“It is not clear to me what exactly the U. S. is trying to accomplish by not taking a stance in favor of an early cease fire.”—Zbigniew Brzezinski, ex-national security advisor to President Jimmy Carter.
What will it take to convince world opinion leadership and the denial crowd in this country that Newt Gingrich is correct—this is World War III (or IV if you count the Cold War), it has many fronts, we have been in it for at least fifteen years, and it will be a very long one? Why is it that many, if not most, Americans and Europeans understand Islamic terrorism as the disconnected actions of disparate groups of religious fanatics? What is it about the liberal internationalist mind that cannot or will not connect the dots of the sequence of events over the past quarter century? Why is it always that the world’s first reaction, except in the U. S. and Britain, to the exercise of Israel’s sovereign right to self-defense is accusation of “disproportionate response” with immediate calls for cease fire? Why is it so difficult for some of us to empathize with the analogy of the establishment of a state-sponsored militia just across our border launching missiles into Chicago, or at least to the comparison with our Cuban missile crisis of 1962? And why do we continue to have patience or confidence in any reliance on the inept United Nations to monitor, much less enforce, any of its resolutions?
And yet the media laments that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s trips to the Middle East since the Hezbollah attacks on Israel aren’t really “peace missions”, contrasting them unfavorably to the shuttle diplomacy of previous administrations. UN Ambassador John Bolton has it right—Hezbollah is illegitimate, incapable of commitment, and has no authority to negotiate anything, not to mention that it has killed more Americans in the past 25 years than any other group with the exception of Al Qaeda on 9/11.
Let’s review: We’ve had Camp David, the Mitchell Plan, the Oslo Accord, Land for Peace, the Roadmap to Peace, etc., etc. All were failures. Isn’t it time to win the war? No victory, no peace.
