THEY GET IT

Andrew Bacevich:

The truth is that U.S. forces and the IDF looked good fighting Arabs only as long as Arab political leaders insisted on fighting on Western terms. As long as they persisted in pitting tank against tank or fighter plane against fighter plane, Arabs were never going to get the better of either the Americans or the Israelis. His stupidity perhaps matched only by his ruthlessness, Saddam may well have been the last Arab leader to figure this out.

Well before Saddam’s final defeat, others, less stupid, began to develop alternative means of what they called “resistance.” This new Islamic Way of War evolved over a period of decades not only in the Arab world but beyond.

...

What the Islamic Way of War does mean to both Israel and to the United States is this: the Arabs now possess—and know that they possess—the capacity to deny us victory, especially in any altercation that occurs on their own turf and among their own people. To put it another way, neither Israel nor the United States today possesses anything like the military muscle needed to impose its will on the various governments, nation-states, factions, and political movements that comprise our list of enemies. For politicians in Jerusalem or Washington to persist in pretending otherwise is the sheerest folly.

It’s time for Americans to recognize that the enterprise that some neoconservatives refer to as World War IV is unwinnable in a strictly military sense. Indeed, it’s past time to re-examine the post-Cold War assumption that military power provides the preferred antidote to any and all complaints that we have with the world beyond our borders.

Indeed.

BECAUSE HE'S FREAKING MICHAEL CAINE

Michael Caine complains about the "banal" state of Hollywood film. Why do I care? Why should you care? See the title of this post, that's why. Recognize.

I'm not convinced that movies now are any more or less banal than they've ever been, but I believe an appropriate response to Caine would be something along the lines of the one Caine himself gave when someone asked him about the several-sub-basement-levels-below-staggeringly-awful Jaws: The Revenge:

"I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific."

Well put, Sir Michael. As it happens, I recently picked up Caine's autobiography (the excellently titled What's It All About? which seems like a rather odd title at first, but try saying it in Michael Caine's voice and you'll get it.) for a couple bucks used and have been enjoying it very much. It's hard for me to invest valuable reading time in non-Middle East related materials, so when something like this catches my fancy I tend to go with it.

The book paints a great picture of swinging Sixties London, contains some very entertaining stories about Caine's friendships with Terence Stamp and Sean Connery, a particularly funny anecdote about Caine hanging out with John Lennon at some wealthy socialite's party where no one knew who they were and Lennon posing as Caine's assistant, and, of course, about making his movies.

A few favorites which I think give a good sense of Caine's talent:

The Ipcress File (1965)- Based on Len Deighton's novel, Caine stars as Harry Palmer, the anti-Bond.

Get Carter (1971)- Think of the hardest hard man you've ever seen in a movie. Then think of him making Jack Carter's breakfast, washing and waxing Jack Carter's car, and picking up Jack Carter's dry cleaning. That's how hard Michael Caine is in this movie.

Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)- One of Woody Allen's best, Caine's performance won him an Oscar, which he couldn't accept in person because he was off earning the money to build that house.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)- Light, old-timey, con-man comedy. You want to know how cool Michael Caine is? Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars is Michael Caine's butler in this movie. That's how cool Michael Caine is.

HAPPY SNAKE FIST...ERR, LABOR DAY

A little Snake in the Eagle's Shadow for you. You'll no doubt recognize young Jackie Chan, but that's director (and legendary fight choreographer) Yuen Wo Ping's dad as the old man.

So just remember: as you take it easy this holiday, be thankful that you don't have to be looking over your shoulder every few minutes for maniacal Eagle's Claw masters who are dedicated to completely wiping out all the practitioners of your Snake Fist style.

IT GETS WORSE

Vian Juan Cole, the London Daily Telegraph reports that Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani has decided to withdraw from politics.

Aides say Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is angry and disappointed that Shias are ignoring his calls for calm and are switching their allegiance in their thousands to more militant groups which promise protection from Sunni violence and revenge for attacks.

"I will not be a political leader any more," he told aides. "I am only happy to receive questions about religious matters."

...

The extent to which he has become marginalised was demonstrated last week when fighting broke out in Diwaniya between Iraqi soldiers and al-Sadr's Mehdi army. With dozens dead, al-Sistani's appeals for calm were ignored. Instead, the provincial governor had to travel to Najaf to see [Muqtada] al-Sadr, who ended the fighting with one telephone call.

Al-Sistani's aides say that he has chosen to stay silent rather than suffer the ignominy of being ignored. Ali al-Jaberi, a spokesman for the cleric in Khadamiyah, said that he was furious that his followers had turned away from him and ignored his calls for moderation.

By most accounts, Sistani has been deft in his dealings with the U.S. occupation forces, using his influence as Iraq's most prominent jurist to hold out for an elections process that met his specifications. He has obviously been much less successful in cultivating support among poor, young Shi'a, who have come to form the core of the Sadr movement.

Hundreds of thousands of people have turned away from al-Sistani to the far more aggressive al-Sadr. Sabah Ali, 22, an engineering student at Baghdad University, said that he had switched allegiance after the murder of his brother by Sunni gunmen. "I went to Sistani asking for revenge for my brother," he said. "They said go to the police, they couldn't do anything.

"But even if the police arrest them, they will release them for money, because the police are bad people. So I went to the al-Sadr office. I told them about the terrorists' family. They said, 'Don't worry, we'll get revenge for your brother'. Two days later, Sadr's people had killed nine of the terrorists, so I felt I had revenge for my brother. I believe Sadr is the only one protecting the Shia against the terrorists."

I'm sure I'm not the only one who just flashed to the opening scene of the Godfather: "First I went to the police, like a good Iraqi. Then I said to my wife: For justice, we must go to Sayeed al-Sadr."

I recommend this report from the International Crisis Group to anyone interested in a better understanding of Sadr and his organization. One of Sadr's goals has been to create a prominent place for himself and his followers in the holy city of Najaf, the center of Shi'a learning in the world, and to challenge the traditional clerical hierarchy for leadership of Iraq's Shi'is. With Sistani apparently withdrawing from the political field, Sadr is significantly closer to this goal.

GREATEST AMERICAN BAND OF THE LAST TWENTY YEARS RIPPED OFF

Someone is just asking to be stricken with leprosy by the god of rock:

Dinosaur Jr Gear Stolen (Long Island City, NY)
Wednesday, 30 August 2006
After a blistering set last night in Brooklyn, NY the band awoke this morning to find that the their trailer had been broken into and all of the gear has been taken.

J's Amma guitar, the mountain man guitar, Lou's Rickenbacker... EVERYTHING IS GONE. They are still taking inventory to see what else is gone but they were pretty much wiped out.

WE NEED YOUR HELP!!! Spread the word to everyone you know, every music store, pawn shop, club... anywhere you can think they may show up.

Dinosaur Jr at Download

MILBANK'D

Watching yesterday's Walt and Mearsheimer presentation on C-SPAN, and then reading Dana Milbank's column today, I begin to understand why his name has become a verb in some D.C. circles:

University of Chicago political scientist John Mearsheimer was in town yesterday to elaborate on his view that American Jewish groups are responsible for the war in Iraq, the destruction of Lebanon's infrastructure and many other bad things. As evidence, he cited the influence pro-Israel groups have on "John Boner, the House majority leader."

Actually, Professor, it's "BAY-ner." But Mearsheimer quickly dispensed with Boehner (R-Ohio) and moved on to Jewish groups' nefarious sway over Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), who Mearsheimer called " Von Hollen."

...

This line of argument could be considered a precarious one for two blue-eyed men with Germanic surnames. And, indeed, Walt seemed defensive about the charges of anti-Semitism. He cautioned that the Israel lobby "is not a cabal," that it is "not synonymous with American Jews" and that "there is nothing improper or illegitimate about its activities."

Got that? Mearsheimer mispronounced the name of some Congressmen. (Gotcha!) Walt seemed "defensive" about charges of anti-Semitism. (I suppose Milbank expected him to embrace the charge?) Also, while it's apparently anti-Semitic to suggest that someone with a Jewish surname may have a special affinity for Israel, it's perfectly fine to imply that those with Germanic surnames may have a special affinity for anti-Semitism.

I have no idea of Milbank's particular views on the subject of U.S.-Israel policy, but this sort of lazy, irresponsible journalism only helps to obstruct a sorely needed debate. Part of the strategy of the pro-Israel crowd is to keep their critics occupied with accusations, sometimes subtle, usually not, of anti-Semitism, in order to avoid having to deal with the question of why the U.S. shovels some $3 billion at Israel every year. It’s almost comical that no matter how often or how much Walt and Mearsheimer differentiate between "American Jews" and "the pro-Israel lobby," so many of their critics refuse to hear it, and persist with the charges of racism and conspiracy-mongering.

Some have argued that Walt and Mearsheimer are partly to blame for this, that they left themselves open to criticism by defining the lobby too broadly. I think there’s something to that critique, but it’s also pretty clear that the two men would be libeled as anti-Semites no matter how narrowly or rigorously they defined their terms. In neither their original paper nor yesterday’s panel did Walt and Mearsheimer suggest, as Milbank asserts, that "American Jewish groups are responsible for the war in Iraq". Indeed, yesterday they went so far as to address and refute that very claim. The fact that Milbank, one of D.C.'s foremost peddlers of the conventional wisdom, would open his column with such a blatant lie, and probably receive no penalty for it, indicates how obscure and bizarre this discussion so often is in the U.S., and what an uphill battle is faced by those who want to put the U.S.-Israel relationship under greater scrutiny.

HOW IN THE WORLD

Could this not be considered anti-Semitism?

Answer: Because its authors are pro-Israel. Caricatures of spotty, sneering, nefarious, cabalist, string-pulling Jews are apparently permissible if those Jews are to the left of David Horowitz.

THAT'S A REAL CUTE BABY, CONDI

Nasrallah is now the most popular figure in the Middle East, according to an Egyptian poll.

NATIONAL REVIEW: THERE'S NO PARODY LIKE SELF-PARODY

Just when I was having serious doubts that the Corner could possibly produce anything more stupid than Mark Levin's instant classic of knuckle-dragging wingnuttery "Videotaping a politician at a public campaign event is a dirty trick!", here comes Andy McCarthy, refusing to settle for a silver in the Olympics of dumb:

Remember back when the New York Times first disclosed the existence of the NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program. A number of us contended that this should be grounds for a prosecution because it alerted the enemy to our signals intelligence efforts in wartime.

"NONSENSE!" replied the Times and its allies. You see, they explained, al Qaeda well knew that we were using every means in our arsenal to penetrate its communications. Telling terrorists about the NSA program didn't alert them to anything they weren't already well aware of.

Well, apparently the ACLU, CAIR, Greenpeace and the other "public interest" ogranizations who sued the government did not get the memo.

In order to convince Judge Anna Diggs Taylor to invalidate the NSA program, these plaintiffs had to establish that they had "standing" to sue — meaning that they had suffered some kind of individualized harm, something that was unique because it is not enough for standing purposes to simply claim a general objection to government policies.

So how did these plaintiffs claim to have been harmed? They are journalists, lawyers and scholars who do research and other work in the Middle East. But now, according to Judge Taylor's opinion, they have sworn in affidavits that "Persons abroad who before the program [became pubic knowledge] spoke with them by telephone or internet no longer do so." They are, she says, "stifled in their ability to vigorously conduct research, interact with sources, talk to clients," because people suddenly think the U.S. government is listening.

So which is it? Is the TSP leak a big nothing that changed no one's behavior, or a bombshell that changed everyone's behavior? Evidently, it depends on which scenario the Left believes will damage the Bush administration more on any given day.

Yes, because everyone knows that journalists, lawyers, scholars and al Qaeda operatives all go about their work with the same level of secrecy and suspicion*, and the fact that some journalists, lawyers and scholars changed their behaviour in the wake of the NSC wiretap stories is a strong indicator that al Qaeda responded in precisely the same way, after being similarly surprised. Yeah.

*(After all, they're pretty much on the same side, right? The latter group flies planes into buildings, and the former muddies our moral clarity and weakens our will to win with their "reporting," their "legal reasoning" and their "scholarly research.")

DIRTY TRICKS

Apparently, according to NRO's Mark Levin, recording what a politician says at a public campaign event now qualifies as one:

RE: ALLEN [Mark R. Levin]
Not one word about the Webb campaign's dirty trick in having one of its volunteers, camcorder in hand, harrassing Allen as he campaigns around Virginia. It's good that Allen has a mean streak, if in fact he does — enough compassionate conservatism. But I doubt his mean streak comes anywhere near McCain's.

Allen has been an excellent senator, and he was an excellent governor — which gives us significant insight into how he would govern should he become president. Nothing about him suggests any kind of discriminatory instincts. Yes, the libs will blow this out of proportion. That's what libs do, as they sanctify Robert Byrd "the Conscience of the Senate" and tolerate all kinds of racism and anti-Semiticism from their ranks. Allen slipped and apologized. Unlike Rich, I doubt it will be in most people's minds when voting, except those who want it to be.

I don't think I'm going out on a limb by suggesting that Allen's uttering of an anti-Arab slur is a plus in Levin's book. Even if it was in French.

Okay, now back to my hard liberal work of sanctifying Robert Byrd and tolerating all kinds of racism and anti-Semiticism...

GENUINELY PERNICIOUS

A big Kool-Aid OH YEAH! to Matt Yglesias for putting his finger on Charles Krauthammer:

He's one of -- if not the -- most genuinely pernicious people on the American intellectual scene. A forceful polemicist, blessed with the ability to engage in staggering levels of dishonesty on behalf of shockingly wrongheaded ideas. Or, as the vice president of the United States put it, "a man I admire very much . . . one great American . . . a superior intellect."

As if to demonstrate precisely Yglesias' charge, here's Krauthammer last week in Time, presenting his familiar fakakta version of Middle East history, in which the Israelis stand around making the desert bloom, pausing in their prayers for peace only long enough to repel periodic attacks from the undifferentiated mass of Jew-hating Arabs.

Something radically new is emerging in the Middle East: the century-old Arab-Israeli dispute has been transmuted from a nationalist to a religious war. And as a result, the Arab-Israeli wars are now merging into the global conflict between radical Islam and the West.

Well, not that radically new. Krauthammer and other Likud-types have been trying for years to conflate the U.S.'s war on terror with Israel's war on the Palestinians, and the conflict with Hezbollah has given them a perfect chance to try again.

The Israeli writer Amos Oz has written that the Arab-Israeli conflict is really three conflicts. The first involves the effort by Arab nationalist regimes to destroy what they perceived, not entirely unreasonably, as a Western colonial outpost in their midst. The second involves the effort by militant Islamists to restore all of historic Palestine as an Islamic waqf (religious endowment). The third involves the effort by the Palestinian people to assert their right to establish a state in part of their homeland. Conflating and confusing these conflicts only helps extremists on both sides, and handicaps moderates, which is, of course, Krauthammer's goal.

GARAGE SALE SCORE

Earlier today, I stopped by a garage sale down the block from my home, and managed to double the size of my indefensibly small DVD collection with the purchase of Blade Runner, Enter the Dragon, and Annie Hall, each one a genre-redefining classic in its own right.

The guy was asking $3 each for the films, and $1 for the hardback book I wanted. As a reasonably experienced market haggler, I know better than to simply fork over the asking price. Here's how it went:

ME
How much for these?

HIM
Three bucks each for the movies, one dollar for the book.

ME
I feel kind of bad not haggling with you over this, but $10 seems so reasonable.

HIM
We can pretend to haggle, if you want.

ME
Okay. How much do you want for these?

HIM
Ten bucks.

ME
Rrmm, how about ten bucks?

HIM
I can go down to ten bucks.

ME
Sorry, I'm out of here.

HIM
Okay, okay! Ten bucks, ten bucks.

ME
Fair enough.

fin

Upon returning home, my first move was to watch the cavern fight scene in EtD where Lee takes on, like, fifty uniformed flunkies, dispatching them in various creative ways, using first only hands, feet, and orgasmic facial expressions, and then a succession of weapons, culminating, of course, in his Free Nunchaku Clinic, three astonishing minutes of film which are probably responsible for more self-inflicted backyard injuries than any others in cinema history.

Thence to Annie Hall, where I skipped forward to relive one of the formative experiences of my cultural life: The Marshall McLuhan scene.

I was thirteen, had nothing else to watch, my parents had rented Annie Hall the night before, there it was on top of the TV. I knew who Woody Allen was, but nothing more. I knew he was supposed to be funny. With a resigned sigh, I took the cassette out of the box, pushed it into the player, and plunked down on the couch. There were the opening credits, which would eventually become as familiar and comforting to me as an old blanket, then cut to this nerdy dude talking right at me in heavy Brooklynese about life, relationships, and old women in the Catskills. Heh, pretty funny. When it got to the doctor's office with the redhead kid as young Alvy ("The universe is expanding!" "What is that your business?!!"), I started to get into it, yeah this was definitely worth watching, but when it arrived at the scene were Alvy pulls Marshall McLuhan from behind the easel in the theater lobby to confront the pontificating pinhead behind him in line, the film achieved a state of sublime funniness for me. I'm not exaggerating when I say that I had a religious experience there and then.

The fact that I had no idea at that time who Marshall McLuhan only proves the brilliance of the gag.

Later, tonight: "If only you could see what I've seen with your eyes."

SATURDAY'S VERY TOUGH QUESTION

What does David Horowitz have less of: Shame or credibility?

THANK YOU FOR PLAYING

Here's a fun little exercise: Read Robert Pape's NY Times op-ed about the Hezbollah movement, and the phenomenon of suicide terrorism and its roots in resistance to foreign occupation (a subject on which Pape has written one of the definitive works.)

Then read Alan Dershowitz in today's NY Daily News, insisting that foreign occupation does not cause terrorism.

Then raise your hand if you can tell who's full of crap.

SADR, SISTANI, AND HEZBOLLAH

Juan Cole on Iraq's Grand Ayatollah Sistani's recent condemnation of Israel's bombing of Lebanon and demand for an immediate cease-fire. Moqtada al-Sadr has already indicated his willingness to send Mahdi Army fighters to join with Hezbollah, and as Cole notes, Sistani needs to proect his flank from the steadily growing power of Sadr.

The Sadr family is originally from Lebanon, and Moqtada's cousin, Sayyid Musa al-Sadr, is one of the pivotal Lebanese Shi'a leader of the twentieth century. It was Musa al-Sadr who issued a fatwa (religious legal decision) in 1974 declaring Syria's Alawites to be Muslims, a decision which is still considered controversial among mainstream Sunnis and Shi'as.

It's important to place the current conflict within the context of the rising tide of Shi'a political activism in the Middle East, which the invasion of Iraq threw into high gear. The fact that the most effective Arab military organization in the modern era is Shi'a cannot be overlooked or underestimated, nor can the fact that Hezbollah is also solidly Khomeinist in its ideology. Sadr is a professed Khomeinist, Sistani is not. Given this connection, along with the resonance of the Sadr family name in Lebanon, it's quite clear that Hezbollah's success benefits Sadr at Sistani's expense, and thus makes it somewhat more likely that the United States will have spent trillions of dollars and suffered thousands of casualties (and inflicted hundreds of thousands) in order to transform Iraq into a very hardline conservative jurisprudent-dominated state, instead of merely a moderately hardline conservative jurisprudent-dominated state.

Further reading: A very good New Yorker essay on Hezbollah from a few years ago.

NASSER AND HEZBOLLAH

This past Wednesday was the 50th Anniversary of Gemal Abd al-Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal, a pivotal moment in the modern Middle East. Via an approving link in NRO's The Corner, I came across this Weekly Standard article by Arthur Herman. In it, Herman makes a number of startling claims ("Even more than the Cold War, the Suez crisis has shaped the world we live in." Huh?) but I'm more interested in the overall tone of the piece, which neatly displays your basic conservative refusal to recognize that colonialism was hell for the colonized. For example, Herman insists that Nasser's takeover of the canal amounted to theft, but makes no mention of the over 125,000 Egyptian conscripts who died while digging the thing, let alone acknowledge that this, along with the fact that the canal was, you know, in their country, may have given Egypt a legitimate claim.

I'm not interested in defending Nasser, who was, by most accounts, a pretty brutal authoritarian dictator (Though, of course, conservatives have no problem with authoritarian dictators whose brutality is employed to defend the privileges of colonial elites and the holdings of Western multinationals, but I digress...) Regardless of what one thinks of Nasser, the fact is that he is still greatly respected by many in the Middle East as having stood up for the Arabs against a vastly more powerful Western oppressor.

It seems that this same phenomenon is taking place in regards to Hezbollah. Hezbollah is the most effective Arab military organization of the modern era, and they're representing for the Arabs in a way that no one really has since Nasser. This isn't to suggest that people are embracing Hezbollah's program, I think it's clear that a majority of people in the Arab world would not want to live under a Hezbollah-type government, just that after decades of being confronted with news and footage from the occupation of Palestine, many are impressed to see someone finally standing up to Israel. The fact that Israel has persisted in it's crushing bombing campaign ,even as it admits that the stated goals of that campaign are unattainable, also strongly works in Hezbollah's favor.

DECISIVE ACTION

Stanley Kurtz, shaking his tiny fists at parody:

On the one hand, Iran is cooking up dreams of regional domination, which a bomb would be necessary to secure. On the other hand, with so many enemies alerted and pressing, Iran's regime has got to fear for its survival. A bomb is also a solution to that problem (from Iran's point of view). Given the stakes, no strictly economic carrots or sticks will work. (Well, a total oil/economic boycott might work, but that will never be imposed.) So either we destroy Iran's nuclear program by force, or Iran is going to get the bomb, likely provoking nuclear proliferation throughout the region.

That means a whole lot of Islamic bombs floating around the Middle East for the indefinite future. It would probably take another terrorist strike to move the American public in the direction of a more hawkish approach.
Over the long term, in the absence of greater national unity and more decisive American military action, you'd have to say the odds of nuclear terror within the next decade have risen substantially. Should we blame the president for this? I don't think so. To a degree, I blame the dovish Dems. Without a national consensus, the country can't take decisive action.

Leaving aside Stanley's not-so-vaguely fascist assertion that the country is being weakened and left vulnerable by the disunity caused by "dovish Dems," let's make this pure and sparkling clear: George W. Bush has never shown the least bit of concern for "consensus." As he's told us many, many times, he knows what's right, he goes from his gut, he's the decider, he's already had his accountability moment, etc., so the idea that he would be constrained from taking decisive action by something as morally un-clarifying as " the lack of consensus" (which is, after all, just another way of saying "the New York times doesn't like it," right?) is ridiculous on its face. Indeed, wouldn't the sort of leader that conservatives imagine Bush to be take whatever action he deemed necessary, regardless of the political consequences, to defend Amurca? I mean, this is Churchill, Jr., we're talking about, yes?

Now, if Stanley thinks very hard, he may remember that Congress passed a resolution authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein with little to no substantive opposition by so-called dovish Dems. Bush wanted a War on Terra, he got it. He wanted a Patriot Act, he got it. Really, other than the Bolton nomination, which the president got anyway through recess appointment (a mechanism which Republicans whined about endlessly when President Clinton used them), and which was only held up because of a Republican Senator's misgivings about Bolton, which of the president's foreign policy initiatives have the Democrats really tried, let alone been able, to block? While it is true that those initiatives have, almost to a one, proven absolutely disastrous, arrogantly conceived and incompetently executed, and it is true that more and more conservatives are edging away from the Bush Doctrine like guys in wigs and hastily-applied makeup trying to slip into lifeboats on the Titanic, pinning the blame for this on "dovish Dems" is tranparent nonsense. Blame Congress as a whole? Sure. They have oversight authority which, by any measure, they have abdicated, so they share some of the responsibility for the tragic mess that's been created, and which is getting worse. But the man most responsible is the man at the top: George W. Dick Cheney.

But wait, here's where the wheels really fly off Stanley's argument.

There is one great hope, however. And this is something that, for all the problems, our ventures in Afghanistan and Iraq have already won us. The other side knows that direct strikes on America unite the country and produce tough military action. For all our success at breaking up terrorist plots, I've got to think the terrorists have been intentionally holding back out of worry that strikes on American soil would lead to radical American action. Why haven't Hezbollah's sleeper cells hit us yet? Because they know the U.S. would then green light an Israeli attack of indefinite duration. Why hasn't al-Qaeda released to sort of cheap, easy suicide terror in the U.S. that the Palestinians use in Israel? Because they fear it would provoke a U.S. takeover of their sanctuaries in Pakistan.

I'd say it's more likely that al-Qaeda has learned that if they attack the U.S., the U.S. will respond by invading random Muslim countries with whom al-Qaeda has no meaningful relationship, thereby transforming that country into a militant jihadist jamboree, increasing al-Qaeda recruitment and training opportunities significantly. States like Iran, on the other hand, have probably concluded that not having WMD and not having ties to al-Qaeda simply cannot provide the sort of insurance against U.S. invasion that a shiny new nuke can.

Stanley undermines his entire "toughness" argument with his reference to Israel. He claims that tough U.S. action has deterred the sort of attacks that Palestinians use in Israel, that is, the sort of attacks that Israel hasn't been able to deter with the most powerful military in the region and a nearly 40-years-long military occupation. God help Stanley if he doesn't think Israel has been "tough" with the Palestinians.

Finally, in regards to Iran's status as a regional power, which is, after all, what Kurtz is on about in the first place, let me put it this way: At this point Iran is pretty much done "cooking up" dreams for regional domination. Those dreams are fully cooked, out of the oven, and cooling on the window sill. Let me put it another way: Had Iran somehow won its war with Iraq in the 1980s, it could not, in its wildest, wettest, regional hegemonic dreams have hoped for nearly as complete and sweeping a victory over its foe as the United States provided for it, gratis, in 2003. The idea that we can solve this problem with just more "decisive action," i.e. more things that go boom, strikes me as the definition of insanity.

RESOLVED

I've seen more than s few conservatives over the last few days getting indignant over UN Resolution 1559, which calls for the withdrawal of non-Lebanese forces from Lebanon, and for the disarming and dsibanding of all militias within Lebanese territory. I'll say this for them, they have a point.

While they're appealing to UN authority, though, here are a few (dozen) other resolutions they may want to peruse.

NOW CLIFF MAY IS THE RALPH

Some arguments are so hacktacularly inept that they don't require comment:

DODDERING [Cliff May]
Laura Ingraham this morning played a bite of Sen. Christopher Dodd saying on one of the weekend talk shows that he will not vote to confirm John Bolton (as Sen. George Voinovich has now decided to do) because so many other ambassadors at the U.N. don’t like Bolton.

Perhaps Dodd forgets: Those other ambassadors don’t represent America’s interests. Bolton does—effectively.

One might ask: Whose interests is Dodd representing? Do the people of Connecticut really want the Syrian, Saudi, Russian, and French ambassadors to have a veto power over our choice of an American envoy?

Heh.

THE END OF ILLUSIONS

A few weeks ago, NR's Rich Lowry posted this column after returning from an American Israel Education Foundation-sponsored trip to Israel. In it, Lowry gravely reports that a "grim realism" has set in amongst Israelis, which has caused them to abandon the twin illusions of a Greater Israel and a negotiated peace with the Palestinians. That Lowry would speak this way is unsurprising, given the nature of the "educational" junket of which he was a part.

The AIEF is closely affiliated with AIPAC, and trips like these have proven a very effective way of maintaining support in Congress for hardline Israeli policies. American legislators, their aides, and credulous journalists like Rich Lowry are flown to Israel, set up in nice hotels, taken in helicopter rides over the ever-expanding Jewish settlements, and spoon-fed hardline revisionist talking points for hours a day, talking points which many of them then dutifully regurgitate upon returning to the U.S. "See? Israelis are just like us: They eat pizza! They swim in pools! They shop in malls! Palestinians, on the other hand, worship Allah. Enough said."

Of course, such trips always steer clear of the Palestinian slums, the bulldozed Palestinian homes, the uprooted Palestinian olive groves, the shelled Palestinian schools, the razed Palestinian playgrounds, the long lines of Palestinian elderly, men, women, and children baking in the merciless Mediterranean sun at Israeli military checkpoints as teenage IDF troops leisurely thumb through their identification papers and make humiliating jokes about them, or anything else that might puncture the lie that it is Israel who is under siege.

In my view, the illusion that has been shattered in these last weeks is the notion that Israel can achieve anything resembling normalcy or stability in the absence of a political process, in the absence of negotiations with its enemies. As Daniel Levy, guest-posting at The Washington Note, points out:

Israel withdrew from the Sinai in the context of a negotiated peace agreement with Egypt and from parts of the Arava in a negotiated peace treaty with Jordan, results: quiet borders, no military exchanges since, solid if cool peace. Israel withdrew from South Lebanon and Gaza unilaterally without agreements...enough said.

After the latest events avoidance of negotiations with the Palestinians and pursuit of a unilateral convergence on the West Bank, or re-alignment, or disengagement or whatever new name is found is a joke in poor taste.

The unilateral paradigm has ill-served the US and Israel, bury it.

Repeat: The idea that Israel can unilaterally impose a solution, or achieve security simply by the might of its military is the illusion here. It has not worked in Palestine. It will not work in Lebanon.

I'd like to quickly mention one other thing. Today marks the 60th anniversary of the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem by the Zionist Irgun organization. Demonstrating once again the grace, sensitivity, and good sense for which he is unknown the world over, former PM Binyamin Netanyahu attended a celebration of this event. You read that right: A celebration. At the very moment that Israel is raining bombs down on the Lebanese in response to the capture of two of its soldiers, Israelis are celebrating the death of 92 people by Zionist terrorism. Words simply don't begin to do justice to the staggering moral relativism at work here.

UPDATE:
Speaking of AIPAC-funded trips to Israel, here's Jacob Weisberg in Slate, reporting that it's everybody else's fault except for George W. Bush and Israel. I'm curious how much of this he wrote himself, and how much was simply cut and pasted from AIPAC materials. Super-plus-mega-bonus-doo-doo points to Weisberg for repeating the tiresome Myth of Arafat's Rejection of Israel's Generous Offer at Camp David, which has earned a place alongside Reagan Won the Cold War as a Self-serving Political Storyline of Yesteryear Which is Seriously Perverting Our Foreign Policy This Year.