Posted on 08/01/2006 5:02:28 PM PDT by danno3150
The war in Lebanon must not end short of its logical conclusion. Its logical conclusion is not the successful use of human shields by Hezbollah to hamstring the Israeli Defense Forces. Its logical conclusion is the destruction of Hezbollah as a military and political force that will always remain a threat to peace and stability of the region.
Hezbollah has gotten a pass from the international community at Qana, as it did when it targeted UN peacekeepers for death by placing Hezbollah fighting positions within meters of the doomed UN observation post, as it has in numerous other tragedies in recent weeks. Israel has received widespread condemnation for firing on a town that Hezbollah cynically used as a base to launch missiles. Further questions of what actually happened in Qana are raised by the Israeli report that the building in which as many as 60 men, women and children were killed did not collapse for up to eight hours after the IDF attack, possibly in a secondary explosion. The IDF’s goodwill gesture of a 48-hour suspension of air attacks was answered by a volley of Hezbollah rockets into Israel.
The apparent civilian death toll in the Lebanon campaign in excess of 500 -- "apparent" because it is impossible to determine how many of them are in fact Hezbollah combatants, and beyond that, how many were purposefully placed in harm’s way by Hezbollah -- has weakened the international community’s willingness to let Israel defend itself unhindered and led to more calls for a ceasefire.
As some observers have noted, Hezbollah’s ability so far to hang on and continue to inflict Israeli casualties is seen as a victory in Arab eyes. Merely failing to be routed by the Israeli onslaught is triumph.
This shows that Israel, and by extension the free world, is facing an enemy on a spiritual par with the Japanese in the Pacfic in World War II, though not nearly as capable as that enemy was, even when that enemy had similarly overplayed its hand.But equally tenacious and delusional, seeing futile acts of suicide and homicide as tactical and strategic coups.
Lebanon is not war-era Japan.Its people will not throw their babies off cliffs as the Israelis approach, and peasants armed with sharpened sticks will not launch Banzai charges against them.Israel need not fear the kinds of losses that the United States faced in the invasion of Japan.To prevail in Lebanon, Israel will not have to use nuclear weapons to obliterate Beirut, Damascus or Teheran the way the United States had to obliterate Nagasaki and Hiroshima in order to neutralize Japan’s will to resist. Israel will, however, have to push on with ground and air strikes, at great cost and in the face of internatinlal condemnation, until Hezbollah is done. Israel has no more choice in the matter than the United States had in the Pacific.The threat cannot be allowed to remain, when its mere survival emboldens it and ensures it will be able to rebuild.
The twisted perception of Hezbollah as David to the Israeli Goliath -- a perversion of the reality in which Israel is vastly outnumbered, outgunned and surrounded, but more adept and capable that its foe-- positions Hezbollah as a winner in any conclusion short of its utter destruction.It offers a major symbolic victory to Iran and Syria, and will allow them to maintain a militarized proxy front in their war on Israel.It will embolden their actions in Iraq against the efforts of the United States and the Iraqi people to build a stable and sane democracy there.It will embolden Iran to continue to pursue its nuclear weapons program in defiance of international pressure.It will create a threat of war in the Middle East on a scale that would make the current troubles look like a picnic.
The pressures of European leaders and the United Nations for a quick fix -- an accommodation of evil of the sort they historically have prefered to acting with determination against a nascent threat -- must not be allowed to stop Israel, with our support, from completing this dirty job.
To end the present suffering of its people , Lebanon cannot be allowed to remain a defacto Shiite-extremist state, dominated by Syria and Iran. An international peacekeeping force cannot be brought in until the root of war is dug out, and Hezbollah is destroyed or effectively removed from Lebanon. That means that for now, as terrible as the toll has been, the use of human shields by Hezbollah cannot be a deterent to utterly exterminating Hezbollah as a political and miltary threat and just as significantly, as a symbol of resistance.
This war, like all just wars against aggression, must not end short of its logical conclusion. Its logical conclusion is the extermination of Hezbollah.
Still, the fact that such a paper even exists there, still surprises me.
Massachusetts voted for Reagan in 1984. Bush lost to Kerry 37-63. It's harder to vote Republican up here, so more than a third of our folks are pretty hardcore. I think we are more motivated and battlehardened than in other parts of the this fine country.
I was thinking Teheran and the extreme unlikelihood that Iran's will to resist is any less than was Japan's.
Conversely, North Korea, North Vietnam, And Iraq (after 1991) are still enemies and threats because they were never decisively defeated. These radical Muslims have not been utterly defeated since 1976? and the Six-Day War. By the way, Egypt hasn't been a big threat since then. Even then, the fighting was stopped prematurely, I think.
Let us support Israel fully and urge and allow them to utterly defeat Hezbollah.
Anything less than the complete annihilation of hezbollah in lebanon will be a tremendous loss for the free world.
Moreover, those nations and leaders which seek to prevent the total annihilation of hezbollah are equally enemies of the free world. Since any negotiations that aids and abets hezbollah preventing the total annihilation of hezbollah, will only leave determined terrorists to terrorize again and again.
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