FAILURE OF THE WILL
My previous angry post "Do we need a new Warfighter President?" about the failure of our government to support, no, to demand, winning the Hezbollah War has proven true. I've not commented on the subject for several days, awaiting some indication of what might have been up anyone's sleeve, to be revealed later.
Now we know. Our sleeve is empty. Everyone else's sleeve contains treachery, incompetence and betrayal.
This war of American and Iranian proxies had a single cause, and several goals, (which might have differed for the Israelis and for the U.S.), but the only acceptable outcome was enunciated by the President and Secy. of State. This included return of the kidnapped Israeli soldiers, the disarming of Hezbollah and creation of a solid Lebanese government that would be the sole controller of the use of armed force. Until such conditions could be created, the peace was to be guaranteed by a "robust force" of international troops with real armaments and war fighting capability.
After a collossal failure of Israeli nerve, and a failure of U.S. to influence them or the "international community," the outcome has been determined, and it's in NO WAY acceptable. The kidnapped Israelis are not returned. Hezbollah is negotiating with itself as to whether, not how, to disarm, and a "disarmament" is now defined keeping their weapons, just not brandishing them in public. The "robust force" of 15,000 is now up to about 3500 from various countries, and the French, with whom this abortion was created, are only promising about 200.
The French! Constant only in betrayal, they were allowed by our Government to be prime movers in the "negotiation" that led to this disastrous outcome. The UN, happless as always, tags along, driven by it's usual miasma of anti-semitic and anti-American sentiment, providing "diplomatic" cover for what will surely be more war, a vastly bloodier one, over a much wider region than that contained by the Litani River....but on someone else's watch.
Mona Charen explains it:
Well, they were true to their word. We didn't get a return to S.Q.A. It's worse than that. Israel and the U.S. having been outmaneuvered in diplomacy and proved on the battlefield to be unwilling to fight whatever kind of war was necessary, we will now be tested everywhere in the world, by every enemy we have. Our potential allies will doubt us, because The Will is everything. We will soon hear again from North Korea; the Chinese will test us. The entire Middle East will be in play, and Iran has had confirmed what they suspected.
Bin Laden learned in Somalia that Bill Clinton would not fight, and was surprised when we did in Afghanistan and Iraq; that was a mistake from which the Islamofacsists are recovering. We're showing them that despite our willingness to fight OUR kind of war, we're proving unwilling to fight THEIR KIND.
There's discussion on a blog, The Belmont Club, one of the most intellectual sites on the internet, which chooses a character from a movie to make the point. Read the whole thing, but here's the money quote: "They realized that to be in power, you didn't need guns or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn't."
This war confirmed to our enemies that we haven't the Will. That's the war we're losing. The other guy fights, kills innocents, murders children, uses babies as bomb carriers....we build hospitals and schools, and fret about panty-hose "tortures." The Israelis worried about their image, and Hezbollah helped them by manufacturing "massacres."
We don't have to massacre children to defeat these savages but we do have to fight with whatever we must, and that's a bloody, awful business. The more fight now, the less later. Being deterred by the animus of the French or of the UN simply guarantees worse bloodshed in the certain wars down the line. Consider this frank observation by Hussein Massawi, a former Hezbollah leader: "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something, We are fighting to eliminate you."
I've written elsewhere that "a civilization that has both the capacity and the will to destroy another one, will do so. We have the capacity, but not the Will. They have the Will but not the capacity." They're acquiring the capacity, as Hezbollah showed the Israelis, and as the Iranians and North Koreans are showing us. Unless we develop the Will, we'll soon be fighting for our lives. Here.
Most of my friends and all of my family feel I've gone over the hill. They can't accept or stand to talk about my predictions that unless we stop them "over there," we will have to defend ourselves right here, in our own neighborhoods, and as individuals, not being able to count on our leadership to defend us. Recall how few people in England imagined in 1938 that London would soon be destroyed, their children evacuated, that being defended by "so few" the English would face the real possibility of defeat and submission to the "real" Nazis.
That's a horrible contemplation...but once again, today, the fire is raging across the world, and we just put another log on it.
In America, there is a political dimension playing simultaneously on a different screen in an adjacent theatre. There's a large and building constituency for withdrawal from the fight. Call it "cut and run" or "re-deploment across the horizon" or whatever, withdrawal can only confirm that we have no Will to fight their war. That can ONLY mean that we will have MORE of their war. And in the meantime, we quibble among ourselves over the legality of "wiretaps" and following the enemies' money trail.
We now live in another movie. A remake called "1938,(2)" I recognize the story line. I saw the first one, and I remember how it came out; 40-60,000,000 dead in six years. That time the White Hat Guy won, but it was a "close run thing" at times. This script may have a different ending, depending on whether we can find the Will .
There's nothing about History that guarantees the continued existence of anything....not even the United States, liberal democracy, freedom...not anything. Civilizations have come and gone...if we're to stay, we'll have to make it so.
I give Mr. Bush credit, and thanks, for what he has done. But he has proven himself to be an executive...a "do-er" ...and not much of a leader.
We need another Winston Churchill....and we need him badly... and now.
Now we know. Our sleeve is empty. Everyone else's sleeve contains treachery, incompetence and betrayal.
This war of American and Iranian proxies had a single cause, and several goals, (which might have differed for the Israelis and for the U.S.), but the only acceptable outcome was enunciated by the President and Secy. of State. This included return of the kidnapped Israeli soldiers, the disarming of Hezbollah and creation of a solid Lebanese government that would be the sole controller of the use of armed force. Until such conditions could be created, the peace was to be guaranteed by a "robust force" of international troops with real armaments and war fighting capability.
After a collossal failure of Israeli nerve, and a failure of U.S. to influence them or the "international community," the outcome has been determined, and it's in NO WAY acceptable. The kidnapped Israelis are not returned. Hezbollah is negotiating with itself as to whether, not how, to disarm, and a "disarmament" is now defined keeping their weapons, just not brandishing them in public. The "robust force" of 15,000 is now up to about 3500 from various countries, and the French, with whom this abortion was created, are only promising about 200.
The French! Constant only in betrayal, they were allowed by our Government to be prime movers in the "negotiation" that led to this disastrous outcome. The UN, happless as always, tags along, driven by it's usual miasma of anti-semitic and anti-American sentiment, providing "diplomatic" cover for what will surely be more war, a vastly bloodier one, over a much wider region than that contained by the Litani River....but on someone else's watch.
Mona Charen explains it:
...In a better world, the tactics of Hezbollah -- crossing an international boundary in an unprovoked act of ruthless aggression; kidnapping soldiers; using civilians as human shields; deliberately targeting Israeli civilians -- would have provoked universal revulsion. Every death of an innocent Lebanese would have been laid at the feet of Hezbollah. But in the world we actually inhabit, the European Union, Muslims throughout the world and many on the left in the United States condemned Israel instead. This war brought us not embedded journalists but embedded terrorists, woven into the fabric of civilian society -- missiles hidden in mosques, launchers within laundries.We were promised "no return to the Status quo Ante"...an outcome that would settle control of Lebanon in the hands of a legitimate elected government that would engage the Israelis in creation of a final settlement. Hezbollah would particpate in politics if elected, but would have no army of its own.
Hezbollah, with a large assist from the Reuters news agency, boldly and blatantly falsified photographs and other news from Lebanon -- strategically posing human beings (dead and alive), stuffed animals and weeping women for world media consumption (see www.aish.com/movies/JP/PhotoFraud.asp). Thanks to alert bloggers like those at LittleGreenFootballs.com, we have come to recognize the ubiquity of figures like "Green Helmet Guy" posing as a Lebanese rescue worker when he almost certainly works for the terrorists -- the Leni Riefenstahl of Hezbollah.
One part of the world that proved particularly vulnerable to this manipulation was Israel itself. It fought this war with one eye on the camera.... the Israeli government worried excessively about the public relations price it was paying to defend itself. But by failing to finish the war, Israel did itself far more damage than any public relations hit could do. It emboldened the enemy -- and Israel's enemy in this war is our enemy, too.
How do you fight people who are not afraid to die? Well, certainly not by letting them believe that such tactics succeed. ...
At this moment, Israel has done the most dangerous thing we in the West can do: It has withdrawn from a fight without victory. The U.S. has offered some wobbly signals as well. Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute reports that after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced that the U.S. would "engage" Iran, a top Iranian official jeered, "Why don't you just admit that you are weak and your razor is blunt?" A few days later, an Iranian Revolutionary Guards boat unfurled a banner as it passed a U.S. Navy ship in the Persian Gulf. It read: "The U.S. cannot do a damn thing."
A Hamas columnist has predicted that Hezbollah's "victory" will open the door to a "third intifada."
We await the consequences elsewhere around the world -- from London to New York to Baghdad to Bali to Calcutta -- of jihadists who feel the wind at their backs.
Well, they were true to their word. We didn't get a return to S.Q.A. It's worse than that. Israel and the U.S. having been outmaneuvered in diplomacy and proved on the battlefield to be unwilling to fight whatever kind of war was necessary, we will now be tested everywhere in the world, by every enemy we have. Our potential allies will doubt us, because The Will is everything. We will soon hear again from North Korea; the Chinese will test us. The entire Middle East will be in play, and Iran has had confirmed what they suspected.
Bin Laden learned in Somalia that Bill Clinton would not fight, and was surprised when we did in Afghanistan and Iraq; that was a mistake from which the Islamofacsists are recovering. We're showing them that despite our willingness to fight OUR kind of war, we're proving unwilling to fight THEIR KIND.
There's discussion on a blog, The Belmont Club, one of the most intellectual sites on the internet, which chooses a character from a movie to make the point. Read the whole thing, but here's the money quote: "They realized that to be in power, you didn't need guns or money or even numbers. You just needed the will to do what the other guy wouldn't."
This war confirmed to our enemies that we haven't the Will. That's the war we're losing. The other guy fights, kills innocents, murders children, uses babies as bomb carriers....we build hospitals and schools, and fret about panty-hose "tortures." The Israelis worried about their image, and Hezbollah helped them by manufacturing "massacres."
We don't have to massacre children to defeat these savages but we do have to fight with whatever we must, and that's a bloody, awful business. The more fight now, the less later. Being deterred by the animus of the French or of the UN simply guarantees worse bloodshed in the certain wars down the line. Consider this frank observation by Hussein Massawi, a former Hezbollah leader: "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something, We are fighting to eliminate you."
I've written elsewhere that "a civilization that has both the capacity and the will to destroy another one, will do so. We have the capacity, but not the Will. They have the Will but not the capacity." They're acquiring the capacity, as Hezbollah showed the Israelis, and as the Iranians and North Koreans are showing us. Unless we develop the Will, we'll soon be fighting for our lives. Here.
Most of my friends and all of my family feel I've gone over the hill. They can't accept or stand to talk about my predictions that unless we stop them "over there," we will have to defend ourselves right here, in our own neighborhoods, and as individuals, not being able to count on our leadership to defend us. Recall how few people in England imagined in 1938 that London would soon be destroyed, their children evacuated, that being defended by "so few" the English would face the real possibility of defeat and submission to the "real" Nazis.
That's a horrible contemplation...but once again, today, the fire is raging across the world, and we just put another log on it.
In America, there is a political dimension playing simultaneously on a different screen in an adjacent theatre. There's a large and building constituency for withdrawal from the fight. Call it "cut and run" or "re-deploment across the horizon" or whatever, withdrawal can only confirm that we have no Will to fight their war. That can ONLY mean that we will have MORE of their war. And in the meantime, we quibble among ourselves over the legality of "wiretaps" and following the enemies' money trail.
We now live in another movie. A remake called "1938,(2)" I recognize the story line. I saw the first one, and I remember how it came out; 40-60,000,000 dead in six years. That time the White Hat Guy won, but it was a "close run thing" at times. This script may have a different ending, depending on whether we can find the Will .
There's nothing about History that guarantees the continued existence of anything....not even the United States, liberal democracy, freedom...not anything. Civilizations have come and gone...if we're to stay, we'll have to make it so.
I give Mr. Bush credit, and thanks, for what he has done. But he has proven himself to be an executive...a "do-er" ...and not much of a leader.
We need another Winston Churchill....and we need him badly... and now.
posted by Jerry at 7:08 AM
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