Mark Steyn has done a good job of sticking pins so as to deflate the "Great Men" Mideast diplomacy balloon.

However, his last paragraph leaves me a bit puzzled. At the least, he needs to write a follow-up column proposing how he would "wage war on the ideology". Hopefully Mark is stating an oblique criticism of Kadima's lack of strategic vision (or wrong-headed vision) that allowed the present crisis to develop -- rather than expressing opposition to the current military action.

Israel has been pursuing a "starve the beast" approach, though it is probably accurate that Kadima has not exhibited a consistent approach. (Exhibit A: unilateral withdrawals). Hopefully, Kadima has now "seen the light" following the recent acts of Hamas and Hezbollah and finally recognizes that since the world did not cooperate with its efforts to cut off money and arms flow [did they really expect the world to cooperate?], Israel must militarily cut off the arms of the beast (in both senses of "arms") so that the beast will bleed to death. If Syria and Iran wish to become blood donors, then hopefully Israel will take the necessary actions to eliminate their ability to resusitate the beast -- and hopefully the world this time will not come to the rescue of the beast.

At this time, with Israel up to its armpits with alligators, its first objective rightly is to drain the swamp. I trust Kadima will not get a free pass in the post mortem.

Civil Truth --

I would take waging war on the ideology to mean the same things we did during the cold war, like the reverse propaganda broadcast by Radio Free Europe, only in this case hammering the populations of Islamofascist run countries with comparisons between living as they do and living as we do in the west, etc. To mean sowing whatever seeds we could to turn the people against their form of government and the violence in their religion. Take some of their most forceful dissenters and train them to organize others, that kind of thing. Where the Palestinians are concerned, the suggestion that they get rid of the religious leaders who preach terrorism and the teachers that teach hatred and encourage children to idolize and want to emulate murderers is a good one and needs also be implemented.

I recently wrote that recent events should have shown Israeli liberals why giving Gaza to the Palestinians had been a bad idea, but that if they're anything like our liberals, they'll stick to the unilateralist idea just because they view doing so as taking some sort of moral high ground which, speaking at least of our own left, takes precedence over the preservation of any number of innocent lives or the lives of military or police authorities stuck with having to function on that "moral high ground".

I should think that the Israelis, after this, would reannex the Gaza Strip and all the West Bank territory they've ceded to the Palestinians, and tell them that they can try again after they've proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that they've "straightened out their own affairs". But don't count on that, it would be much too sensible, and the UN, the EU and playmates would all be loudly condemning Israel for taking the land back, "violating a treaty agreement", etc, as always ignoring the transgressions of the Palestinians.

One can only hope that Israel takes full advantage of this war by using the opportunity to take out all the movers and shakers in both Hezbollah and Hamas, and making sure Syria gets badly burned, in one way or another, for their contributions.

More:

The problem with "the guys in the suits" is that the Arabs don't take them seriously. They've shown that lying, breaking agreements, etc. mean nothing to them, and every time some hot shot goes over there to administer a "peace plan", he makes a total jackass of himself. Bush made an ass out of himself over his "Roadmap", all it did was get a lot of terrorists released from prison and some good laughs at the President's (and Israel's) expense by the terrorists.

You cannot deal with those people as you would with people whose sensibilities lie in the modern world. The Muslims we are dealing with today are exactly the same people the crusaders dealt with.

I like that, 'which would get us back to "Oslo'
so this time they could walk away from the table that caused so much of this hate and destroy the enemy of Human Kind...

Welllllll, you've got to admit that if you were a space alien sent here to observe world affairs, you'd definitely get confused.

You'd see this one bunch of people murdering a whole bunch of another bunch of people, then the victimized bunch of people being restrained from doing anything about it.

Then you'd see a bunch of politicians negotiating with each other, and the victimized side having to make all sorts of concessions to the murdering side while the murdering side gives nothing, then picks up on the murdering when they've gotten all the concessions their going to get that time around.

After about the 5th or 6th identical cycle, you'd just have to assume the victimized country existed solely as a murderers' playground, by general global agreement.