by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n S<\/span>um up the declarations of Hezbollah\u2019s leaders, Syrian diplomats, Iranian nuts, West Bank terrorists, and Arab commentators \u2014 and this latest\u00a0Middle East\u00a0war seems one of the strangest in a long history of strange conflicts. For example, have we ever witnessed a conflict in which one of the belligerents \u2014 Iran \u2014 that shipped thousands of rockets into Lebanon, and promises that it will soon destroy Israel, vehemently denies that its own missile technicians are on the ground in the Bekka Valley. Wouldn\u2019t it wish to brag of such solidarity?<\/p>\n Or why, after boasting of the new targets that his lethal missiles will hit in\u00a0Israel, does Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah (\u201cWe are ready for it \u2014 war, war on every level\u201d) now harp that\u00a0Israel\u00a0is hitting too deep into\u00a0Lebanon\u00a0? Don\u2019t enemies expect one another to hit deep? Isn\u2019t that what \u201cwar on every level\u201d is all about?<\/p>\n Meanwhile, why do the G-8 or the United Nations even talk of putting more peacekeeping troops into southern Lebanon, when in the past such rent-a-cops and uniformed bystanders have never stopped hostilities? Does anyone remember that it was Hezbollah who blew up French and American troops who last tried to provide \u201cstability\u201d between the warring parties?<\/p>\n Why do not\u00a0Iran\u00a0and\u00a0Syria\u00a0\u2014 or for that matter other Arab states \u2014 now attackIsrael\u00a0to join the terrorists that they have armed? Surely the two-front attack by Hamas and Hezbollah could be helped by at least one conventional Islamic military. After promising us all year that he was going to \u201cwipe out\u201d\u00a0Israel\u00a0, is not this the moment for Mr. Ahmadinejad to strike?<\/p>\n And why \u2014 when Hezbollah rockets are hidden in apartment basements, then brought out of private homes to target civilians in Israel \u2014 would terrorists who exist to murder noncombatants complain that some \u201ccivilians\u201d have been hit? Would not they prefer to lionize \u201cmartyrs\u201d who helped to store their arms?<\/p>\n W<\/span>e can answer these absurdities by summing up the war very briefly.\u00a0Iranand\u00a0Syria\u00a0feel the noose tightening around their necks \u2014 especially the ring of democracies in nearby\u00a0Afghanistan\u00a0,\u00a0Iraq\u00a0,\u00a0Turkey\u00a0, and perhaps\u00a0Lebanon\u00a0. Even the toothless U.N. finally is forced to focus on Iranian nukes and Syrian murder plots. And neither\u00a0Syria\u00a0can overturn the Lebanese government nor canIran\u00a0the Iraqi democracy. Instead, both are afraid that their rhetoric may soon earn some hard bombing, since their \u201cair defenses\u201d are hardly defenses at all.<\/p>\n So they tell Hamas and Hezbollah to tap their missile caches, kidnap a few soldiers, and generally try to turn the world\u2019s attention to the collateral damage inflicted on \u201crefugees\u201d by a stirred-up Zionist enemy.<\/p>\n For their part, the terrorist killers hope to kidnap, ransom, and send off missiles, and then, when caught and hit, play the usual victim card of racism, colonialism, Zionism, and about every other -ism that they think will win a bailout from some guilt-ridden, terrorist-frightened, Jew-hating, or otherwise oil-hungry Western nation.<\/p>\n The only difference from the usual scripted Middle East war is that this time, privately at least, most of the West, and perhaps some in the Arab world as well, want\u00a0Israel\u00a0to wipe out Hezbollah, and perhaps hit\u00a0Syria\u00a0or\u00a0Iran\u00a0. The terrorists and their sponsors know this, and rage accordingly when their military impotence is revealed to a global audience \u2014 especially after no reprieve is forthcoming to save their \u201cpride\u201d and \u201chonor.\u201d<\/p>\n After all, for every one Israeli Hezbollah kills, they lose ten. You are not winning when \u201cvictory\u201d is assessed in terms of a single hit on an Israeli warship. Their ace-in-the-hole strategy \u2014 emblematic of the entire pathetic Islamist way of war \u2014 is that they can disrupt the good Western life of their enemies that they are both attracted to and thus also hate. But, as\u00a0Israel\u00a0has shown, a Western public can be quite willing to endure shelling if it knows that such strikes will lead to a devastating counter-response.<\/p>\n W<\/span>hat should the\u00a0United States\u00a0do? If it really cares about human life and future peace, then we should talk ad nauseam about \u201crestraint\u201d and \u201cproportionality\u201d while privately assuring Israel the leeway to smash both Hamas and Hezbollah \u2014 and humiliate Syria and Iran, who may well come off very poorly from their longed-for but bizarre war.<\/p>\n Only then will\u00a0Israel\u00a0restore some semblance of deterrence and strengthen nascent democratic movements in both\u00a0Lebanon\u00a0and even the\u00a0West Bank\u00a0. This is the truth that everyone from\u00a0London\u00a0to\u00a0Cairo\u00a0knows, but dares not speak. So for now, let us pray that the brave pilots and ground commanders of the IDF can teach these primordial tribesmen a lesson that they will not soon forget \u2014 and thus do civilization\u2019s dirty work on the other side of the proverbial Rhine.<\/p>\n In this regard, it is time to stop the silly slurs that American policy in the Middle East is either in shambles or culpable for the present war. In fact, if we keep our cool, the Bush doctrine is working. Both Afghans and Iraqis each day fight and kill Islamist terrorists; neither was doing so before 9\/11.\u00a0Syria\u00a0and\u00a0Iranhave never been more isolated; neither was isolated when Bill Clinton praised the \u201cdemocracy\u201d in\u00a0Tehran\u00a0or when an American secretary of State sat on the tarmac in\u00a0Damascus\u00a0for hours to pay homage to\u00a0Syria\u00a0\u2019s gangsters.\u00a0Israel\u00a0is at last being given an opportunity to unload on jihadists; that was impossible during the Arafat fraud that grew out of the\u00a0Oslo\u00a0debacle. Europe is waking up to the dangers of radical Islamism; in the past, it bragged of its aid and arms sales to terrorist governments from the West Bank to\u00a0Baghdad\u00a0.<\/p>\n Some final observations on Hezbollah and Hamas. There is no longer a Soviet deterrent to bail out a failed Arab offensive. There is no longer empathy for poor Islamist \u201cfreedom fighters.\u201d The truth is that it is an open question as to which regime \u2014\u00a0Iran\u00a0or\u00a0Syria\u00a0\u2014 is the greater international pariah. After a recent trip to the Middle East, I noticed that the unfortunate prejudicial stares given to a passenger with an Iranian passport were surpassed only by those accorded another on his way to\u00a0Damascus\u00a0.<\/p>\n So after 9\/11, the London bombings, the Madrid murders, the French riots, the Beslan atrocities, the killings in India, the Danish cartoon debacle, Theo Van Gogh, and the daily arrests of Islamic terrorists trying to blow up, behead, or shoot innocent people around the globe, the world is sick of the jihadist ilk. And for all the efforts of the BBC, Reuters, Western academics, and the horde of appeasers and apologists that usually bail these terrorist killers out when their rhetoric finally outruns their muscle, this time they can\u2019t.<\/p>\n Instead, a disgusted world secretly wants these terrorists to get what they deserve. And who knows: This time they just might.<\/p>\n \u00a92006 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Israel is at last being given an opportunity to unload on jihadists. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Sum up the declarations of Hezbollah\u2019s leaders, Syrian diplomats, Iranian nuts, West Bank terrorists, and Arab commentators \u2014 and this latest\u00a0Middle East\u00a0war seems one of the strangest in a long history of strange conflicts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[772],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-11w","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8272,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/israel-jews-and-the-obama-administration\/","url_meta":{"origin":3938,"position":0},"title":"Israel, Jews, and the Obama Administration","author":"victorhanson","date":"March 9, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ PJ Media Even some Democrats in Congress have come to the conclusion that after the brouhaha over Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu\u2019s speech before Congress, President Obama wants to radically downgrade the long American special relationship with democratic Jewish Israel \u2014 and perhaps has a dislike\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"President Obama meets with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House, Oct 1st, 2014. 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Defensive missiles explode to save civilians in\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "The Middle East"","block_context":{"text":"The Middle East","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3938"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3938"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3939,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3938\/revisions\/3939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}