Here's a good read from frontpagemag.com
"The fact remains, for all the losses that IDF tanks and infantry suffered at the hands of Hezbollah fighters armed with sophisticated anti-tank missiles, Israeli soldiers won every tactical engagement. There is no doubt that, if given the necessary time and freedom, the IDF would have eviscerated Hezbollah. That was the preferred course of the Israeli public: Polls show a majority wanted to continue fighting rather than accept the U.N. cease-fire. That sentiment was shared by the mayors of towns in the north who met with a group of visitors on August 10 after having been under incessant rocket attack for a month. Over dinner on the Golan Heights, as Israeli artillery shells roared overhead and as Israeli attack jets and helicopters streaked through the night sky popping flares, local leaders told me that they were willing to stay in their shelters as long as it took to eradicate the terrorist menace across the border.
The failure (or, if you like, incomplete success) of this summer's Second Lebanon War was not the fault of ordinary Israeli soldiers and civilians. It was the fault of Israel's current leaders, civil and military, who were shortsighted and irresponsible in their lack of preparation for this war and vacillating and irresolute in its conduct. Those complaints should sound familiar to anyone who has followed the dispiriting course of the conflict in Iraq.
No doubt our jihadist enemies will conclude from the setbacks suffered by Israel and America in Lebanon and Iraq that the West is, as Osama bin Laden once put it, a "paper tiger." Such misapprehensions have long bedeviled liberal democracies. Recall the contempt that Napoleon expressed for Britain as a "nation of shopkeepers." Or the widespread assumption in the 1930s that liberal democracies were finished: that they were too degenerate and decadent to compete with such vibrant ideologies as Nazism, fascism, and communism. That illusion was buried in the rubble of Dresden and Hiroshima. As Dwight Eisenhower wrote his brother on the day that World War II began, "Hitler should beware of the fury of an aroused democracy." By the time the fighting ended six years later, American and British bombers had incinerated more than 600,000 German and Japanese men, women, and children.
Today this might be condemned as a "disproportionate response." The attack on Pearl Harbor, after all, left "only" 2,403 American dead. Yet I sense that even now America, Israel, even Europe would be capable of perpetrating violence on a similar scale if sufficiently provoked. Unfortunately, the way things are going, with Iran and its terrorist proxies growing powerful and increasingly impudent while the Western democracies lick their wounds, we may see this proposition put to the test before long."
Bottom line...mess with the bull and you get the horn.
