You should read David Rothkopf's article

He ruminates on this week's slaughters of the innocent - the four kids killed on the beach in Gaza and the downing of the Malaysian plane over the Ukraine. It's a powerful piece. Here are some excerpts:

Modern low-intensity conflicts are won and lost on their ragged edges. Nations act as though the careful plans of their militaries and intelligence operations can harness the chaos of combat and guide it to advance their interests. And then the unplanned happens, collateral damage occurs, and it has a bigger impact on politics and the position of combatants than all the calculated elements of the conflict added up.

While the Israeli government can and repeatedly does justify its actions against Hamas as self-defense, it cannot argue away the deaths of four children on the beach or, for that matter, the large number of other civilian victims of its attacks. There is no moral equation that offers a satisfactory calculus to enable us to accept the death of innocents as warranted.

Leaders on both sides have lost all sense that when you share a land, you share each other's children, and that they belong not to the flawed nations of today but to the promise of what might come tomorrow.

The sight of dead children not only weakens Israel politically and dents the country's international standing, but it taints every defensible action Israel might take and devalues any future peace by literally having snuffed it out for those killed.

When innocents die, standard military metrics for success or failure pale in comparison with the human costs depicted so graphically in the media -- highlighting once again with indelible and deeply disturbing images the hubris of leaders who delude themselves into believing they can control the uncontrollable.