real.

Of course, say what you will about Iraq, it *is* a democracy, so the line about the Arab world's only democracy is wrong, like much of Totten's political analysis. He's a good travel writer, but this is a fine example of oversimplifying a situation (seriously, just ignore the group that controls half of our territory and we're a democracy!). Silliness.

Maybe you can clear up one small fact for me. How much of its territory does the government of Iraq cover ? One province and the Green Zone, if that. And its a democracy, while Lebanon is not because around half the country is out of its grasp?

And as was pointed out here before, the Indo Pak war of 1999 should already have refuted the democratic peace theory.

Are there any ME states that aren't "ethnostates" by your definition, or do different strands of Islam/Arabism bust the ethnostate?

Well, yes. Syria is not an ethnostate, nor was Iraq before our invasion (Tarik Aziz, for example, is a Christian). Christian Lebanese, according to some blogs, are fleeing to Syria to escape Israeli bombing -- but Syria is run by an Alawite family. (Alawi's are one of the infinite number of syncretic heresies in the ME, as are the Druze) Lebanon is has had confessional gerrymander, by definition it is not an ethnostate.

The fact that Israel has Arabs in its Parliament is really not relevant. I have read -- I wish I could recall where -- that on truly important matters Israel's main parties will not form coalitions with Arab parties (who might hold the balance otherwise.) Maybe this 'grand coalitions' of Likud-Labour seem to be so common in Israel. My understanding also is that much of the land in Israel has been set aside for Jewish only purchase. I know that recently the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that *spouses* of Israeli Arabs have no right to immigrate to join their husband/wife in Israel. Contrast that to the "Right of Return", not to mention private programs to promote Aliyah, such as the "Birthright Israel" program open to Jewish youth worldwide. So you see who is in charge.

The reason that this is important is not that ethnostates are bad -- but rather it is foolish to expect the same results of a liberal democracy as from an ethnodemocracy. Moreover, when people shout 'the only democracy in the region' it has no meaning in terms of spreading liberal democracy, because the people we want to emulate the 'democracy' are by definition second class citizens in Israel.

BTW much of the same holds true for Turkey. But very few people hold out Turkey as 'the only democracy in the region.'

Re supra, first it strikes me that Joe M has the most honesty commentary Hizbullah has become popular because of its views and work, and has competed against other factions for its position as the most popular faction in the country. If anything, they are the only ones that make the Lebanese government honestly democratic. they legitimatly won their ministers and MPs.

Insofar as the "non-democratic" (as opposed to non-liberal) status of Hezbullah rests primarily on their "we don't like them" (even if for some v. good reasons, as well as dumb ones) status, the entire structure of most of the discussion seems rather ... well divorced from lived realities.

I suppose for myself this illustrates why I have never taken Poli Sci seriously. Unless one is applying a rationally coherent and objective definition of say democracy across the board, it is simply journalism dressed up. Insofar as one almost never sees operational rigour....

As to Totten, well, he's a shallow journo wannabe hack. as I emphasised some time back in deconstructing his ill-informed but terribly sexed-up travel commentary on Libya

What the hell does IR stand for?
Would it be such a pain to identify early on and they use the acronym?

IR = International Relations. And no, I suppose it wouldn't, it's just kind of a long phrase. DPT = Democractic Peace theory, btw.

Lounsbury:
You write, "Unless one is applying a rationally coherent and objective definition of say democracy across the board, it is simply journalism dressed up."

People do apply such a definition. The most widely used metric is the Polity Score. It is constructed from a variety of component variables representing the extent to which leaders are selected competitively, whether there are any institutional constraints on executive power, etc... If you're interested you can check out the data at Polity IV Project .

Nopers.
"Hezbollah" is, de facto, a state. It is an Islamic theocracy with an army, bases, taxes, infrastructure, and a foreign policy. Although not a recognized state, it is a state for all practical intents and purposes. It is at war with Israel. Lebanon, for all practical intents and purposes, does not exist in the combat area.

foolish,
factually you may be right that butch cassidy & the sundance kid were gunned down in Bolivia. My familiarity with American folklore is limited, but I am sure you can find examples of American lawmen following American criminals into Mexican territory and delivering justice in foreign lands.
About Colombia, the American Army is active there, as is in many foreign countries.
In these days if intercontinental missiles, frontiers are irrelevant.

OK kids, lets go round up some data and some theory and see what happens.

Freedom House (2005) has Lebanon coded as Not Free, with Political Rights scoring 6 (7 is lowest) and Civil Liberties 5 (7 is lowest). Given the Syrian withdrawal, these scores should have improved for early 2006, especially with the Cedar Revolution. On the other hand, because of some electoral laws that divvy up the national level leadership by "confession," it is tough to argue that this is a democratic system by even layperson standards. As Annia Ciezadlo points out in her WaPo article "Lebanon's Election: Free but not Fair" (22 May 2005) at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/05/20/AR2005052001868.html, since the Pres has to be "Christian," the PM has to be Sunni, and the Speaker has to be Shiite, one of the most prominent politicians, Walid Jumblatt, can't get into senior leadership because he is Druze. As much as we enjoy (a "frisson" for democratists!) the glimmers of democracy in Lebanon, it just ain't one yet...by a long shot.

As for "theory," most political scientists are WAY beyond the simplistic view that an election makes a democracy...there is a general consensus among DP reseachers that to have any semblance of democracy SUCH THAT no war exists with other such regimes, you have to have: a first election, AND a second election, AND at least one peaceful, electoral turnover of power. Some even argue that there must be two turnovers to demonstrate that the institutions and culture of democractic politics are well entrenched enough to become the practiced and expected way to select and change governments, AND that other democracies percieve a country to be a democracy like them.

So while we certainly will have some useful and some vituperative comments to make about Lebanon, this ain't a debate about the DP being demolished...

Freedom House has their 2006 stats up - Lebanon gets a 5/4 (and the PA gets a 5/5 for those who were wondering, in the territory that is considered ruled by the PA...in the territory ruled by Israel its a 6/5). I'm pretty sure at least a 4/4 is necessary to even begin considering that a country *might* be democratic.

One question about the theory though: is it generally thought that it is democracies that don't go to war or *liberal* democracies? Because if its the latter, the Israel/Lebanon/Hezbollah case as well as the India/Pakistan case can easily be thrown out. This question also matters as far as the dynamics behind the theory, as to whether it is elections and vertical accountability that prevent war or all of those other nice factors such as freedom of the press and horizontal accountability that may allow for better signalling.

The democracy peace theory has no foundation, because "democracy" is itself groundless as any kind of meaningful description. It's a long, long ways from a positive descriptor of a government.

In a democracy, pure as the driven snow, 51% of the people can vote to execute the other 49% (or merely enslave them). A genuinely democratic Iraq would result in Shiites voting to execute the Sunnis. Would we base or reject some hypothesis regarding international behavior on such a result?

Pete, you are doing exactly what critics of Democratic Peace complain of, narrowing down the conditions of democracy, I especially like 'other democracies must perceive a democracy to be like them.' That's fairly close to a tautology -- and who is the 'master' democracy that gets to decide who is a democracy? Or is it a democracy of democracies, all the democracies voting on whether another country is a democracy or not. Or is it more like a fraternity -- on blackball and you don't count as democracy.

On Lebanon's confessional gerrymander -- it is just a particularly institutionalized form of consociational politics. Consociations have long been considered democratic (see anything by Liphardt). Indeed our own system has been becoming increasingly ethnically gerrymandered, with court-mandated black or hispanic majority electoral districts, for example.

And why the scare quotes around 'Christian.' Lebanon and the mid-east have some of the oldest Christian communities in the world.

One more point, tangential but relevant. The United Kingdom faced a situation on the border of Ulster very similar to what Israel faced on its border with Lebanon. The IRA would occasional lobby a mortar into a police station, for example, and then flee accross to the Republic. While the government of the Republic was nominally against such activity, it never could really prevent the IRA from carrying out such attacks.

However, the UK *never* invaded the Republic, and in fact engaged in dialogue with Eire to improve security. This took time, patience, and civility. This is not to say that the SAS didn't carry out special ops type, targetting attacks against the IRA. I think very few would object to such type operations.

You are all so correct -- the big flaw of the DP is that it tries to define democracy -- surely an impossible task! I regret the error, and will turn my attention to my new life: I'm getting rid of all my dictionaries and encyclopedias, and will search through all my political science books and purge those that try to define anything. What a relief teaching will be! I can do the old Lewis Carrol thing and just make stuff up, and when anyone challenges me, I'll tell them to pound sound. God (no definition attempted -- the term just means whatever I want it to mean today...and maybe I'll change my mind tomorrow...or even this afternoon..ha!) this is going to be great! THANK YOU!

1- Pete, please. Indeed, one of the problems with DPT is that it tries to "objectively" define democracy. But, the alternative is not "burn the dictionaries" Lewis Carrol "make things up" po-mo hell. Definitions like democracies are what our old friend Durkhiem might call Social Facts, and as such they are not objective in definition, but agreed to and institutionalized in social practice that evolves over time. Certainly the US of 1905 would not be a democracy today (women and most minorities without the franchise) but at the time, it was about as good as it got. Yet the DPT folks still code it as a democracy just as they do today.

2- Dan Nexon is more right about this than anyone else commenting here about defining / measuring Lebanon's democratic essence. The core of a robust DPT is not just an observation of outcomes, its a explanation of how those outcomes come about. In other words, a causal mechanism that produces peace between two states identified as democracies.

Some suggest it is trade and interdependence, some suggest it is an institutional structure, and some suggest its a set of shared "democratic" values.

Each of these separate Democratic Peace Theories would have a different discussion of the current crisis in Lebanon.

The war is pretty clearly between Hezballah and Israel, not Lebannon and Israel.

But in any case, I think the description of Lebannon as "democratizing" rather than "democratic" is perfectly accurate, especially since much of the country wasn't under the rule of the democratic regime.

Hey folks, read the literature! Specifically "Never at War" (summarized, not by me, on Wikipedia, look it up). The book, although written a decade ago, addresses exactly this issue in great detail.

In surveying ALL wars involving republican governments throughout history, I got hung up on some medieval and early modern cases, and it took me a full year of study to sort them out. The answer turned out to be simple, however. Some republics are "anocratic," meaning that the elected government does not have full monopoly on the exercise of force. Such quasi-states readily go to war with one another. These wars typically begin with raids carried out by sub-government groups. Hey, I did NOT write that about the current situation, but about a pattern that was very common in 14th-century Italy, 16th-century Switzerland, etc. OLD story.

And one more piece of evidence confirming that what counts is political culture: as ye deal with one another in your capital city, so do ye deal with foreigners. Or does anyone imagine that the assassination of Lebanese & Palestinian leaders by their fellow Muslims is not highly relevent?

Another question: when democracies do fight, do their conflicts particularly devolve into total wars of peoples, without respect for civilians? Isn't there something in Tocqueville?

From Yahoo! new:

Israeli helicopter fire hit a Lebanese army troop carrier during the raid and Lebanese troops fired anti-aircraft guns at Israeli aircraft, the security sources added.

Five Lebanese, including an army soldier, were killed in the violence, the sources said.

So much for Israel fighting Hesbollah, not Lebanon. Of course, the people on the receiving end of bombs in, say, Tripoli could have told you that Israel was attacking Lebanon three weeks ago.

mitchell, israeli forces have standing orders of shooting back to anyone shooting at them. If legitimate Lebanese army or UNIFIL fires at Israeli forces, they are done. No one said war was nice.
What is surprising in this war, is the randomness of Hizbollah rockets. It seems they are unable to hit any infrastructure or industrial target. The damage done is minimal, and the country's moral is up and hardened. Lately they are firing at Arab villages - what is the purpose?

Jaimito,

There is a meme going around that this is a war not against Lebanon, but against Hesbollah. The purpose of my post above was to show that this is not true.

More specifically, the Israeli armed forces have engaged Lebanese army units -- and bases -- and Lebanese army units have engaged Israeli units. Moreover, the very first days of the bombing featured sorties against targets like the port city of Tripoli -- far from Hesbollah territory. However much strategic sense they make from an Israeli point of view, there is simply no way to interpret these attacks as anything other than acts of war against Lebanon.

Mitchell,
Hizbollah is represented in the Lebanese parliament, and it part of the Lebanese government and state. Arab identities and affiliations are always fluid, as the Arab street always searching for superheroes and victorious leaders. Should Nasrallah emerge strong from this conflict, he will carry Lebanon and Syria too. Should he be cought and sent to The Hague to be judged, as I dream, the Lebanese state will claim his right to hang him for banditry.

"Regardless of the Lebanon thing (and if Lebanon is a democracy, seems like Iran would have to count as well - they have regular elections), I hope I don't sound too ideological here, but how is Israel a democracy? It's not like everyone governed by it gets to vote. If South Africa before 1992 was a democracy the way these things were coded, then, yes, sure, so is Israel."

All citizens of Israel can vote, and everyone born in Israel is an Israeli citizen, including arabs. The West Bank is NOT part of Israel (though the Govt of Israel considers it disputed territory, not occupied), so its residents are not Israeli citizens (although Israeli citizen FROM Israel have moved there). Jerusalem WAS annexed in 1967, and its Arab residents WERE offered Israeli citizenship and full voting rights. Most turned it down. They are extend voting rights in municipal elections anyway.

"The fact that Israel has Arabs in its Parliament is really not relevant. I have read -- I wish I could recall where -- that on truly important matters Israel's main parties will not form coalitions with Arab parties (who might hold the balance otherwise.) Maybe this 'grand coalitions' of Likud-Labour seem to be so common in Israel."

The current arab parties in Israel are anti-zionist, and, as opposing the basis of the state, are not fully coalitionable. When Labour had an affiliated Arab list, it WAS coalitionable.

" My understanding also is that much of the land in Israel has been set aside for Jewish only purchase."

The Jewish National Fund, a private organization funded by the donations of Jews abroad, bought land for purchase by Jews. Recent Israeli Supreme Court cases have reaffirmed that land provided to the JNF by the state CANNOT be sold on a disciminatory basis.

" I know that recently the Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that *spouses* of Israeli Arabs have no right to immigrate to join their husband/wife in Israel."

AFAIK, by the same token, Palestinian spouses of Israeli Jews (and yes, there are a few) have no right to immigrate either.

" Contrast that to the "Right of Return", not to mention private programs to promote Aliyah, such as the "Birthright Israel" program open to Jewish youth worldwide. "

Yes, Israel was founded to be a haven for Jews from around the world. The arguement is made that discrimination between different classes of would be immigrants, none of whom are citizens (which type of discrimination is practiced by the Federal Republic of Germany, among others) is not relevant to civil equality among citizens, which is the meaningful measure of relevant limitations on democracy, including presumably those relevant to DPT.

citation for attacks on Tripoli?

The Mansfield and Snyder argument about the dangers of democratizing states is, imo, strongest in the case of weak democratizing states, i.e., those in which the level of domestic concentration of authority is low. (Shameless plug alert: for a more detailed discussion of this point see my article on interaction terms, pp. 811-816.) And it seems very hard to me to argue that the concentration of domestic authority in Lebanon is high, so this is precisely the sort of condition under which the M&S finding should apply.

That said, it seems to me to be worthwhile to ask exactly what sort of actor Hezbollah really is. Is it simply a state within a state, or is it (more problematically for DP theory as well as IR theory more generally) a combination of domestic Lebanese actor and catspaw for Iran and Syria? If the latter is the case, and I don't think it's too hard to argue that it is, then it's difficult to fit the case neatly into a theory like democratic peace theory that was designed with a tidy world of Westphalian sovereign states in mind. How are preferences, norms, audience costs, etc., to be understood in the case of a territory-less agglomeration of multiple, overlapping sovereignties?

To anticipate one response, I'm not particularly trying to save the "one counterexample kills it" variant of democratic peace theory. I'm of the opinion, for the reasons that Ken Schultz has already explained above, that that isn't a particularly interesting conversation to have. Rather, I'm suggesting that, rather than trying to squeeze important cases like this into theoretical frameworks that don't accommodate them, we should be open to re-thinking how actors like these should be understood.

regarding the late 90s india - pakistan hostilities in kargil:

there's plenty of evidence that the (elected) prime minister sharif, wasn't the main guy behind the whole incursion. sure, he must have had knowledge and given his consent to the extent that he could, but he wasn't the planner or decision maker, nor did he know the extent of the whole operation. unelected ISI and military generals (musharraf) were the ones behind it.

see strobe talbott's book, "engaging india"

if that counts, or if such minimal involvement from actual democratic officials is good enough, then surely the entire proxy war pakistan has waged against india for the last 30 years in the state of kashmir and beyond disproves the whole democratic peace theory.

i for one don't think it does, nor does this lebanon situation. and to the extent that they do, it's only because these are rather flawed "democracies" to begin with...
both seem to be cases where the democratic elements are dragged into a conflict by non-democratic elements.

since "democracy" is a scale, i think the problem would be solved by simply changing the theory to: the more democratic and free two countries are, the less likely they are to go to war with each other.