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Me#1You#10
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Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 6503
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 Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 12:41 pm Post subject: NY Sun Editorial: "One War" |
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While I'm not prepared to buy into the unqualified characterization of Israel's "defeat" in Lebanon, the NY Sun provides some perspective... (emphasis mine)
| Quote: | One War
New York Sun Editorial
August 14, 2006
For those nursing their wounds in the wake of Israel's defeat in Lebanon, the thing to remember is that the fight with Hezbollah is not a war apart. It is but one engagement in one battle in one theater in a world war.
<snip>
Israel's voters will, in the fullness of their democracy, make their own decision in respect of Prime Minister Olmert and his decision to wait for, and then accept, the intercession of the United Nations. By our lights, Mr. Bush has maintained quite a steady hand during the early years of this world war. He has comprehended better than the vast majority of his critics that we are fighting one war. It is the president who has always referred not to the war in Iraq but the battle of Iraq. We have not the slightest doubt that the other battles are going to come into focus, and be joined, at the right time, including in Syria or Iran. If we don't choose the time, the enemy will, as we were reminded by exposure last week of the plot to attack the trans-Atlantic air routes.
Our task at the moment is to advance in our understanding and to be prepared, militarily and psychologically, for the next battle when it comes. This task will be opposed by many, as we have just witnessed in Connecticut. The left wing of the Democratic Party behind Ned Lamont routed Senator Lieberman by arguing, precisely, that Iraq is a war apart, that they are not opposing the war on terror, only the notion that Iraq is part of it. This ilk existed in World War II and the Cold War. No one would have suggested World War II could have been won by knocking, say, Japan out of the Philippines and leaving it at that. Or the Cold War by liberating, say, Grenada. This is a time to step back and comprehend the big picture. Neither Iraq nor Israel nor America can be secured until the regimes in Iran and Syria are defeated and we come to the recognition that it is one war.
NY Sun - cont'd |
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shawa
CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
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| Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 4:02 pm Post subject: |
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Insightful editorial by the Sun. Thanks for posting, Me#1.
It refers to the Podoretz interview by the WSJ which I read over the weekend.
I love the mind of John Podoretz and pasted this interview in my "Its A Keeper" file.
| Quote: | Unrepentant Neocon
Norman Podhoretz stands IV-square for the Bush doctrine.
BY JOSEPH RAGO
Saturday, August 12, 2006
Excerpt:
In any case, as a practical matter, it denotes the mentality of those who moved from somewhere on the political left to somewhere on the right, primarily during the late '70s. It had "two ruling passions," according to Mr. Podhoretz. On the one hand, the neocons were repulsed by the countercultural '60s radicalism that came to dominate the American liberal establishment. On the other, they argued for a more assertive, muscular foreign policy (at the time in response to Soviet expansionism).
It is the latter that consumes Mr. Podhoretz during this late period in his disputatious career. Here at his bucolic summer home, he makes an easy, serene figure; but any outward tranquility is very much at odds with the intensity of his moral and intellectual universe.
He is careful, certainly, to distance himself from policy making. Washington "might as well be the surface of the moon." Rather, he says, "I'm always trying to look at the world in some larger frame." That, today, means "telling the story of what has happened since Sept. 11 with some intellectual distance, to place it as a world-historical development."
The scale and the suddenness of that day, as Mr. Podhoretz sees it, swept away the assumptions of the era that preceded it, both the soft internationalism and the balance-of-power calculations that by turns governed the way America conducted itself in the world. Here was a generational, existential confrontation with militant Islamist antimodernism, international in character and analogous to World War III (known otherwise as the Cold War). The "war on terror," he argues, ought to be rightly understood as "World War IV," demanding a new set of policies and ideas that will allow the U.S. to cope under drastically altered conditions.
The point of his voluminous WWIV essays (currently being expanded into a book) is to limn the ways in which George Bush has done precisely that. "The military face of the strategy is pre-emption and the political face is democratization," he says. "The stakes are nothing less than the survival of Western civilization, to the extent that Western civilization still exists, because half of it seems to be committing suicide."
With the crisis in the Middle East deteriorating, alarmingly fraught, Mr. Podhoretz's WWIV theory assumes further urgency.......
~SNIP~
Right-wing utopianism--now there is machismo. It is, of course, the very charge most often leveled against the neocons: that they thought (to put it rudely) they could go parading through Arabia and reorder it as a liberal democracy; instead of flowers and sweets they were met with IEDs and sectarian death squads. And this notion has picked up currency of late--particularly among those who consider themselves conservatives without the qualifying prefix.
Mr. Podhoretz is having none of it. "I always knew they didn't like this policy, the Bush doctrine," he says, speaking of increasingly vocal antagonists like George Will and William F. Buckley. "They had doubts about it going in, and not just because it violates in their view conservative principles but, you know, it's hubris, it's Wilsonianism, it goes beyond the limits of power, it's nation-building, and so on. But for reasons of solidarity or because they were not willing to join with the left or the far reaches of the Buchananite right, they were careful, they voiced their doubts only through hints or veiled asides. So when they came, so to speak, out of the antiwar closet, I certainly was not all that surprised.
"They've declared defeat, basically," he continues. "What can I say? I think they're wrong. I think Iraq has gone not badly but well, is not a disaster or a crime or a delusion, but what's more is a noble, necessary effort."
Mr. Podhoretz attributes the troubles of reconstruction as much to our own irresolution as to what he calls "the recalcitrance and obduracy of the region." "The only reason in my opinion that we're having as much trouble as we're having in Iraq is that we're not getting intelligence. You cannot fight a revanchist insurgency and certainly not one that uses terrorist tactics without good intelligence . . . and you can only get that kind of intelligence by squeezing it out of prisoners. That's all there is to it."
Both domestic opposition and the international community, unhappily, are "defining torture down. The things they're calling 'torture' now have never been and have no business being considered torture......
Cont'd at Opinion Journal |
Well worth the read!
_________________
“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
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Me#1You#10
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Joined: 06 May 2004
Posts: 6503
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| Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 6:52 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | Mr. Podhoretz attributes the troubles of reconstruction as much to our own irresolution as to what he calls "the recalcitrance and obduracy of the region." "The only reason in my opinion that we're having as much trouble as we're having in Iraq is that we're not getting intelligence. You cannot fight a revanchist insurgency and certainly not one that uses terrorist tactics without good intelligence . . . and you can only get that kind of intelligence by squeezing it out of prisoners. That's all there is to it." |
Hence the moral equivalency of "panties on your head" and "electrodes on your genitals" being offered by the ENEMIES of this country.
Podhoretz has certainly nailed THAT one. |
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shawa
CNO
Joined: 03 Sep 2004
Posts: 2004
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| Posted: Mon Aug 14, 2006 7:39 pm Post subject: Who will win the 'peace'? |
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Whew!! Some REALLY stark reality from Thomas Lipscomb! (emphasis mine)
| Quote: | Who will win the 'peace'?
TODAY'S COLUMNIST
By Thomas Lipscomb
August 14, 2006
The last week has been filled with interminable meetings and rapid-fire press statements about any number of equally stupid cease-fire proposals and proposals for peace-keeping troops of one kind or another. They all have something else in common. They are all irrelevant.
Most observers agree that by standing up against Israel creditably, Hezbollah has already won the admiration of the whole Muslim world and greatly increased the power of its sponsors in Syria and Iran. Some kind of face-saving "cease-fire" will do nothing to sully what is being seen as this unprecedented military victory against the once-invincible Israeli military.
But who will win the peace?
Islamofascists like Osama bin Laden delude themselves with "dreams of Andalusia," but the West has been deluding itself for decades with dreams of a Lebanon that once was, and never will be again. Hundreds of Katuysha rockets have been launched by Hezbollah and hundreds of "smart" munitions have been fired by the Israeli military. But the only bomb that matters in the end is the population bomb that had already gone off in Lebanon well before the war began.
A country that had a Christian majority right through the 1930s, memorialized even today in a silly French Vichy-era constitution with Christian rights to certain political office, is now more than 70 percent Muslim. Two-thirds of these Muslims are now Shi'ite. So how surprised can anyone be that the recent Lebanese-American University at Beirut poll shows that, if an election were held last month, more than 87 percent of Lebanese of all denominations would choose Hezbollah as the democratically elected government of Lebanon?
And when, not if, this happens, Hezbollah can no longer be discounted as some kind of de facto shadow government of what the West prefers to call as "the real Lebanon." Hezbollah will be the majority party in a popularly elected de jure government, complete with a seat at the United Nations.
That means that if the Lebanese army ever took up those "peace-keeping positions" between Israel and Hezbollah urged by the much-touted U.N. Resolution 1559, all that would really happen is that the army of the Hezbollah government will be sitting on Israel's border by invitation. If some kind of interim NATO or other cobbled-together peacekeeping force squats in some kind of demilitarized zone for a while, how can it not bow to the sovereign state of Lebanon's laudable desires to lawfully implement U.N. 1559, once Hezbollah is in power?
If the Israeli military can do little about the Hezbollah Lebanon that will be the ultimate result of the peace, it still has time to alter the perception and the results of the war. There is no reason now why Israel or the United States should settle for anything that would not clean the entire Lebanese state of the Hezbollah arsenal. Forget delusions about "victory" being some kind of militarily insignificant security zone up to the Litani River. Destroying the Syrian cash-cow drug industry in the Bekaa Valley will hurt Syria more than an airstrike on Damascus. The time this cleanup occupies delays the inevitable democratic election of Hezbollah and leaves it looking far less successful in Arab eyes. It also means that Hezbollah will take years to repair its defense infrastructure.
Both that perception and that military reality count for a lot in the Middle East. And they count for a lot more than the legalistic nonsense by which international civil servants continually endanger the world by treating fantasy as reality and reality as just an inconvenience, easily dismissed by "men of good will" meeting at some nice resort.
It is time for prudent policy thinkers to crawl back through the looking glass that hung on the walls of the Hall of Mirrors at the disastrous Versailles Peace Conference after World War I. Few but T.E. Lawrence recognized the mess that the European imperialists were making in their sunset, carving up the Ottoman provinces of the Middle East for their special spheres of influence. Now, once again, the United States is stuck with their bill and has no choice but to try to correct what is rapidly becoming a potential nuclear catastrophe.
In doing so, the United States had better be open to finding new solutions and losing its lawyerly reverence for the status quo. Supposedly, the most dangerous thing in warfare is a second lieutenant with a map. But we should have learned by now what President Franklin Roosevelt understood innately: The most dangerous thing to peace in much of the world has been European imperialists with a map.
If the Shi'ites now prefer three nations rather than the "Iraq" created by the Versailles Treaty, they may well have found the solution to the intractable difficulty of holding some kind of federal Iraqi state together that may be more of an imperialist delusion than a political reality. Certainly, the Kurds will go along, and who really cares about the Sunni who doomed the attempt at the federal solution?
One thing is clear. Maintaining fictional states is a costly business. It is time to at least try to recognize real ones and hold them to account for their actions. A solution to stateless guerrillas with nothing to lose operating out of failed states may well be making them the successor governments. That is something Hezbollah may not have considered with its full implications.
The Washington Times |
_________________
“I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress, and grow brave by reflection. ‘Tis the business of little minds to shrink; but he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (Thomas Paine, 1776) |
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Deuce
Senior Chief Petty Officer
Joined: 19 Mar 2005
Posts: 589
Location: FL
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| Posted: Tue Aug 15, 2006 5:02 pm Post subject: |
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Yep,
Podoretz would have defined Lebanon as one of the 'suicides': | Quote: | | "The stakes are nothing less than the survival of Western civilization, to the extent that Western civilization still exists, because half of it seems to be committing suicide." |
I think I'd define countries like Lebanon (and France?) as 'assisted suicide'. Time will tell.
Deuce |
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kate
Admin
Joined: 14 May 2004
Posts: 1891
Location: Upstate, New York
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| Posted: Wed Aug 16, 2006 11:22 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | It is time for prudent policy thinkers to crawl back through the looking glass that hung on the walls of the Hall of Mirrors at the disastrous Versailles Peace Conference after World War I. Few but T.E. Lawrence recognized the mess that the European imperialists were making in their sunset, carving up the Ottoman provinces of the Middle East for their special spheres of influence. Now, once again, the United States is stuck with their bill....... |
agree shawa, Lipscomb nails it
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