"It's Go-Time!"
Commentary by Greg Lewis / NewMediaJournal.US
August 4, 2006
One of the most trenchant comments I've heard about
the state of affairs in the Middle East (and I'm sorry I can't identify
who spoke these words) is this: "If Arabs laid down their weapons,
there would be peace; if Israelis laid down their weapons, there would
be genocide."
This bottom-lines in stark terms
what's currently happening half a world away from us, although we well
know that Islamists have also attacked us with devastating consequences
on our own soil on September 11, 2001. It is not western-style democracies
that perpetrate terrorist attacks on other states for the purpose of killing
civilians, breaking down the will of people living in freedom, and subjugating
those people (where they are not simply slaughtered outright) to the most
egregiously repressive religio-fascistic governmental regimes.
The state of Israel, carved in 1948
out of forbidding land in the wake of World War II and the holocaust,
has a total area of approximately 11,000 square miles (that's slightly
larger than Maryland, for those interested in such comparisons). In the
nearly six decades since it came into being, Israel has willed a political
and economic oasis into existence in the middle-eastern wilderness, despite
the fact that it is surrounded on all sides by avowed mortal enemies,
that it has been forced to defend itself against numerous military attacks
and unceasing terrorist pressure.
If any other evidence is needed to
demonstrate that Israel is a haven for democracy and freedom, it is the
condition of the Arab population living in Israel. Israeli Arabs live
infinitely more prosperous and fulfilling lives than do their Palestinian
brethren. It is not Israel that stands in the way of Arab/Islamic success;
it is precisely the Islamist-Arab nations that have allied themselves
against Israel that insure that their own citizens will not flourish.
Against (I'm making an assumption
here) their better judgment, Israel's leaders went along, during the late
1990s, with the Clinton Administration's "peace plan" for the
middle east, negotiating with a "jackal for the ages," Yasser
Arafat, and ceding (unwisely, as it has turned out) territory to their
enemies. The thanks they got for dealing with Islamist terrorists as if
they were really complete human beings was, in part, the Intifada, and
in part the entrenchment and arming of Hezbollah after Israel's pullout
from southern Lebanon in 2000.
If nothing else, that should teach
any student of international diplomacy that you simply can't negotiate
with certifiably insane religion-driven terrorists.
There is no question whatsoever that Iran and Syria and their proxy Hezbollah,
among many other militant Islamist factions in the Middle East, would
like to see Israel, not to mention the United States, wiped off the map.
(You'll notice that Islamists don't even bother to mention Europe any
more; Europe is already drowning in Islamism, given that the entire continent,
with the exception of any countries with savvy leadership England,
for instance, and lately Italy and Spain, although new leadership there
has certainly tipped the balance in favor of capitulation to Islamism
has adopted a putty-soft leftist acceptance of any anti-democratic,
anti-capitalist, anti-religious political movement). The fact is, however,
that the combined armed forces of the United States and Israel could settle
the hash of the entire middle east in about three good weeks. Hell, Israel
alone, if we were rearming her, could do the job herself.
There is not a military force in
the middle east, or anywhere else in the world, for that matter, that
could do anything but cower in the presence of our countries' combined
military might, should we ever decide to unleash it. Indeed, while those
on the left continue to whine about the "disproportionate" force
with which Israel has responded to Hezbollah, what they're in fact doing
is admitting that, in the long run, neither Hezbollah nor any other Islamo-imperialist
state could hope to resist for more than about a month or so any all-out
military onslaught by Israel or the U.S.
Israel has admitted that it hadn't
realized how well-armed and how well-dug-in Hezbollah had managed to become
in the six years since Israeli forces withdrew from southern Lebanon.
Much of the world has prematurely and unwisely interpreted the difficulty
Israel has had in dislodging Hezbollah from its positions just north of
the Lebanon-Israel border and in degrading Hezbollah's ability to strike
Israel with missiles seemingly at will as a sign that Israel is losing
the war against Hezbollah. Nothing could be further from the truth.
While Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah
has promised ever more devastating rocket attacks ever deeper into Israel,
the IDF has, after resolving strategy and policy differences among its
leadership, settled on a plan that calls for overwhelming air and ground
forces to be employed to realize precisely its earlier-stated aim: to
dislodge Hezbollah from its southern Lebanon strongholds and to degrade
substantially Hezbollah's military capability.
In implementing its strategy, Israel,
while admittedly encountering fierce resistance from Hezbollah fighters
and while admittedly still suffering rocket attacks on its civilian population,
has made it clear that it regards Lebanon as a state that implicitly harbors
and supports terrorists and that any Lebanese assets it perceives to be
available to Hezbollah are legitimate military targets. Such assets include
buildings from or near which Hezbollah launches rocket attacks; roads,
bridges and other venues along which Syria and Iran can resupply Hezbollah
militarily; and pretty much any other potential target that might fall
into the category of "asset that can be construed as property of
the country of Lebanon, which property Lebanon has very unwisely allowed
to be co-opted by Hezbollah for terrorist ends."
The message Israel is sending is
precisely that articulated in the so-called "Bush doctrine":
If you aid and abet terrorists, don't be surprised if you wake up to find
that bombs are falling on the very towns and cities and institutions you
have so unwisely allowed your terrorist cohorts the same ones who
were "democratically elected" to positions of power in your
government while you wishfully cast a blind eye to the possible consequences
to commandeer.
All the talk of World War III is
at best premature, at worst totally misguided. We (the United States and
Israel) could sit like James Joyce's "god of creation, paring [our]
fingernails" for the next two or three years while Iran and Syria
and Venezuela and North Korea and militia-states such as Hezbollah and
al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad and whatever other "forces" controlled
by whatever hyped-up psychotic despots as tend to rise to the top among
populations unable to think for themselves secretly banded together and
plotted their "doomsday for western capitalism" scenarios, and
on top of that, we could give them two or three weeks to start to implement
their strategies when they declared it was "go time."
If we (that is, the United States
and Israel) faced all-out, unbridled attack from all of our avowed mortal
enemies simultaneously, and if we gave them a two- or three-week head
start before we mounted a response, it would take us about 11 days (and
I'm being generous here) to destroy them militarily and humiliate them
politically.
I'm sorry, but it's no contest. If
it ever is "us against the world," "us" wins. Hands
down. Might as well be a forfeit, except that lots of our enemies' fighters
and probably a significant number of their citizens will die unnecessarily
because their delusional rulers somehow got it into their heads that they
could take on the U.S. and Israel and somehow prevail. Oops!
Furthermore, even though Islamists
have written off our western European "allies" as no longer
constituting a threat to the spread of Islam, those same Euros will be
able to gravy-train (that's sports slang for "ride the coattails
of") our overwhelming military victory and thus avoid having to submit
to becoming Islamist nations, even though they didn't raise a hand in
their own defense against the forces of Islam.
Few thinking people would assert
that anything other than the scenario I've outlined would eventuate, if
a true "World War III" were to happen. Of course, the problem
comes when you factor in the skewed perspective of international diplomacy.
This is an arena in which the political interests of our planet jockey
to mute or negate or skew or de-legitimize through negotiation the ability
of the world's democratic powers to truly reshape global politics and
economics for the good in favor of empowering otherwise hapless banana
republic despots to continue to enmire their citizens in the results of
their ill-advised policies, in the name, somehow, of giving a voice to
the downtrodden in world affairs.
No wonder Democrats and leftists
and terrorists everywhere despise John Bolton. Finally, an American UN
Ambassador who doesn't countenance all that crap, a guy who understands
that if enlightened western democracies give in to the positions of medieval
Islamism, well, then we'd all better start making handbasket reservations.
When it all shakes out, what we're
looking at is a remarkably restrained response by the United States to
the 9/11 terrorist attacks. We liberated Afghanistan, the seat of an Islamist
terrorist state, and we've set it on course to become a democratic ally
in the Middle East.
We also chose to topple Saddam Hussein's
terrorist-sponsoring regime in Iraq. What is lost in most analyses of
the situations in Afghanistanistan and Iraq is the nature of the enemy:
Islamist terrorists, under whichever guise they may wage war, do not play
by accepted "western" rules of engagement. Their targets are
civilians, their tactics terroristic, their aims tyrannical. And while
the United States and Israel are still developing workable tactical and
strategic methods for combatting and defeating the forces of Islamist
terrorism without unleashing a U.S.-Israel Armageddon on the Middle East,
the fact is that, despite local and temporal appearances to the contrary,
we are in the process of winning the war against terrorism.
All of which is to say that the terrorists
had damn well better hope we never decide "It's go time!"
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