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July 20, 2006
Good Reasons To Let Israel Finish The Job
Former Undersecretary of Defense(Bush 1 Administration) and author Jed Babbin has some spot-on reasons why it would be irresponsible in an extreme for the "global community" to interfere with Israel's prosecution of their war with Hamas and Hezbollah, and by extension Syria and Iran.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan and British Prime Minister Tony Blair want to send an international force to separate Israel from Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon. Mr. Blair said a U.N. force should be sent to "stop the bombardment coming over into Israel and therefore [give] Israel a reason to stop its attacks on Hezbollah." Mr. Annan said such a force could "pursue the idea of stabilization." But their idea assumes, first, that a cease-fire would protect those worthy of protection and, second, that restoring the region's antebellum "stability" would promote long-term peace. Both assumptions are utterly false.Hezbollah is not some small, ragged band scattered around Lebanon. It is a huge terrorist structure, built over decades, that includes thousands of men, weapons, positions, offices and everything that enables it to control southern Lebanon. Israel is now destroying that infrastructure. A cease-fire would benefit Hezbollah and threaten Israel. It would protect both Hezbollah and the nations that support it--Syria and Iran--as well as the Lebanese who have accepted the terrorist organization as a legitimate part of their government. A cease-fire would allow Hezbollah to rebuild its power base and enable it to resume its attacks whenever Damascus and Tehran desired. For Israel, a U.N. force would create no security whatever against future attacks.
It has become rather tiresome, over the years, watching the same stupid jackass politicians, including a President I happen to like, continuously pressuring Israel into cutting off defensive actions before they've been completed and forcing them to go through a whole lot of diplomatic posturing in order to engender "peace" in the Mideast. I say these politicians are jackasses in this regard because they are too liberal-like when it comes to negotiating with Arabs -- Hamas, Hezbollah and all the rest of Islam's terrorist organizations break every agreement, no matter what, and these stupid, moronic, imbecillic politician dumb-asses go right back the next time and do it again. Even during "peace" negotiations, Arab bombs go off on Israeli streets, in stores and restaurants and on buses.
And every time, their only accomplishment is to get the Arabs a break so they can regroup and be fresh for their next treaty violation. I'm sorry, but these western politicians are effin' boneheads -- the only way Israel will ever have any peace is if they are allowed to destroy all the terrorist infrastructure over there, root and branch, and waste every last one of the terrorists' leaders and supporters.
Sometimes the only way to achieve peace is through winning a war, and this is something the rest of the world has been keeping Israel from doing for a long time. These "peace" processes that all these Presidents of ours like to give themselves cudos for only serve to escalate terrorism and get more Israelis murdered.
I'm sorry, but when I hear Blair and some others want to pull the same crap yet again, it makes my blood boil. At least George W. Bush seems to have realized that his entire "Roadmap" enterprise was a complete waste of his time, to say nothing of a waste of the lives of innocent people killed by terrorists his "Roadmap" got released from Israeli prisons, and has given his blessing to Israel to do what they need to do, and that at least partly redeems him from some of the less delicate references in my above rant.
Anyway, read the rest of the OpEd here.
Finished? Good, because I'm not done yet.
Now let's talk about the damage Israel's liberals and the general complacency of their government have done.
Daniel Pipes is right on top of it.
For 45 years, 1948-93, Israel's strategic vision, tactical brilliance, technological innovation, and logistical cleverness won it a deterrence capability. A deep understanding of the country's predicament, complemented by money, will power, and dedication, enabled the Israeli state systematically to burnish its reputation for toughness.The leadership focused on the enemy's mind and mood, adopting policies designed to degrade his morale, with the goal of inducing a sense of defeat, a realization that the Jewish state is permanent and cannot be undone. As a result, whoever attacked the Israel state paid for that mistake with captured terrorists, dead soldiers, stalled economies, and toppled regimes.
By 1993, this record of success imbued Israelis with a sense of overconfidence. They concluded they had won, ignoring the inconvenient fact that Palestinians and other enemies had not yet given up their goal of eliminating Israel. Two emotions long held in check, fatigue and hubris, came flooding out. Deciding that (1) they had enough of war and (2) they could end the war on their own terms, Israelis experimented with such exotica as "the peace process" and "disengagement." They permitted their enemies to create a quasi-governmental structure (the "Palestinian Authority") and to amass hoards of armaments (Hizbullah's nearly 12,000 Katyushas in southern Lebanon). They shamelessly traded captured terrorists for hostages.
And they gave the Palestinians -- Hamas, a terrorist organization whose goal is the destruction of Israel -- territory annexed in 1967 specifically for the purpose of having a security buffer zone in case of another invasion attempt by Syria. In the Yom Kippur War of 1973, the IDF had to fight tooth and nail to kick the invading Syrians off the Golan escarpment. So now an enemy sponsored by Syria occupies the security buffer zone with Israel's blessing. Was that a brilliant move, or what?
Somewhere I was reading recently -- I can't recall exactly where, someone compared the "useful idiots" {western liberals, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's term}, of the USSR years who believed all the B.S. of Marxist propaganda spewed by communists and responded by joining the Communist Party, etc, and today's "useful idiots", who are this time swallowing all the "Religion Of Peace" folderol and to compound their gullibility, are so ignorant of Israel's history and current affairs that they believe all the "occupation" and "apartheid" rhetoric generated by Islamofascist propagandists.
Now, I can see where that might be the case with western liberals, who get all their "news" from leftist bastions of bullshit like the New York Times and who know absolutely nothing about people and human nature, but from Israelis who have lived with terrorism and broken peace agreements by Arabs for so many decades, you'd expect a little more intelligence, or at least the wisdom born of long experience.
UPDATE
My blogger friend Always On Watch has indicated that the Saudis and fellow travellers have done a John Kerry and flip-flopped on us, going from condemnation of the "irresponsibility" on Hezbollah's part that brought the wrath of Israel down on Lebanon to the standard form, general purpose condemnation and blame laid on Israel.
These folks, and I'm speaking of Arab Muslim leaders, are about as mature as kindergartners.
Posted by Seth at July 20, 2006 02:10 AM
Comments
Thanks, Seth! I finally got around to doing a blog article about the Saudis' change of position.
Posted by: Always On Watch at July 20, 2006 11:21 AM
...just when we thought some semblance of sanity had arrived in Riyadh...
Posted by: Seth at July 20, 2006 02:37 PM
I've been trying to ping back this post to yours!
Help!!
http://thespisjournal.blogspot.com/2006/07/faulty-news-templates-for-middle-east.html
Posted by: Thespis at July 20, 2006 08:59 PM
Thespis --
Your link to my post works fine. In the other direction, I deleted the URL for your post from your comment and then retyped it to see if that would work.
To follow the link, a reader needs to "copy" the URL and "paste" it into the address bar. I'm going to check with someone I know who is better versed in the technical end of Moveable Type and probably Blogspot as well(a lot of fellow bloggers I know started out at Blogspot, didn't like it for some reason and "fled", though having never used it, I can't say I know their motives) and see if we can make the link work right.
Thanks for the link! :-)
Posted by: Seth at July 20, 2006 10:26 PM
Seth, excellent analysis and commentary.
The base question is, does Israel have a right to exist as a nation? The answer, of course, is yes (regardless of what Hezbollah [Iran] and Hamas [Syria] say). If they have a right to exist, they have a right to react when attacked, just like we did in Afghanistan post 9-11.
If the have a right to exist and to react when attacked, then they have the right to wage war to defend their citizens. When war is waged, the goal is victory, not status quo. Overwhelming force is required to subdue an enemy into surrender. Anything less is sheer stupidity. I'd hate to see the Israelis become stupid at this point in time.
Posted by: Old Soldier at July 21, 2006 04:25 PM
Old Soldier --
I think that much of what led to this war was the fact that Israeli govt was doing to their country in the last few years what the Clinton Administration did to ours all through the 1990s: Inadequate responses to terrorist attacks, sending a message to the enemy that we'd become a clawless, toothless tiger. On Israel's part, there was the added mistake of making too many unilateral concessions, which the Arabs perceived as an indication that terrorism was working and that if they stepped up attacks, it would work even faster. They even said as much before and during the Great Gaza Give-Away, but the Israeli leadership paid them no mind.
Like the Bush response to 9/11, this defensive action on Israel's part is demonstrating that certain terrorists and their government sponsors got the wrong message, and brought the wrath of G-d down on their sorry behinds.
I sincerely hope that some real lessons have been learned from this in appropriate circles, but recent history teaches me that I shouldn't hold my breath.
Posted by: Seth at July 21, 2006 04:52 PM
What if the US had let Saddam march right thru Kuwait into Saudi Arabia?
Posted by: Love at July 21, 2006 07:38 PM
Saddam would have kicked the Saudis' rear end, and on this end, the price increase in gas at the pump would have made the prices people are whining about today seem the next best thing to free.
Posted by: Seth at July 21, 2006 07:49 PM
Right, everything is the fault of the liberals and the NY Times. I see the light now.
The truth is that liberals have nothing to do with the reckless bombing of civilians in Lebanon. Hezbollah kidnaps two, so Israel kills civilians rather than Hezbollah. Good job.
Beirut now looks and smells like NYC on 9/11.
Posted by: PoliticalCritic at July 24, 2006 02:45 PM
Political Critic --
I'm glad you asked, LOL.
It's funny that the left never has anything to say when Hezbollah or Hamas terrorize Israeli citizens, but every single time, without exception, ever, no matter what, that Israel responds to a terrorist attack the left starts screaming bloody murder.
Liberals have a highly selective sense of outrage. In some circles, it's known as hypocrisy.
A. Lebanon is a sovereign nation, and one responsibility of a sovereign nation as such is to take responsibility for all military/ paramilitary assets within its borders.
B. The Lebanese have voted a number of Hezbollah members into positions of leadership. Just as the Palestinians knew they were voting terrorism into their government by electing Hamas, so did the Lebanese vote for Hezbollah.
C. Hezbollah forayed onto Israeli soil, killed and abducted Israeli soldiers.
A + B + C = an Act Of War as much by Lebanon as by Hezbollah against Israel. In war, things get broken, lots of things, and people, including civilians, get killed. When the enemy hides among, and even opens fire from behind civilians, civilians who are at the least sympathetic with, and at best supportive of the terrorists' cause, well -- reality is nothing like Hollywood would have us believe.
The Israelis also dropped leaflets into areas known to be infested with terrorists, warning civilians to evacuate because the areas would be bombed. Hezbollah has never dropped a single leaflet anyplace, unless it contained an anti-Israel message.
A liberal would stand down the troops for fear of civilian casualties, and that liberal would be as much a terrorist as the terrorists they allowed to survive and kill some more people as a result, much as I believe a judge who lets a rapist or murderer back into the public domain is automatically the felon's partner in any rapes or murders he performs once free.
And to answer your question, yes -- liberals and the mainstream media (6 of 1, 1/2 dozen of the other) are very responsible for a lot of negative events, the greatest today being what could only be called treasonous abuse of rights -- yes, with freedoms come responsibilities, and this concept is totally lost on liberals.
War is not a sporting event, real lives are on the line, yet liberals act as if it's a fun game and always take the side of the enemy.
In the current conflict between Israel, two major terrorist organizations and, by extension, Syria and Iran, Israel is doing a dirty job that might never have been necessary had liberals and/or liberal political and media influence not continuously prevented them from getting the job done when it would have been a much easier and exponentially less bloodier task.
Another thing -- by crossing into Israel to do the deed that ignited Lebanon, Hezbollah, who are a "legitimate" part of the Lebanese gubmint, violated a U.N. directive.
How is it that liberals support the U.N. as if it were a holy oracle, even to the point of believing it's "okay" for Koffi & Kompany to tell the United States how to secure our own country, yet when a terrorist group that is part of a government violates a U.N. directive in attacking Israel, we only hear crickets chirping on the subject from the left?
Posted by: Seth at July 24, 2006 09:37 PM
Posted by: Chris at July 31, 2006 06:23 AM
Chris --
Thanks for the linked and truthful image.
I'm having a technical issue with direct links, and yours didn't appear, so I copied it from my comment notification email.
Posted by: Seth at July 31, 2006 07:18 PM
