The Jerusalem Post provides a summary of the recent fighting in Lebanon. The Israelis seem to be moving methodically and carefully to crush Hezbollah with the minimum harm possible being inflicted upon civilians.
Meanwhile Bob Gorrell has the diplomatic Kubuki dance figured out:
MEMRI has a transcript of an interview with Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah in which he makes two admissions which are particularly interesting. He says first that Lebanon knew in advance that Hezbbollah was going to kidnap Israeli soldiers and did nothing to discourage or prevent it. This means that Lebanon must share part of the blame for the destruction which has befallen it.
Hassan Nasrallah: I told them on more than one occasion that we are taking the issue of the prisoners seriously, and that abducting Israeli soldiers is the only way to resolve it. Of course, I said this in a low-key tone. I did not declare in the dialogue: 'In July I will abduct Israeli soldiers.'
Interviewer: Did you inform them that you were about to abduct Israeli soldiers?
Hassan Nasrallah: I told them that we must resolve the issue of the prisoners, and that the only way to resolve it is by abducting Israeli soldiers.
Interviewer: Did you say this clearly?
Hassan Nasrallah: Yes, and nobody said to me: 'No, you are not allowed to abduct Israeli soldiers.' Even if they had told me not to... I'm not defending myself here. I said that we would abduct Israeli soldiers, in meetings with some of the main political leaders in the country. I don't want to mention names now, but when the time comes to settle accounts, I will. They asked: 'If this happens, will the issue of the prisoners be over and done with?' I said that it was logical that it would. And I'm telling you, our estimation was not mistaken. I'm not exaggerating. Anywhere in the world - show me a country, show me an army, show me a war, in which two soldiers, or even civilian hostages, were abducted, and a war was waged against a country - and all for two soldiers. This has never happened throughout history, and even Israel has never done such a thing.
Nasrallah indicates genuine surprise at the ferocity of the Israeli reprisal. He did not expect them to go to war over a kidnapped soldier, nor did he expect that the Arab world would remain tacitly indifferent to their response. He seems to feel sold out by the Arabs:
Hassan Nasrallah: Once we used to ask the international community to denounce the hangman and to have mercy on the victim. Then we got to the point where we said we would accept it if they denounce the hangman and the victim alike. This has become what we could expect from them. If a resolution denounces both the hangman and the victim - fine. As for the Arab regimes - all we expect from them is to be neutral. And if they do not want to be neutral - brother, let them treat Israel and us equally. We would even accept it if they treat the hangman and the victim equally. But for them to participate in spilling the blood of the victim, and to provide cover for the crimes of the hangman - I tell you that we did not expect this. This was indeed a surprise.
He added this:
Once the war is over, in what way will it affect the Iranian nuclear dossier? What effect will it have on it? On the contrary, if this is in any way connected to the Iranian nuclear dossier, the war being waged against Lebanon does not serve its interest. The Americans and the Israelis have always taken into account that if a confrontation breaks out with Iran, Hizbullah might intervene in Iran's favor. So striking Hizbullah now would weaken, rather than strengthen, Iran on the nuclear issue.
Those who insist the Israelis stand down before their task is finished in Lebanon should take Nasrallah's words to heart. A weakened Hezbollah diminishes Iran's standing in the world and weakens their bargaining position over their nuclear program. Such an admission should give the world incentive to encourage the Israelis to complete the job. It's just one more way in which the cause of peace will be served by the elimination of Hezbollah.
CBS gets a scoop: A conservative icon does not consider President Bush to be much of a conservative. This, of course, is not much of a scoop:
President Bush ran for office as a "compassionate conservative." And he continues to nurture his conservative base - even issuing his first veto this week against embryonic stem cell research. But lately his foreign policy has come under fire from some conservatives - including the father of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley.
"I think Mr. Bush faces a singular problem best defined, I think, as the absence of effective conservative ideology - with the result that he ended up being very extravagant in domestic spending, extremely tolerant of excesses by Congress," Buckley says. "And in respect of foreign policy, incapable of bringing together such forces as apparently were necessary to conclude the Iraq challenge."
Of course, Mr. Buckley is simply reiterating what conservatives have been saying about George Bush for at least four years now. He's not a pure ideological conservative, and the only people who think he is, apparently, are liberals. George Bush is a political centrist, a man who forty years ago would have probably been in the mainstream of the Democratic Party. This makes the left's visceral hatred for him all the more astonishing.
Some will say that the left vilifies him because of Iraq, but the Iraq project is something for which the left should be grateful. Not just because Bush liberated 25 million people from oppression, a fact they often elide, but also because, as we've been tirelessly reminded, getting preoccupied in Iraq has made adventures in Syria, Iran and North Korea far more difficult and far less likely.
Parenthetically, it is one of the hypocrisies of the left's rhetoric that they castigate Bush for tying us up in Iraq to the point where we can't, in their telling of it, react with strength to the nuclear threat in Iran, when, in fact, the prospect of military action against Iran would send them into paroxysms of outrage.
Victor Davis Hanson writes that the Islamists are pushing the West into a corner, a strategy which may prove very dangerous for the Muslims. Here are some key excerpts:
For years, the Arab world clamored for the Israel "problem" to be solved. Then peace and security would at last supposedly reshape the Middle East. The Western nations understood the "problem" as being Israeli retention of lands it had captured in Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza, Syria and Lebanon after defeating a series of Arab forces bent on destroying the Jewish state.
But after the Israeli departure from Sinai, Gaza and Lebanon, and billions of dollars in American aid to Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinians, there is still not much progress toward peace. Past Israeli magnanimity was seen as weakness. Now Israel's reasoned diplomacy has earned it another round of kidnapping, ransom and rocket attacks.
Finally, the world is accepting that the Middle East problem was never about so-called occupied land -- but only about the existence of Israel itself. Hezbollah and Hamas, and those in their midst who tolerate them (or vote for them), didn't so much want Israel out of Lebanon and Gaza as pushed into the Mediterranean altogether. And since there will be no second Holocaust, the Israelis may well soon transform a perennial terrorist war that they can't easily win into a conventional aerial one against a terrorist-sponsoring Syria that they can.
Yet for all their threats, what the Islamists -- from Hezbollah in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley to the Iranian government in Tehran to the jihadists in Iraq's Sunni Triangle -- don't understand is that they are slowly pushing tired Westerners into a corner. If diplomacy, or aid, or support for democracy, or multiculturalism, or withdrawal from contested lands, does not satisfy radical Islamists, what would?
The answer, of course, is nothing will satisfy them except the total elimination of Israel. Now that Europe is facing its own "Muslim problem" more Euro-appeasers are beginning to realize that concessions will not sate the ravenous Islamic appetite. Despite calls in the media for a cease-fire realists recognize that a cease-fire will not be an end to hostilities nor will it presage such an end. It would only rescue the extremists so that they can resume the fight once they've recovered their strength.
Betty Williams won the Nobel Peace Prize thirty years ago for her work to end the violence in Northern Ireland. If they gave prizes for despicable speeches she might qualify for one of those, too.
Campaigning on the rights of young people at the Earth Dialogues forum, being held in Brisbane, Ms Williams spoke passionately about the deaths of innocent children during wartime, particularly in the Middle East, and lambasted Mr Bush.
"I have a very hard time with this word 'non-violence', because I don't believe that I am non-violent," said Ms Williams, 64.
"Right now, I would love to kill George Bush." Her young audience at the Brisbane City Hall clapped and cheered.
"I don't know how I ever got a Nobel Peace Prize, because when I see children die the anger in me is just beyond belief. It's our duty as human beings, whatever age we are, to become the protectors of human life."
She might also receive an award for high achievement in perpetrating logical atrocities. "It's our duty," she avers, "to become protectors of human life." She states this immediately after telling cheering school children that she would love to murder the president of the United States. What a marvelously inane human being this lady is.
"If I was president, this wouldn't have happened."
John Kerry on the Israeli/Hezbollah conflict.
We have no doubt that that's true. A President Kerry would doubtless have done everything he could to prevent Israel from defending itself so that there would be no war. Israel would just be "hunkered down", in Richard Cohen's infelicitous phrase, hoping that Hezbollah would be nice and return their kidnapped soldier and stop murdering Israeli civilians. How else could Senator Kerry be so sure that a conflict such as the one we're currently witnessing would not have broken out on his watch unless he knows he would have blocked Israel's attempt to defend itself?
Actually, were Mr. Kerry president, the problem would be perhaps even more serious. A President Kerry would have retreated from Iraq in January of 2005 right after his inauguration. If we were not in Iraq, however, Syria, Iran, and maybe a couple of other Middle Eastern Arab states, emboldened by our lack of will, would probably right now be amassing troops to confront the Israeli Defense Force because they would know that Kerry would do nothing to stop them except call for negotiations.
In other words, if the pompous Mr. Kerry were president, Israel would right now be forced to choose between risking annihilation and going nuclear to defend itself. That's where Kerry's strategy of appeasement and surrender in Iraq would take us. It's where appeasement and surrender always take those who adopt it as a policy.
In an interview about his book Darwinian Conservatism, Larry Arnhart makes this statement:
In my book, I explain why the arguments of the intelligent design folks are weak. They assume unreasonable standards of proof in dismissing the evidence for Darwin's theory, and they don't offer any positive theory of their own as an alternative.
Note that he doesn't say that he explains "...why, in his opinion, the arguments of the ID folks are weak." Nosiree. No sissified qualifications or equivocations from this man. Arnhart is a political science professor, after all, and if such an exalted expert proclaims the ID arguments to be weak, then that settles that.
Professor Arnhart is evidently convinced that a professorship in political science is close enough to real science to give him sufficient standing to pontificate on controversies in the philosophy of science as though he had some authority in the field. This is almost as presumptuous as Ann Coulter's pronouncements on the short-comings of the theory of evolution in her book Godless.
To be sure, there's nothing wrong with a non-specialist venturing opinions on matters outside their field of expertise - at Viewpoint we do it all the time - but it would be wise of non-specialists to exercise a little intellectual humility and avoid presenting their opinions as if they commanded the assent of the rest of us.
James Lewis at The American Thinker makes a prediction: If the Iranians don't back off their nuclear program there will be military strikes against Tehran before George Bush leaves office. The Israelis may start it, but the Americans will finish it. And no Arab country will shed a tear.
He argues that all the indications are that the Israelis are currently preparing for just such an assault:
Even as the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are battling to knock down Hezbollah, Iran's terror proxy in Lebanon, the Washington Times reports that the Israeli Air Force is now equpped to take on Mahmoud Ahmadinejad even while he is busy channeling the Twelfth Imam in Tehran. The timing of this report may not be a coincidence.
According to Rowan Scarborough, Israel has purchased 25 $84 million F-15I (I for Israel) Ra'am, aspecial version of the U.S. F-15E long-range interdiction bomber. It also is buying 102 of another long-range tactical jet, the $45 million F-16I Sufa. About 60 have been delivered.
The Jewish state also is buying 500 U.S. BLU-109 "bunker buster" bombs that could penetrate the concrete protection around some of Iran's underground facilities, such as the uranium enrichment site at Natanz. The final piece of the enterprise is a fleet of B-707 air-to-air refuelers that could nurse strike aircraft as they made the 900-mile-plus trip inside Iran, dropped their bombs and returned to Israel.
More than 85 long-range bombers and tactical jets are enough to strike fixed nuclear targets in Iran. The Iranians can't very wel move their nuclear plant at Bushehr or their enrichment cascade at Natanz. They do have another estimated 30 nuclear-related sites that may survive a short-term air campaign.
So much for IAF capability. What about military objectives? The Israeli mindset is essentially defensive. Israel has a formidable military because for more than half a century it has had formidable enemies. It would be absurd in Israeli eyes to attack anyone who did not pose a threat.
But the Mullahs are repeating Saddam Hussein's model of building a nuclear industry while talking genocide. That adds the greatest possible incentive to actually use Israel's long-range bombers. Add capabiity to incentive, and you can get action.
It's clear that Iran cannot be permitted to develop nuclear capabilities. It's not that they could put one atop an ICBM and launch it at the U.S. but rather that they'd almost certainly supply them to terrorists who would smuggle them into Israel, Europe or the U.S. An attack on Iran would have terrible consequences for world stability, but nuclear weapons in the hands of those who preach genocide of the Jews and the destruction of Western civilization would be calamitous. There simply are no easy options if Iran persists in its quest to develop the ability to accomplish these aims.
Read the rest of Lewis' piece at the link.
Reuters has an article which suggests that the stem cell debate has created a fissure in the pro-life camp:
President George W. Bush may have cited his moral stance in vetoing a bill that would have expanded embryonic stem-cell research on Wednesday but the issue transcends traditional divisions over abortion rights. Strongly conservative Republicans who oppose abortion such as Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch have backed broader federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research for years, and more conservatives have come on board recently, including Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee.
The embryos at issue come from fertility clinics, where eggs and sperm are united in lab dishes. But many more are made than can ever be implanted in mothers' wombs, and the leftovers are discarded.
The bill vetoed by Bush would have allowed federal taxpayer money to be used to do research on those embryos donated by the parents. It is not illegal to use private funds to do so, although some conservatives, such as Kansas Republican Sen. Sam Brownback, would also seek to ban this research.
The stem cells are taken from a ball of cells known as a blastocyst, which develops five to seven days after conception. These embryonic stem cells are pluripotent -- meaning they can differentiate into all the types of cells that make up an animal, including a human being, but do not form placenta and cannot become a fetus.
Bush, an opponent of abortion, used his first veto as president to block the bill on Wednesday, saying destroying embryos for medical research "crosses a moral boundary that our decent society needs to respect."
Many people who disapprove of abortion say they do not disapprove of experimenting on these embryos, which would otherwise be discarded. "It's very difficult to justify abandoning 7,000 to 20,000 in vitro eggs as medical waste," Hatch told reporters recently.
"The president is simply wrong -- it is clear we can expand current policy in an ethical and moral manner that unleashes the potential of embryonic stem-cell research," Sarah Chamberlain Resnick, executive director of The Republican Main Street partnership, which styles itself as a centrist Republican movement.
And supporters of embryonic stem-cell research say they are the ones who can claim the moral high ground. "It is immoral for our families, neighbors and friends to be held hostage to chronic diseases when their treatments are within our scientific grasp," June Walker, president of Hadassah, the Women's Zionist Organization of America, said in a statement.
Harry Moore of the Center for Stem Cell Biology at the University of Sheffield in Britain called Bush's stance inconsistent. "Most embryos produced by a normally fertile women will fail before implantation and not go on to a pregnancy. To call it 'murder' to use embryos donated for research is just emotional blackmail," Moore said in a statement.
I agree that there is no necessary connection between one's stance on abortion and one's position on embryonic stem cell research and have explained why here. There may be good reasons not to use embryos as a source of stem cells - other sources may be superior and less socially problematic, for example - and certainly, embryos should not be produced for the purpose of securing their stem cells. But the argument that it is immoral to do research on embryos that are destined to be discarded in any event, and should not be publically funded, does not work.
As I argued at the linked post it may be that the embryos should never have been produced, but that is an entirely separate question from the issue of what, given that the embryos are available and will ultimately be destroyed in any case, may morally be done with them.
The benefits of the Iraq invasion keep piling up in the Middle East. Josh Manchester explains the latest instance of this at Tech Central Station where he argues that the invasion of Iraq has had a tectonic impact on the policies and politics in the Arab world and is paying dividends in the current conflict between Israel and Hezbollah. He concludes his case by saying that:
The 'big bang,' as invading Iraq has sometimes been called, was meant to reorder the nature of politics in the region. This has been accomplished in a fundamental way. The idea of dividing an enemy force into its constituent parts and then dealing with it piecemeal is at least as old as Caesar's actions in Gaul. It applies no less to US strategy in the Middle East. Every faction there has been made to reconsider its relationship with every other. Rather than there being a monolithic clash of civilizations, thus far the US is dealing with the area in pieces -- in whatever way it sees fit to do so -- whether making it tacitly clear to Syria that what happened in Iraq could more easily happen to it, or threatening Iran on behalf of the region and world, or seeking cooperation with the Saudis in hunting down al Qaeda.
Were Saddam still in power, the Arab world would not feel nearly as threatened by Hezbollah, the Frankenstein's monster of Iran's creation. Instead, they would have sided with the Syrian foreign minister's strong support for Hezbollah. Saddam himself might even have offered cash rewards to anyone attempting martyrdom against the Jews. Instead, ... the leading Arab League states, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt, call Hezbollah's actions "inappropriate and irresponsible." This lessens the urgency of calls from the international community, whether the G8, UN, or EU, for a ceasefire. That lessened urgency creates something very precious indeed: a moment in time and space wherein Israel has the most fleeting of opportunities for decisive action against Hezbollah, an avowed foe, a terrorist organization, and a constant threat to the security of its populace.
Israel now has the chance to destroy Hezbollah. Only time can tell what Israel will do with the opportunity it possesses. Opportunities forsaken are opportunities lost forever, as MacArthur was sometimes rumored to say. But let there be no mistake: this moment would not have been possible without the invasion of Iraq, and the destruction of Hezbollah is very much in the interest of the United States and that of any other nation that abhors terrorism.
Very little is said about this in the MSM because media types can only see what's directly in front of them, and in their immediate field of vision they see only strife and conflict. To them it all seems like chaos. The idea that Israel would be in a far more precarious position today and that Hamas and Hezbollah would be far stronger had the Iraq war never happened does not impinge upon their mental radar. Even if it did occur to them they wouldn't dare mention it lest they make our nincompoop commander in chief look strategically prescient.
It's not looking good for the Democrats in the Connecticut senate race. The August 8th primary contest between incumbent senator Joe Lieberman versus wealthy challenger Ned Lamont seems to be tilting in favor of Lamont. This is what the self-destructive left-wing base wants, of course, because they loathe Lieberman for his support of the war and love Lamont who is a genuine cut-and-runner.
Lieberman held a 55-40 lead over Lamont in June but is now trailing 51-47.
So why is this bad news for the Dems? Because Lieberman has indicated that if he loses the primary he'll run in November as an independent and will probably win by picking up a lot of Republican votes. This will embarrass the party and those in it who support Lamont in November. If elected as an independent Lieberman promises to caucus with the Democrats, but he'll certainly feel that he owes them little allegiance after their tepid support for him this summer.
Ed Morrissey considers the prospects for Israel's anticipated ground assault against Hezbollah. He looks at the likely reactions of Syria and other players in the Middle East and concludes that the long term benefits might be worth it but the short term risks are high.
Read his analysis here. See also Strategy Page's report here.
Pat Buchanan is on the side of the angels, and I have a lot of respect for him, but he has a surprisingly short memory. In the course of arguing against going to war with Iran he says that:
None of this is written in defense of Hamas, Hezbollah or Iran. But none of them has attacked our country....
Let's refresh his memory for him with a list of Hezbollah's attacks against the U.S. over the last twenty years or so:
See Michelle Malkin for more on Hezbollah as a threat to the U.S.
How many Americans does Hezbollah have to kill before Pat is convinced that if we are not at war with Hezbollah they are certainly at war with us?
Strategy Page offers interesting analysis of Israeli tactics in the current war.
Meanwhile, this article at YNet describes the extensive bunker system Hezbollah has constructed along the Israeli border and why it must be destroyed.
Evidently, thousands of Israeli troops have been tasked with the job of finding and securing these underground structures and most of the Israeli military casualties have been suffered in this mission.
Thanks for the tip to Belmont Club.
It was obvious from the first paragraph of Jim Rice's Sojourners piece on the Israeli attack on Lebanon that we would be left scratching our heads more than once. For instance, he began his essay with this:
What is the proper, appropriate response of a nation to violent attacks by terrorists or other radical extremists? We have seen one model illustrated in the response of the British government to last year's attacks on London's public transportation system, in which 52 people were killed and 700 injured. The British rightly understood the attacks as terrorist acts, but responded in a measured manner, dealing both with the investigation of the terrible crime and the need for enhanced security in its wake. Pointedly, the British did not opt for a military response to these acts of terror.
Maybe no one has told Mr. Rice but a) the attack to which he refers was carried out by British citizens. There was no appropriate military target for a reprisal and b) the British are, in any event, no strangers to the use of military against terrorists. They have used military force in both Northern Ireland and in southern Iraq.
We have also, of course, seen an altogether different model of response, perhaps most clearly exemplified by the U.S. invasion of two countries - one of which was an actual source of the terror - following the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001. Unfortunately, it seems to be in the latter spirit that Israel responded to terror attacks in the past fortnight.
Is Mr. Rice suggesting that the use of military force against the Taliban and al Qaeda is "unfortunate"? If so, why is it? What does he suggest we should have done in the wake of 9/11? More to the point, how does he think Israel should have responded to the incessant terrorism to which it has been subjected?
In pursuit of peace Israel gave the Palestinians Gaza. It acceded to world opinion and promises by the U.N. by withdrawing from southern Lebanon and was planning further withdrawals from the West Bank. The Camp David accords awarded the Palestinians everything Israel could possibly give without ceasing to exist, but Arafat rejected the offer. Israel trusted Lebanon to keep Hezbollah off of its northern border but Lebanon was too weak. It trusted the U.N. to protect it from terror attacks, but the word for people who trust the U.N. is "corpse." Europe, we all know by now, won't stop the terrorists. Richard Cohen says the Israelis should just "hunker down," presumably until Hamas, the PLO, and Hezbollah have attrited them into extinction. Now James Rice says their decision to defend their children from the Hezbollah butchers is "unforunate."
The rest of the article is a complaint about Israel's alleged disproportionate use of force, etc. Mr. Rice writes as if the killing and kidnapping of Israeli soldiers was the very first provocation committed by Hamas and Hezbollah. He ignores the low level war that has been waged against Israeli citizens for decades and sniffs that the Israelis should ignore it, too.
...does the real need for security justify the massively disproportionate response to an act of terror? Is the collective punishment of an entire population ever morally and ethically justified?
What exactly is a disproportionate response? In Mr. Rice's world, apparently, the Israelis are justified in killing only as many terrorists as the terrorists have killed themselves. That, of course, is an absurd policy. The purpose of war is to crush the enemy, not to make him say "uncle." Israel finds itself in a war for its very survival, not some schoolyard scuffle that is supposed to be a "fair fight."
The only way to stop Hezbollah and Hamas from killing Israelis is to eliminate Hezbollah and Hamas. The first question then is whether the Israelis are justified in seeking to destroy these terror groups, both of which effectively control the governments of Gaza and Lebanon respectively. If the answer is that they do, then the question becomes what are the most moral means to bring this end about. If Mr. Rice has a problem with the morality of a "disproportionate response" it would helpful if he explained exactly what it is that is so offensive about it.
Does the destruction of much of Lebanon's civilian infrastructure, so painstakingly rebuilt after years of civil war and occupation by both Israeli and Syrian forces, bode well for future peace between the neighboring states? In sum, will the Israeli attacks bring long-term security for Israel, or will they further ensure that the next generation of Lebanese and Palestinians - across the theological and political spectrum - grow up with an undying hatred in their hearts?
It is true that there has been much destruction in both Gaza and Lebanon, but there was much destruction in France in WWII. The effort to defeat the Germans meant that war needed to be waged in France and other European countries where innocent civilians were caught in the crossfire and entire towns and cities were laid waste. Was "the collective punishment of an entire population" of Europeans morally and ethically justified? Death and destruction are tragic, of course, but the blame for these should no more fall on the shoulders of the Israelis than it should have fallen on the shoulders of the allies sixty years ago.
...much U.S. media coverage of this new Middle East war paints a misleading picture of a tit-for-tat equivalency between the two sides: Hezbollah explodes a bomb in Israel, Israel responds in kind. While their intentions are indeed malevolent, the two terrorist groups have nowhere near the military capability of Israel, which wields one of the most powerful military forces in the world...The death toll in Lebanon in the first six days of the war has been tenfold that in Israel - according to The New York Times, 310 people, most of them civilians, have died in Lebanon while Israel has suffered 27 casualties, 15 of them civilians, since Israel began its attacks.
This is bizarre. Would Mr. Rice think that things would be more just if the casualty figures were closer to equal? He seems to suggest that if one side is stronger than the other it's somehow unfair for the stronger side to use its might, or it's unfair if they don't suffer the same casualties as the other side. This is positively looney.
So what if Israel is stronger? How does that bear on the crisis that Hezbollah and Hamas have precipitated? As I said above, the goal of war as Mr. Rice seems to think, is not to gain a stalemate, it is to win as quickly and as decisively as possible.
We cannot allow ourselves to be paralyzed by the political, strategic, and moral complexity of the situation to stand back and do nothing. A first step toward a more comprehensive resolution is an immediate operational cease-fire. But that must be followed by a new way of thinking because, as a U.N. official put it yesterday, "The Middle East is littered with the results of people believing there are military solutions to political problems in the region."
He says that we can't stand back and do nothing and then calls for a cease-fire which essentially does nothing. A cease-fire does not resolve the problem. It does not make Israel or Lebanon any safer from the predations of the terrorists. It simply returns things to the status quo. It guarantees that terrorism will continue and convinces the orcs that the world will never let them be defeated.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir had it right when she said that there will never be peace in the Middle East until the Arabs love their own children more than they hate the Jews. As long as Muslims are so filled with hate for Jewish people that they will strap bombs to their children and send them out to blow themselves up, there will be no peace. If Mr. Rice wants "a new way of thinking" in the Middle East he can start by confronting that fact.
Israel has every right and reason to do what it's doing. The world, including those who are so quick to condemn it, has done nothing to end the terror and has instead left Israel with no other choice. All those who demand a cease-fire and who complain about "disproportionate response" are essentially calling for another Masada.
What much of the world doesn't seem to understand Gary Varvel eloquently explains with a single drawing:
This piece of overstatement is from the Science and Theology News site:
Finches on the Galapagos Islands that inspired Charles Darwin to develop the concept of evolution are now helping confirm it - by evolving.
A medium sized species of Darwin's finch has evolved a smaller beak to take advantage of different seeds just two decades after the arrival of a larger rival for its original food source.
The altered beak size shows that species competing for food can undergo evolutionary change, said Peter Grant of Princeton University, lead author of the report appearing in Friday's issue of the journal Science.
Grant has been studying Darwin's finches for decades and previously recorded changes responding to a drought that altered what foods were available.
It's rare for scientists to be able to document changes in the appearance of an animal in response to competition. More often it is seen when something moves into a new habitat or the climate changes and it has to find new food or resources, explained Robert C. Fleischer, a geneticist at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History and National Zoo.
One of the difficulties of evolutionary theory is that the timescales involved are often so large that much of the data has to be inferred. While the scientific community finds such data - primarily the fossil record - compelling, the data can be incomplete, leaving room for critics to cry foul. However, documented changes occurring within the timescale of a human life are, one might say, a different sort of animal.
Why a journalist might think this constitutes evolution is not hard to understand. What is difficult to grasp is why a scientist would call it evolution. There's no speciation involved here, no reproductive isolation, no indication of an alteration in the finch's genome, no "different sort of animal," just a simple modification of the size of an anatomical structure triggered, apparently, by the unavailability of a particular food source.
This is only evolution if evolution is defined in such a way as to include any variation that occurs in a population of organisms, but such a definition renders the concept meaningless.
The amusing and disingenuous ploy at work in reports such as this is that they are used to support the claim that evolution is a fact. Darwinists will argue that evolution (meaning molecules to man evolution) is as firmly established as gravity, that anyone who questions it is either ignorant or malicious, but when the public meekly requests a crumb of evidence to support that claim it's shown pictures of finches with diminished beaks. We may as well be told that since humans, because of better nutrition, have grown taller in the last century and a half, and live longer, evolution is therefore a fact.
Ed Lasky argues compellingly that there has never been a more propitious time than now for the Israelis to cut out the cancer that is Bashir Assad's Syria:
The stars are aligning as they rarely do in the Middle East. When was the last time France, America (under the most assertively Israel-supporting president ever), Israel and the Sunni nations agreed on a common enemy? Failure to grasp such an opportunity would be a failure to grasp an opportunity to bring peace to the region.
Read his entire argument at The American Thinker.
We're living in interesting times. There would probably be more enthusiasm in the rest of the Arab world for removing Assad than there would be in the capitals of the West. Despite the fact that Assad has been a thorn in our side in Iraq, it may be that behind the scenes he's been playing both sides, an irritating arrangement that, on balance, may have been working to our benefit. At any rate, Lasky is correct that a window of opportunity like this may not ever open again.
Richard Cohen, in a column for which he has been roundly and justly criticized, writes:
There is no point in condemning Hezbollah. Zealots are not amenable to reason. And there's not much point, either, in condemning Hamas. It is a fetid, anti-Semitic outfit whose organizing principle is hatred of Israel. There is, though, a point in cautioning Israel to exercise restraint -- not for the sake of its enemies but for itself. Whatever happens, Israel must not use its military might to win back what it has already chosen to lose: the buffer zone in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip itself.
Why on earth, we ask, shouldn't Israel take this land back? The Arabs have shown that they can't govern it, they can't control the extremists, and in Gaza they even voted the extremists into power. Israel gave up this land with the understanding that giving the Palestinians and the Lebanese land that they claim would conduce to peace. It hasn't because the Arabs don't just want a sliver of soil here and a plot there. They want it all. Israel, having been betrayed by the Palestinians, the Lebanese, and the U.N. should rescind their decision to leave and should reoccupy whatever land they need to make their people secure.
Hard-line critics of Ariel Sharon, the now-comatose Israeli leader who initiated the pullout from Gaza, always said this would happen: Gaza would become a terrorist haven. They said that the moderate Palestinian Authority would not be able to control the militants and that Gaza would be used to fire rockets into Israel and to launch terrorist raids. This is precisely what has happened.
It is also true, as some critics warned, that Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon was seen by its enemies -- and claimed by Hezbollah -- as a defeat for the mighty Jewish state. Hezbollah took credit for this, as well it should. Its persistent attacks bled Israel. In the end, Israel got out and the United Nations promised it a secure border. The Lebanese army would see to that. (And the check is in the mail.)
All that the critics warned has come true. But worse than what is happening now would be a retaking of those territories. That would put Israel smack back to where it was, subjugating a restless, angry population and having the world look on as it committed the inevitable sins of an occupying power.
Cohen apparently believes that it's better to watch your children be blown to smithereens by suicide bombers and rockets than to have to control the people who would be their murderers.
The smart choice is to pull back to defensible -- but hardly impervious -- borders. That includes getting out of most of the West Bank -- and waiting (and hoping) that history will get distracted and move on to something else. This will take some time, and in the meantime terrorism and rocket attacks will continue.
This is a "smart choice"? The reason Israel is in the predicament it's in is because it conceded to its enemies what they demanded. That made Israel vulnerable to the kinds of missile barrages that we've seeing launched at them on a daily basis and Cohen thinks that the smart play is to do more of the same? He advises the Israelis to withdraw now from the West Bank as well? He urges the Israelis to wait for the Arabs to grow weary of killing them? He counsels them to maintain the staus quo for generations more? This is what passes for sound judgment and analysis in the editorial offices of the Washington Post?
...gifted British historian, Tony Judt, wraps up his recent book "Postwar" with an epilogue on how the sine qua non of the modern civilized state is recognition of the Holocaust. Much of the Islamic world, notably Iran under its Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, stands outside that circle, refusing to make even a little space for the Jews of Europe and, later, those from the Islamic world. They see Israel not as a mistake but as a crime. Until they change their view, the longest war of the 20th century will persist deep into the 21st. It is best for Israel to hunker down.
This has to be about the worst possible advice anyone could offer Israel. When one's family is under assault one doesn't hunker down, not if it is within one's power to stop the attackers. Cohen is so afraid that the Israelis might actually defend themselves and incur the condemnation of the Euro-appeasers that he urges upon them the path of cowardice and capitulation. Give the Arabs what they want, he argues, because, who knows, they might someday get fatigued from the slaughter. "Hunkering down" until the Arabs grow tired of killing them is a prescription for national suicide. Moreover, it's sheer impertinence for Mr. Cohen, who sits in a safe office in Washington, D.C,. to pontificate on how others should be willing to suffer the daily terrors of life among the orcs.
As expected, President Bush vetoed today a Congressional attempt to expand federal funding for embryonic stem cell research. I understand and sympathize with the President's instincts on this issue, but I'm not convinced by the logic of his position.
Basically, the President argues that it is wrong to use federal money to support research that many Americans believe to involve the murder of a human being.
Here's the problem: Fertility clinics generate more embryos in their attempts to help couples conceive than what they eventually use. Once a successful implantation occurs the surplus embryos are usually discarded. Let us, for the sake of argument, stipulate that this is tantamount to killing a human being (parenthetically, we might wonder why those who believe that this is indeed a form of murder have not been more vocal in their opposition to the practice).
Furthermore, abortions produce hundreds of thousands of dead embryos every year. Let's stipulate that this also involves the killing of a living human being. Indeed, let's agree for the sake of discussion that early abortion is the equivalent of murder and should be made illegal.
Now, where are we? We have agreed that dead embryos are often produced in horribly immoral fashion. Does it follow from this that it is wrong to use those embryos, whose lives are forfeit in any event, to help relieve the suffering of others? Not necessarily. It would seem that it's no more wrong to use the tissues of murdered embryos (assuming, still, for the sake of argument that the embryos have been murdered) than it would be morally wrong for a hospital to harvest the organs of an adult homicide victim if consent from the next of kin were granted.
In other words, the morality of the means by which the embryos become available is a separate question from the morality of what can, or should, be done with the embryo once it has become available. It would be morally repugnant, certainly, to produce embryos purely for the sake of harvesting their tissues, but embryos which are sacrificed for other reasons, even for some morally dubious reasons, are not necessarily in that category. They are, at worst, in the same moral category as the homicide victim. It seems that just as we would abhor killing someone to harvest his organs but would not be repelled, perhaps, by the idea of harvesting the organs of someone whose life was otherwise unjustly taken, we should abhor producing embryos simply for the purpose of "farming" them, but not be unwilling to use the stem cells of embryos which have been produced and killed for other reasons.
In sum, the morality of using stem cells extracted from surplus embryos obtained from fertility or even abortion clinics is separate from the question of the morality of how the embryos came to be available. Using the cells for research is not necessarily made morally reprehensible because the way the embryos are obtained is, or may be.
At least that's how I've come to see the matter. Perhaps you have a different view, and if so, I invite you to share your thoughts through our Feedback feature.
