Death by 1001 Cuts

I’ll be blunt: Israel has lost this one.

Not news to anyone paying any attention to the latest war in Lebanon, but I had to go on the record with it. The only way to eliminate Hezbollah is to “ideologically cleanse” out every last supporter of them from within range of Israel and keep them out. Killing most of them would have been a step in the right direction too.

The reasons Israel couldn’t do that (their particular history and generally being an enlightened democracy) are the same reasons that the West’s whole “War on Terror” is going in the wrong direction. As has been said before (including by me of course) a lot more people have to die before there’s a meaningful change in the status quo.

What the hell do I mean by that, you ask? A good question, and let’s see if I can answer it.

Well, wholesale slaughter and/or effective containment will do a lot of our work for us. Less people who want the decadent Crusader-Zionist countries assimilated into some Universal Caliphate means less potential terrorists, or at least a nice contained area that we could pit our volunteer armed forces against them. I’ve read some stuff that suggested that was the Americans’ plan for Iraq, but I don’t credit them with that kind of foresight. While on that topic however, any kind of “divide and conquer” the Yanks may have been attempting there seems about ready to fall into the lap of Iran, but I won’t go there right now. Wouldn’t be the first time the US backed the wrong “enemy of my enemy”…

This of course is anathema to us enlightened democracies, and it would take a LOT to get us back into a Dresden/nuke-‘em-til-they-glow mindset. It rather surprised me, but even 9/11 didn’t do it. If the Americans had really taken the gloves off Riyadh would be a crater, the Arabian oilfields would be occupied by and run by the US for the US, and every bit of Saudi money the Yanks could get near would be as frozen as the inner circle of hell. Oh yeah, and they would have knocked over the theocracy in Iran instead of taking out (secular) Saddam Hussein.

The Americans talk about the money that finances/inspires terrorists, but a lot of it comes from their buddies in Saudi, so they go after the small fish instead. If you pluck the leaves the roots are still there, and the two main sources of money to trouble western interests come from Saudi Arabia and Tehran. Short of the Iranians getting the bomb and actually being suicidal enough to use it (or give to someone who would), I don’t see the “enemy” being able to kill enough of us at once to really put the Fear of God into us and then show the radical parts of the Muslim world what we’re capable of..

However, I think at this point they’ve seen as much as they need to of what we’re REALLY made of these days. We’re too soft to do what is required to ensure the continuance of Western civilization and we will eventually reap the results of that. Israel is already being destroyed on the instalment plan, and any hare-brained scheme to take over or destroy an airliner or two can paralyse us for days on end. It won’t end with our toothpaste and bottled water, but it could if we wanted it to.