Reading material

David Horovitz on whether or not Israel will—or should—ramp up the use of force.

The negative perception and presentation of Israel starkly impacts on the degree of Israeli military response that international public opinion, and by direct and vital extension the American political leadership, is prepared to tolerate. The problems, self-made or inflicted, that Israel is encountering on the media battlefield, in short, constitute a significant factor in circumscribing its military room for maneuver.

But the main limitation on Israel’s use of heavier force, nonetheless, remains our own nation’s sense of right and wrong. Israel’s leadership and its mainstream public don’t want to get large numbers of reservists killed in the effort to eviscerate Hizbullah. And they also don’t want to kill large numbers of Lebanese. And so Israel still hesitates.

In the meantime, Caroline Glick says that everyone in charge of Israel has failed in their duties, and is calling for a revolution.

THERE IS a palpable sense in Israel that we are on the edge of a revolutionary moment. Our national leadership in the government, the IDF and the media has utterly failed us.

As we stand poised on the edge of an even larger war, the main question that hangs in the balance is what lessons the Israeli people will take from the current fiasco. Will we continue to believe their fictions, or will we find a way to abandon them and move on with leaders who understand that territory is vital, that the jihad is real, that Israel has a right to defensible borders, and that Israel is not to blame for our enemies’ hatred?

My thoughts are that when this crisis is over, the second Olmert tries to start his “realignment,” his government will fall.

Lastly, we have “Spengler” in the Asia Times, who says that the U.S. doesn’t quite get that the current situation in Israel is the right way to go in the Middle East, and he also says Israel needs to send in massive ground forces to sweep out Hezbullah.

Israel’s strongest move on the chessboard would be a massive armored incursion into Lebanon to crush Hezbollah combined with limited strikes against Syria. These would be costly in terms of human life, but that is the bill due the devil for fleeing Lebanon six years ago. The Israeli population longs for normalcy, and is loath to sacrifice its young men, a fact with which Hezbollah taunts them. It is far from clear whether Israel will convert a subtle but fundamental change in the regional balance into a strategic breakthrough.

Washington’s best move would be an ultimatum to Tehran with a deadline for dismantling its nuclear-weapons program, followed by aerial attacks in the event of non-compliance. Rather than engage the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, Washington should take the opportunity to destabilize it. Rather than attempt to hold together its Frankenstein monster in Iraq, it should partition the country. Sunnis and Shi’ites already are fleeing mixed neighborhoods and agglomerating into sectarian strongholds, and a broader population exchange is the best formula to suppress bloodshed.

In other words, in pursuit of its own best interests, Washington should do precisely what the Iranian regime fears that it may do. Tehran’s paranoia, of course, runs far ahead of Washington’s limited imagination. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is skating in tighter and tighter little circles attempting to limit the war. The US demand for a 48-hour halt in Israeli bombing runs in Lebanon to which Israel acquiesced expresses the delusional hope that Sunni Arab states can be enlisted to oppose Iran and Hezbollah.

Read them in full, particularly Spengler’s.