I don't know how Ophelia digs these gems out. She must have an RSS reader filled to the brim with stories about the craziness of Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva's scholarly bad behaviour - or perhaps she's being beamed these stories by Theory's Satan (the daemonic love child of a three-way with Alan Sokal, Jacques Lacan and Judith Butler - what can I say - someone brought some really good weed back from Amsterdam, and it just sort of happened!). But how about taking two French theorists and applying their valuable insights to the business of war? 
Well, the theorists in question would be Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari and the men of war would be the Israeli army. They believe that A Thousand Plateaus, the second part of Deleuze and Guattari's Capitalism & Schizophrenia, contains valuable insights in to the business of, err, killing people.
This may explain the fascination of the military with the spatial and organizational models and modes of operation advanced by theorists such as Deleuze and Guattari. Indeed, as far as the military is concerned, urban warfare is the ultimate Postmodern form of conflict.
Sorry, but both sides are seeing people go home in coffins. If you are going to have the balls to say that urban warfare is "postmodern", perhaps you'd be willing to explain that to the Lebanese child who has had his arms blown off in this "postmodern" tussle? Perhaps you could tell the families of the kidnapped Israeli soldiers how Deleuzian theory and postmodern Situationism is going to get their relatives back?
I'm sure that the relatives of the dead will be interested to know how the rhizomatic alternative to tree and root models of knowledge or the training in "nomadology" is supposed to comfort them having lost their homes and loved ones as a result of military or terrorist actions.
I'm as neutral as they come, with a slightly leaning towards the Israelis, in the conflict. Fortunately, even though Deleuze and Guattari turned out phrases like "The relation of presupposition between variables of content and expression no longer require two forms: the placing-in-variation of the variables instead draws the two forms together and effects the conjunction of cutting edges of deterritorialization on both sides; this occurs on the plane of a single liberated matter that contains no figures, is deliberately unformed, and retains in expression and in content only those cutting edges, tensors and tensions" (A Thousand Plateaus, p. 109 - a sentence picked semi-randomly from my copy of D&G), when it came to the issue of Israel and the Middle East, M. Deleuze was slightly more lucid than he and M. Guattari are in A Thousand Plateaus.
Again, I say this from a position of (perhaps ignorant) neutrality, but is this not simply the Israeli's listening to M. Deleuze when he is at his most abstract and open to interpretation, and sticking their fingers in their ears when they say anything critical (fairly worrying for a critical theorist, perhaps) - or at least critical and understandable - I have a feeling in my gut that A Thousand Plateaus is as applicable to the Israeli military as it is to Swiss cheese and to breakfast cereals and anything else you care to throw at it, it's just that we shall never really know...
The last paragraph of the original article seems to have a certain instructive value:
When the military talks theory to itself, it seems to be about changing its organizational structure and hierarchies. When it invokes theory in communications with the public in lectures, broadcasts and publications it seems to be about projecting an image of a civilized and sophisticated military.
Ah-ha! They may spend their days out dropping bombs and infiltrating terrorist cells and leaving children limbless, but once they get back to base, they have a swift vodka and tonic and settle down with Anti-Oedipus. It's all about image. What is it that one professor at my university says - "if you don't do postmodernism, postmodernism does you".
And when the military 'talks' (as every military does) to the enemy, theory could be understood as a particularly intimidating weapon of 'shock and awe', the message being: 'You will never even understand that which kills you.'
There is more said in this last paragraph than in the rest of this article and, perhaps, even in D&G's philosophical masterpiece. So you've got critical theory-addled Israeli soldiers going up against fundamentalism-addled Muslims. And in the middle you've got ordinary people dying. So pomo, darling!
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