Days are Dark
If Israel loses this battle in the Global War on Terror, we will have lost and pay the consequent price as well.
The War will only be lengthened, and more blood and treasure will have to be expended to win -- if we have the will to win.
More below, but Caroline Glick summarizes it best:
A clear break from the current path must be made immediately. [Iranian President] Ahmadinejad is looking on and laughing.Many argue Israel has, in fact, lost to Hezbollah. Noel Sheppard's Israel’s Failed Munich Accord suggests Israel is ignoring important history:
In 1938, the leaders of Europe got together in Munich to, for all intents and purposes, give Czechoslovakia to Germany in exchange for peace in the region. Given the recent events in the Middle East, it quite appears that Israel – though well-intentioned – has performed the same act of appeasement with its enemies, and sadly with the same results.Is the Syrian and Iranian goal of this skirmish to win back the Golan Heights?
J.R. Dunn's The Canary Keels Over title says it all:For those that are unfamiliar, the Golan Heights was first captured by the Israelis back in 1967 during the Six Day War. Syria tried unsuccessfully to get this territory back during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. The international community including the U.N. still views this land as Syrian, but currently occupied by Israel. To be sure, Israel’s interest in this territory is largely defensive in nature. As reported by Palestine Facts:
The strategic value of the Golan Heights to Israel cannot be overstated. As with the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria (the West Bank), the visual and radar stations located there give advance warning of any approach from Syria. Any attacking ground force would be effectively blocked by having to cross the Golan Heights. Conversely, if held by an enemy as in the past, it puts northern Israel directly under their guns.Yet, that is not the only importance of this territory:Furthermore, about one third of Israel’s fresh water supply originates there, in the watershed of Lake Kinneret (Sea of Galilee) and must be protected. In 1964, Syria, then occupying the Golan Heights, tried to divert these critical headwaters away from Israel in a blatant attempt to cripple Israel’s fresh-water supply. The IDF destroyed the Syrian damming project.. . . Olmert must not only bring all forces to bear to rid southern Lebanon of Hezbollah and its missiles, but also move to take back Gaza and the ceded sections of the West Bank. After all, as the Palestinians haven’t lived up to their part of the bargain, allowing them to retain land they acquired under false pretenses would be an unforgivable folly on Israel’s part. In the end, a hard lesson must be learned by Israel and the United States: regardless of its seeming logic and the usual international consensus to do so, land for peace doesn’t work.
Make no mistake – Israel’s July 29th retreat from the village of Bin Jibeil marks the most serious defeat of Western arms to date in the War on Terror. . . . This campaign may well mark the end of first phase of the War on Terror. It’s been a strangely slow-moving war. Our equivalent of the Phoney War, with Europe and much of the rest of the world insisting on acting as if nothing was happening, has taken nearly five years. Now we have our equivalent of May 1940, with Israel threatening to take the place of France, as the solid ally who simply collapses before a weaker enemy. It hasn’t happened yet, and I hope it doesn’t. Rejection of demands for a cease fire is a start. We’ve never doubted that the road would be long. I don’t think we have any idea, even now, how dark and bloody it will turn out to be.Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, Caroline Glick's Our World: As Ahmadinejad watches looks at the strategic picture:
As the stakes of the war against Israel rise by the day, we find the international community, led by the US, and willingly followed by the Olmert government, scope-locked on a diplomatic agenda that is irrelevant to the imminent dangers Israel and the world now face in the midst of this Iranian sponsored jihad. Indeed, it is worse than irrelevant. It is counterproductive. For if the aims of the ongoing diplomatic blitzkrieg are all met, Israel will find itself denied its right to self-defense; with its legal right to secure and recognized borders in tatters; and with Hizbullah sitting pretty behind a protective shield of the Lebanese military and an international force that will not attack it.Moreover, Glick notes Lebanese hands are not as clean as many portray:
Moreover, the planned multinational force is supposed to facilitate the Lebanese army's deployment along the Lebanese border with Israel. This is supposed to be a good thing. Yet, since the outbreak of the war, the Lebanese army has been actively fighting with Hizbullah. Its radars have been used to lock in Israeli targets for Hizbullah missile crews. It is paying pensions to the families of fallen Hizbullah fighters. On Sunday its soldiers reportedly shot at IDF helicopters in the Bekaa Valley.But. to date, the US-led international community refuses to recognize the Lebanese army as a combatant, and similarly insists that the aim of the postwar settlement should be to strengthen both the Lebanese government that includes Hizbullah and the Lebanese army that fights by Hizbullah's side.Is the United States helping or hurting?
In her discussions with Israeli leaders, Rice has proposed that in the framework of a settlement of the current crisis, Israel give Mt. Dov on the Golan Heights to Lebanon. There has been almost no public debate about the reasonableness of the US position. Yet even the most superficial analysis makes it clear that such a move would be catastrophic for Israel's long-term viability. Mt. Dov, which Hizbullah refers to as the Shaba Farms, is not and has never been Lebanese territory. In 2000, following Israel's withdrawal from Lebanon, the UN certified that Israel had removed itself from all Lebanese territory. The UN further confirmed that Mt. Dov was territory Israel wrested from Syria during the course of the 1967 Six Day War. The UN stated that the fate of the territory would be determined in the course of negotiations toward a peace treaty between Israel and Syria. Hizbullah cut the Lebanese territorial claim to Mt. Dov out of whole cloth as a pretext for continuing its war against Israel after Israel left Lebanon. Its claim that Mt. Dov is Lebanese territory has been rejected by the international community. Yet today, the US is prodding Israel to give Mt. Dov to Lebanon as a confidence-building gesture toward the Lebanese government, which of course supports Hizbullah's demand. By adopting this Hizbullah demand, the US is breaching the decades-old foundation of the Law of Nations, which stipulates that states cannot win territory from other states through armed aggression.Glick flunks W, Rice and Olmert, and I agree:
It would seem that, in spite of themselves, both the US and the Israeli government have managed to maneuver themselves into diplomatic positions that undermine their own national interests. Somehow, between the US's early and misguided decision to ignore the Lebanese government's support and responsibility for Hizbullah and the Olmert government's clearly halfhearted prosecution of the war, both governments have gotten lost. The goals that now form the basis of their diplomatic agendas serve only to advance the interests of their enemies. A clear break from the current path must be made immediately. Ahmadinejad is looking on and laughing.(And, for those who did not know, sites such as the Jerusalem Post offer RSS feeds to keep up with the latest.) UPDATE: Alexandra von Maltzan also fears for Israel's future safety. And ours. UPDATE II: PowerLine also discusses Caroline Glick's Jerusalem Post piece and asks if Hezbollah has won and Israel has Lost?