Iran continued its war-by-proxy against Israel today with a Hezbollah barrage of rocketry targeted against Haifa, resulting in scores of casualties.
Meanwhile, the U.S. and other nations are starting efforts to evacuate their nationals from Lebanon. (Reminder: this isn't a concern about western nationals becoming casualties of Israeli fire; it's a move to secure westerners against becoming eventual Hezbollah hostages and human shields.)
What to do? Mark Steyn looks at the long and futile history of "Great Man" diplomacy and our collective unwillingness to confront Iran's bloody hands.
The forces at play in the Middle East are beyond the Geopolitical Friars' Club. The median age in Gaza is 15.8 years old. How likely is it that any of those bespoke Palestinian "moderates" who've been permanent fixtures on CNN and BBC Middle East discussion panels for 30 years have any meaningful sway over a population of unemployed uneducated teenage boys raised by a death cult? Israel withdrew from Gaza and, instead of getting on with a prototypical Palestinian state, Hamas turned the territory into an Islamist camp. Israel withdrew from Lebanon entirely in 2000, yet Hezbollah is now lobbing rockets at Haifa.Posted by Alan at July 16, 2006 10:33 AMWhy? Because in both cases these territories are now in effect Iran's land borders with the Zionist Entity. They're "occupied territories" but it's not the Jews doing the occupying. So you've got a choice between talking with proxies or going to the source: Tehran. And, as the unending talks with the EU have demonstrated, the ayatollahs use negotiations with the civilized world as comedy relief. They don't get Larry King's salutes to Red Buttons and Don Knotts on Iranian TV, so entering into talks with the French foreign minister is as near to big-time laughs as the mullahs get.
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During all the time the Great Men were shuttling back and forth, a kind of toxic globalization occurred: The Palestinian "movement" (insofar as there ever was a genuine nationalist movement) became infected and eventually annexed by hard-core Islamism and the Palestinians' most depraved terror techniques were exported to every corner of the world. You can build a "security fence" in the region, but what we might call Palestinianism has leapt the psychological fence and incubated in radicalized Muslim communities worldwide: It's not just Palestinians but also Yorkshiremen who now blow themselves up on public transit. What's happened in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Syria and elsewhere is that the weaknesses of those polities were exploited by Iran and others through various client groups and a potent ideology that's really a virus.
That's a much more cunning and effective strategy than sending a fellow in a suit to concoct a plan in his name. We need to learn from the Iranians. We need to wage war on the ideology, because until we do, the reality is that the Middle East's fetid "stability," its demography, its remorseless nuclearization and proxy militarization all favor Israel's and our enemies.