Winners and Losers

Hezballah has won a major strategic/propaganda victory now that a UN-sponsored cease fire is in the offing. Victory in this battle goes to the Islamofascists. But it's a long war and there will be other battles.

It should come as no surprise that Hassan Nasrallah has declared complete victory. Michael Totten describes an interview with Michael Oren, an Israeli writer and spokesman for the IDF, who comments on this:

He [Oren] laughed. And of course he would laugh. Everyone in the world knew Nasrallah would declare victory no matter what if he was not in a cage and if he still had a pulse. The Arab bar for military victory is set pathetically low. All you have to do is survive. You “win” even if your country is torn to pieces. The very idea of a Pyrrhic victory doesn’t occur to people who start unwinnable wars with the state of Israel.

“Look at Nasrallah today,” Michael said. “In 2000 he did his victory dance in Bint Jbail. He can’t do that this time. His command and control south of Beirut is completely gone. We killed 550 Hezbollah fighters south of the Litani out of an active force of 1250. Nasrallah claimed South Lebanon would be the graveyard of the IDF. But we only lost one tenth of one percent of our soldiers in South Lebanon. The only thing that went according to his plan was their ability to keep firing rockets. If he has enough victories like this one, he’s dead.”

And yet, Hezballah did win, because it didn’t lose. Syria and Iran won, because they can now rest assured that the sponsorship of international terrorism has no consequences. Nasrallah did win, because in the delusional world of Arabic thinking, a terrorist thug who has fought the “occupier” to a standstill is a greater hero that a true leader who would bring them out of their self-imposed darkness.

With regret, any objective assessment indicates that the biggest loser during the past month is Israel. World opinion is uniformly negative. No surpise there, but still unfortunate. The MSM and the Left require that Israel fight a perfectly sanitary, bloodless war of self-defense. The moment a single civilian is killed, regardless of the fact that (1) they were warned to leave, (2) they are used by Hezballah as human shields, (3) they are often Hezballah fighters and rabid supporters and (4) their deaths are often stage managed by Hezballah's media coordinators, Israeli’s are broadly condemned. Worse, Israeli leadership seemed far too sensitive to this hypocritical condemnation, fighting this war in fits and starts.

But the Western world loses as well. The UN cease-fire resolution is a travesty. It does little if anything to disarm a terrorist aggressor who has sworn to destroy Israel and the USA and who continues to be sponsored by Iran (a near Nuclear power). One has to wonder whether the 13,000 Katusha rockets supplied to Hezballah by Iran might someday be replaced with a single containerized Nuke.

Oh well, we MUST stop the killing, because Lebanese innocents (the MSM and the left don't spend much time fretting about Israeli innocents) are dying before our eyes. We must work toward peace with barbarians who have no intention of keeping it. Of course, because we stop the killing now, we set the stage for a time when we’ll look back wistfully at a few thousand civilians deaths. The storm clouds I’ve written about over the past months have gotten darker and more foreboding today. Sad.