Little Elizabeth is starting to babble this month. When I can figure out what she is saying, I’ll let you know in Global Thoughts. Perhaps it is better than my adult babbling....

I was visited this past month by my niece from Australia and her mother. A few days into the trip, after she was getting all the treats she could ever imagine and had the undivided attention of her mom, I asked her if she was happy. She said not as much as she hoped, because she missed her daddy and brother. Reminds me of the boy from Cuba who came to the US a number of years ago – he didn’t care that he had toilet paper and freedom from communism; he just wanted his daddy back.

About a week into the Lebanon campaign, I went to synagogue on Saturday and there was a guest speaker from the Israeli consulate. With a bit of swagger, this fellow with excellent military, academic and work credentials told us that the Israelis would soon finish the job in Lebanon. I had my doubts, as expressed that week in Global Thoughts, and when he left the sanctuary, I followed him into the hallway and told him that in my opinion they would spill a lot of blood, make a big mess and that they wouldn’t accomplish anything unless they were prepared to go to Nasrallah’s house in Beirut and take him out personally and that overall they were wasting their time going after Lebanon when the root of the problem lie in Syria and Iran. He was sure I was wrong, I was sure I was right, and now you can decide who was correct. I know that people in the Middle East often feel that people from outside the neighborhood don’t understand how things work over there, but from my experience I’m not so sure that’s true. I’ve always felt that outsiders can sometimes see the forest through the trees that the locals can’t.

In the last 2 editions of Global Thoughts, I wrote on July 12 that there would 20-30 days of a campaign to go after major infrastructural targets in Lebanon to get everyone to think 10x before sending rockets and soldiers over the border again and to turn the clock back 20 years in Lebanon. I said that Peretz and Olmert would be led by their armed forces leadership and that an inconclusive result would strengthen Arabs who feel that violence works and kill any constituency in Israel for a peace process. So far I’m 100% on the mark. On July 26, I wrote that the war seems phony in the sense that the Israelis really weren’t getting anywhere from the air and that they could not win that way. When one guy can tie a rocket to a lamp post with a timing device and be far away when it launches and terrorizes an entire city, it is clear that this is correct.  I wrote that fighting Hizbullah in Lebanon was like stomping at ants inside a circle when the ant farm supplying the circle lie outside the circle. I wrote that the buffer zone in the south was worthless, that the nations would talk the talk but not walk the walk in terms of contributing soldiers to an international force, that the Arabs would be furious if the Israelis left a big mess and didn’t finish the job, and that if Lebanon remains a Shiite/Iran stomping ground, you could just start counting down to the next war.

OK, so now here we are a few weeks later and what do we have?

For the last week of this campaign, I had a great sense that I had no idea what was really happening. Stratfor, the intelligence service, couldn’t figure out what was going on either. I wanted to believe that the war was being censored and that some epic battle was taking place, but I really believed that the Israeli leadership couldn’t decide what to do and that’s why nobody could make sense of all the inconsistent signals coming out of that country. I believe the launch of the land campaign in the final 3 days of the campaign, when the country had already agreed to a ceasefire, was a political move to save face. I don’t know why but I believe the Israelis wanted to avoid escalating this war at this time; perhaps they decided while the war was going that they would rather postpone it to a time of their choosing, but if so we don't know that yet. On the surface, I believe that Olmert, Livni and Peretz conducted themselves in a manner that showed they were more interested in covering their asses before a commission of inquiry than in leading the nation. And yet people should feel bad for them; this was bad fate, and the wrong people were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The war was also unwinnable, because the two sides played war by different rules and the Israelis refuse to play by Hizbullah’s rules.

Let's talk about rules of war: Anyone ever wonder why all those women and children were alone in Qana when they were killed? Where were all the men? Why did Hizbullah put all the rockets around women and children? Isn’t it obvious they wanted the world’s media to show pictures of them dead? On Arab stations, they showed these pictures morning, noon and night for a month to inflame everyone’s passions. Why were they using hospitals as arms depots and now it is admitted that they used the UN border post as a shield as well. Had the Israelis turned Bint Jbail and other such villages into “sandlots” they could have finished the war a lot faster instead of fighting mano-a-mano with guerillas hiding in 10 story buildings filled with civilians where the occupant had the clear advantage. In one such example reported in the National Post of Canada, the Israelis came through the door of a building knowing there was a 3 men rocket launching crew on the second floor. The first soldier took a bullet in the lung as he entered; as they left, they were fired on in the streets till they got out of the village. They could have bombed the building instead but it was full of civilians. In Gaza, the Israelis call up on the telephone and warn they are going to bomb a house and tell everyone to leave. They did similarly in Lebanon where they dropped leaflets and told people to evacuate. No such courtesies on the other side. The Arabs think the Jews are weak and incompetent but frankly I’m proud that the Israelis have some standards and live and die by them and frankly show ten times as much guts as opposed to Hizbullah which hides beyond women’s skirts and baby rattles and who mostly ran this war hiding in holes in the ground till the Israelis came to get them. If they got killed or wounded in the process, they refuse to admit it. Hizbullah, according to witnesses quoted in the New York Times, entered Christian villages to fire rockets at Israel and told people they would kill anyone who ran away. Quite courageous, wouldn’t you say? By the way, where were all those brave Hizbullah commanders who never showed their face during the war? What about Assad, who was peeing in his pants during the war, and now gets on TV and calls all the other leaders of Arab countries half-men....The fact is that more Israelis died than was necessary and more risk was taken with less results to show for it in order to minimize Arab civilian casualties and to play by Western rules against an enemy that has no scruples – it is a courtesy that I’m not sure ought to be repeated in the next round.

A quick word on media coverage -- Israel is a free country which means you can criticize it and report just about anything. In Lebanon, if you were reporting there, Hizbullah had a copy of your passport and controlled press cards, according to a reporter speaking on a Sunday morning talk show on CNN. If you were reporting in a Hizbullah area, they supervised you. Now, why would anyone report independently if you looked over your shoulder in Gaza where reporters are routinely kidnapped (and you can imagine how much independent reporting comes from there) and where Hizbullah was threatening everyone else?

Now to the conduct of this campaign. Peretz, the Israeli defense minister, was a former member of Peace Now who had no interest in being defense minister. None of the 3 at the top (Omert, Peretz or Livni, the foreign minister) had real military credentials. Peretz’s first move as defense minister was to cut the defense budget 5%. These guys did not come into office to run a war. Their intention was to make peace and to move Israel to another dimension, to make Israel a more “fun” country, according to Olmert. Problem was this is the last thing Iran and Hizbullah are interested in.

Everybody thought that Hizbullah wouldn’t put Lebanon at risk to fire rockets at Israel and everyone discounted the threat across the northern border. The army wasn’t ready to fight and was poorly equipped (I got word of appeals to pay for everything from flashlights to night vision glasses from reservists who said the army was giving them nothing), bomb shelters hadn’t been updated for years, and a laser system designed to stop these missiles was cancelled because few thought it was worthwhile. The country figured they could unilaterally pull out of Lebanon and that if they held no territory, nobody would really be interested in attacking Israel. In the south, they felt similarly about Gaza. They wanted to wall off the West Bank too, figuring they could pull out and be finished with the Palestinians. There might not be a deal with both sides signing, but what could you do if there were no Arabs who could complete a deal and who would care if the Israelis pulled out when the Arabs kept saying the conflict was all about Land? 

Of course, we all know now that the gloom and doomsayers have had the latest laugh. They who said that the Arabs only want to completely destroy Israel and would just pocket the withdrawal as a sign of weakness and continue the war of destruction are feeling rather smug right now. They may not be correct viz. all Arabs but it doesn’t matter as long as the ones who have the guns and rockets are the ones who count and can veto all the others.

Let’s look at the possibilities.

Lebanon/Syria – I’ve felt for the past few years that it was a mistake to be simply ignoring them. Lebanon is not a real country and it is not going to become one simply by hoping that Syria will disappear. Syria is embracing Iran because its back is to the wall. The Americans are boycotting the Syrians and the Israelis are not interested in giving back the Golan and guaranteeing Assad’s survival as part of the package. But they obviously want Assad to survive because they made it very clear last month that they would not fool around with Syria, even though they were in a better position to deal with Syria than with Lebanon, given that the army has trained to fight the Syrian army and not the Hizbullah guerrillas. But everyone including Netanyahu realizes that it pays to give back the Golan if you neutralize Syria as an enemy in the process. This would also remove the Hizbullah from Lebanon because they can’t survive as a military force if Syria doesn’t allow safe passage of its armaments. It is a good deal to get rid of the Golan if it removes the threat of rockets and missiles from both Lebanon and Syria. Holding the Golan does little to protect Northern Israel if the threat continues to exist from Lebanese territory from rockets that can be fired as far away as 100 miles from the Israeli border. I’ve been advised that Syria would like to deal with Israel but that the best conditions for dialogue are those that give Assad a bit of wiggle room instead of having his back up against the wall. Most Israeli military analysts agree with this assessment; it is the political side of Israel that has resisted dealing with Syria. At this moment, even though Assad is an unattractive partner, it is correct for the Israelis to explore dealing with him and it is not necessarily a problem that the campaign did not end in Israel’s favor. The biggest problem may be that if Assad feels that the political leadership in Israel is weak, he will not want to deal with them if he feels they cannot deliver whatever is agreed to.  If the two sides cannot deal with each other, the next campaign really has to deal with Syria instead of battling it out in Lebanon.

Based on what I know and feel, I believe at this time that the political leadership in Israel is more interested in a pre-emptive strike against Syria and that they think there is no hope to deal with Assad, perhaps because the Israeli political leadership is weak and against the wall and Assad knows it too. I also think that the leadership realizes the only way to remain in power at this point is to go back to war and to win it. If the war was paused with the intention of doing something later, if and when Israel does go to war against Syria, I will believe at that point that the decision was made toward the end of this last round, perhaps with American collusion, and that's why they agreed to a ceasefire in order to conduct the war on its timetable. In any event, this ceasefire is not built to last because the Europeans are not coming through, nobody is disarming Hizbullah and the Iranians and Syrians are trying hard to rearm Hizbullah in violation of the arms embargo that was agreed to. Perhaps everyone wants the ceasefire to fall apart -- nobody aside from Syria and Iran is happy seeing Hizbullah virtually taking over Lebanon right now handing out all the cash and showing the government to be a deck of cards built by coalitions of christians and moslems who sell their own natural allies out to collude with Hizbullah, the only true power there.

Iran – Dan Rather said this month that the Lebanon border is really the Iranian border. Iran is now, for all intent and purposes, running Lebanon. Right now, they via Hizbullah are paying everyone off who is friendly to them, murdering anyone else who is hostile, and whoever they aren’t assassinating, the Syrians are. Siniora, the country’s prime minister, knew full well that he couldn’t stand up to them and all he could do was to cry for mercy before the Arab League. Throughout the Middle East, the Iranians are taking over the region and have taken over what used to be the Arab-Israeli conflict but which no longer is since the Arab countries have become so factionalized so as to be useless as a group and the Iranians are calling the shots. (Note: The Iranians aren’t even Arabs.) But let’s say Israel disappeared – would any fewer than 3,000 people be dying in Iraq each week? Would Iran and Syria ever pull out of Lebanon? Would they not be trying to overthrow the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, etc.? We all know the answer. So let’s be honest about the fact that the root of the problem in today’s Middle East has nothing to do with Israel or the Palestinians. If the Israelis gave up the Shebaa farms even after the UN certified that they withdrew from Lebanon, the Hizbullah would start making claims on 7 Shiite villages in Northern Israel and saying they needed Lebanese territory to launch the resistance. Lebanese TV made this point in a satire program and Hizbullah went the next day and shut down the country’s airport and killed people to intimidate everyone in Lebanon because they knew full well the import of what was being said. It's not about Israel at all -- the Iranianization of the Israeli issue is a cover to extend its hegemony over the region.

In Iran today, the leadership tells its people in writing that the Armageddon will come, that millions of people will be killed including Iranians, but that while everyone else will go to hell, the Iranians will go to heaven. For more details, read the scholar Bernard Lewis’ article in the August 8 Wall Street Journal. Evidently, enough people believe this because there are thousands of people dying to commit suicide for the mullahs. Anyone who believes that such a regime would not actually use nuclear weapons is in la-la land. If they didn’t care if they ripped up $5 billion of Lebanese infrastructure to ruin everything the country did for the past 20 years and caused 1,000 people to die for no real reason at all beyond lobbing a few thousand rockets into Israel which really didn’t do all that much damage in comparison, why would anyone think they would care about using a nuclear bomb? They say out loud and in their internal speeches for over a decade that they want global jihad, that Israel must be destroyed and that they want an all-Islamic world. 

If you are a Sunni Arab, you know that Shiites think you are a heretic worse than a Jew. Sunnis I know are really afraid of the Shiites because they know they are capable of brutality beyond imagination.  If the Iranians would use the bomb against the Jew because they want jihad, why wouldn’t they use it against a Sunni or, for kicks, a Christian? The fight against Zionism by Iran is an excuse for letting it get a power that it will ultimately use against the others. Whether or not the others realize it is really the $64 million question today. Can they see beyond the myth-cult of Nasrallah to realize they are ones who will become the ultimate victims? These guys don’t even care if Shiites are killed; they don’t care about anyone at all. In my opinion, as previously expressed in Global Thoughts, this regime is really bad news and must be stopped, no matter what the cost is in lives or money. We will have World War III before long and it will involve Iran – the only question is whether the war will be on our terms or theirs. The lesson of the last month in Lebanon is that the events of the last month happened on Hizbullah’s terms, not on Israel’s. You don’t want a similar situation to occur viz. Iran.

What have we learned from the last month in Lebanon? The Israelis might think that they did a good deal of damage to Hizbullah’s infrastructure and that they pounded Lebanon enough to rethink future actions, regardless of what the Lebanese say in public. But perception counts for a lot, and many Israelis feel down about this past war, that it was not only a humiliation but a destruction of whatever deterrence they hoped they had. Even Haaretz, a very liberal newspaper in Israel, said the Israelis had to win this one convincingly.  Perhaps it was right to stop the war at a point when it was realized that they couldn’t shut down Hizbullah or even interrupt its command and control, and that the human cost of sending in troops outweighed the cost of whatever damage or casualties Hizbullah’s rockets could cause. It took 2 weeks to get the ground troops ready because nobody expected this to happen and the troops had to be trained to go to the front and fight a war they hadn’t expected to fight against an enemy different than the type they had been trained to fight (this, by the way, in my opinion, disproves those who say this war was planned in advance – I think the army wanted this war but had been turned down several time over several years). Perhaps it is learned that the Israelis need to deal with Syria and Iran at a time of their choosing and that it was useless to campaign in Lebanon when the root threat was elsewhere. They have definitely learned that walls around the West Bank won’t keep katyusha rockets from getting into that territory if the army pulls out and that eventually those rockets will be fired into Israel. They have learned that unilateral withdrawals don’t work – the only quiet place for the past month was in the West Bank which is the only area they haven’t pulled out of. They are also very suspicious of Israeli Arabs who, even after being bombed themselves, still felt more warm feelings for Hizbullah than Israel, at least if you listened to their community leaders and members of parliament.

Assessing the military campaign, the truth is that it was not as bad as one might think, at least in historical perspective. The 1973 war did not go well and heads rolled. The Lebanon War in 1982 also didn't go well. No aerial bombardment campaign has ever won a war. Hizbullah did not fight that well and did not inflict many casualties either on Israeli ground troops or in Northern Israel, and the other Arab armies in the previous wars did not fight so poorly in comparison to Hizbullah, as everyone keeps saying. The truth lies in the middle. But like I said above, perception counts.

What have the Arabs learned? You can fight Israel to a draw; the citizens will not cut and run just because a bunch of rockets hit the country; you can’t count on Israel to automatically win and remove threats to the region.  This last point really counts, because all the moderate states stuck out their asses and criticized Hizbullah early on figuring the Israelis would win and then got caught with their populations in protest when the Israelis didn’t win. And then of course, filled with the courage that they could only get from fear of what might become the new regional power, they changed their tune. Another reason why Iran has to be dealt with. 

What’s going to happen next looking long range beyond the next few months if the immediate threat is not dealt with? I personally feel really depressed now about this region. If I were an Arab, I wouldn’t invest one penny into Lebanon because there will be no stability in that country until that country is at peace with Israel, as long as that country has no government that stands for anything. In the Palestinian territories, Hamas gains inspiration from Hizbullah and Iran and will in no way be interested in dealing with Israel as long as it thinks momentum is going its way. Even Fatah wanted Israel to win this campaign. If you live in Jordan, you are in big trouble now because if what comes out of this war is that Iran becomes the big mother-fu**er in the region and goes nuclear and decides to use it against Israel, Jordan is going to get toasted in the middle. By the way, so will all the Palestinians, but we all know that Iran doesn’t care about them either. So, in this very uncertain situation, I wouldn’t invest in Jordan either. Jordanians remember how scared they were to talk in restaurants when they feared the Iraqi security services; how long will it be before the Iranian secret service or the Hizbullah people start knocking in Jordan? Israel is also going to have a problem. If you were a tourist in Haifa, Safed or Tiberias and all of a sudden you’re in the middle of a war zone, will you go back for a weekend or would you buy an apartment there? For all these reasons stemming from the fact that the Israelis didn’t win this last round and the whole system of deterrence that kept things in check is now in doubt, the entire region is about to be held back economically as a high risk area until the system of deterrence is restored.

Even if you hate Israel, Jews or Zionists and you live in the Middle East, the fact is that the only entity in the Middle East that is truly prepared to go after Iran and its proxies is the Israelis. You need them because if they weren’t there would be nobody else except America to keep the Iranians and their imperialist intentions in check. The Americans might fight but the Israelis have something to lose and cannot afford NOT to fight. That’s the kind of ally you want to have around because you can’t afford to lose what you have either. The Americans have a bad history of running wars. The idea of getting rid of Saddam Hussein was a good one, in my opinion, but the Americans had no idea of what to do afterward and they created a situation that was worse than it was before they started. Now, the Americans might as well just leave the Iraqis to partition themselves. 

What would I advise the Israelis? I think the Israelis should have either stayed out of Lebanon and dealt with Syria. If they realized that the Lebanon war was no-win, they were right to stop but they are going to have to do something to stop the Arab world from going ga-ga over Nasrallah and thinking the only way forward is to go try and wipe Israel off the map with Iran leading the charge. As I said on Day 1, the Israelis needed to extinguish this hope or find itself in a war. Since this war wasn’t won, the next war will be ten times worse and may involve nuclear weapons unless the momentum toward it is stopped dead-on right now. I'm afraid that the only thing that will extinguish this hope is for Nasrallah's Shiite followers and wannabee copycats to suffer an extremelyl calamitous event at the hands of the Israelis that proves beyond any propaganda machine that following him led them to utter destruction. You can use your imagination here. Considering that these civilians fell in love with Hizbullah, kept rockets like one keeps pets under the bed and allowed their homes and gardens to be used to fire rockets against Israel that have 40,000 pellets in them designed only to kill as many people as possible, at a certain point I don't feel sorry for them and, with a global view of this, whatever happens here will be one-tenth of what happens to everyone else in the region if this isn't nipped in the bud. Just because more Lebanese died than Israelis doesn't make the argument that the Israelis were evil in this conflict; it's a miracle that more Israelis didn't die and then I don't imagine there'd be a chorus of Arabs saying the Hizbullah were evil. It's not equal -- Israeli civilians don't dream of firing a shot against Lebanon. Syria’s Assad killed between 10,000 and 20,000 people in Hama to put to rest the Islamic fundamentalists in his country for a generation. The brutality was so complete that nobody would rise up against him. In this case, because the Israelis really didn’t bomb the infrastructure of Lebanon in a meaningful way (they bombed around the edges so that it could be disrupted but quickly repaired), the Iranians will just pay everyone off so that in a year or two everyone will forget about what happened. And they will eventually get hit all over again. Wars cost money and drive down economies besides killing people. The Israelis don’t want or need these wars and the best way to win a war is to truly avoid it. In the meanwhile, the whole Middle East now has to be nervous about the newly confident Syria and Iran axis of nuclear power and threat. If this problem isn’t dealt with now, I predict that hundreds of thousands if not several million people – almost all of them Sunni Arab – will get killed in the next decade by Iran. Better to extinguish this hope by completely demoralizing a sample Shiite population and making the price of the adventure too high as opposed to what did happen which was that the cost of the adventure is nearly nothing at all and most of these Shiites now think they are going to be better off a few years from now than they were before July 12th. Nasrallah has become the new Nasser for the Arabs, at least until the Israelis get to him. Before you criticize me for what I’ve implied, think about whether you agree that what I’ve said will happen will indeed happen and if you think the Iranians who already had a million people die against Iraq without batting an eyelid will be deterred by anything less. I don't think they understand anything else.

It would be interesting if I could believe with an eye toward the long run that it is great that the Israelis got their butts kicked as some are saying. Now that they have been shown the error of their arrogant ways, the Arabs can go into peace talks with a higher degree of honor, the Israelis can realize that military means don’t secure peace, and everyone can go into a more realistic assessment of the advantages of peace-making. I would be the first to agree if I thought it was true, but the past experience is that Arabs who think they won and are on a roll don’t want to talk to the Israelis (except for Sadat who is not in the same league as Assad and remember that the 1973 war ended with Egypt's army surrounded, depite the public face of victory), and Israelis who feel vulnerable don’t want to talk either. It was only because the majority of Israel finally after 58 years felt not so vulnerable that the country voted in a non-military peace-making government and now all that has been turned on its face.

This is the mess the Israelis, Americans, moderate Arabs and – I know the Europeans think they are above this all – the Europeans too are in. The Europeans have once again proved that their word is meaningless and that they are on another planet with the Swedish foreign minister saying the EEC doesn’t believe Hizbullah is a terrorist organization and the French foreign minister saying Iran is a constructive force in the Middle East – the ceasefire promises are not being met at all by the Europeans and of course the Lebanese can’t be more catholic than the pope and so therefore Siniora can’t live up to his obligations to restrain Hizbullah if the Europeans won’t either. They all think this is a big joke and that the Israelis will put up with this farce. Meanwhile, the Israelis now realize that they can’t afford to leave Olmert, Livni and Peretz in power; you can’t have a government of peacemakers when you have a region that is primed for war and what Israel needs now if it can’t figure out how to get to the table with Assad is an asshole who is not afraid to go for the kill because the country simply can’t afford to feel weak and vulnerable, and neither can those around it. You can be sure that in the next round the Israelis aren’t going to interested in anything coming out of the UN and Kofi Annan might as well forget about ever being taken seriously by Israel again. I can’t believe that I am saying this but I expect someone like Bibi Netanyahu to be back in the prime minister’s office within a year (and I still don’t like him). No less a figure than Walid Jumblatt in Lebanon said so in a piece I just read after posting this article and he certainly knows the territory. Dan Meridor might be a better choice but he may not have the will to wage the political fight. Nevertheless, I expect he will be a major part of the next cabinet.

If I were Israel and/or America, I’d do the following: 1. Hang low for a while and let Iran give out tons of cash to the Lebanese. Let them throw away their money. 2. Change the Israeli government to something that engenders more domestic confidence but meanwhile see if Assad is someone you can do business with. 3. Try to negotiate a deal with Assad to give back the Golan Heights, shut down Hizbullah, end the alliance with Iran and create the conditions for a free and independent Lebanon. 4. Isolate Iran and make it clear that they must give up their nuclear program and, if this doesn’t work:. 5. Bomb their oil facilities and destroy any possibility of producing income so that the government cannot survive by using oil to prop up their foreign adventures and to subsidize the basic necessities that allow Iranians to live. I don’t care if the price of oil goes up; this is a necessary thing to happen for now. 6. If Syria is impossible, then wipe out the Assad regime and bomb Damascus so that they feel the hurt that Lebanon did and occupy the country to the extent necessary to remove the Syrian threat to Lebanon via Hizbullah and the Syrian army/intelligence corps. 7. Use US forces in Iraq against Iran, but otherwise scale down the campaign in Iraq. Remember that much of the unrest in Iraq is coming from Syria and Iran anyway, so that dealing with these two players will add to security in Iraq.

Another route is for Israel to declare a national unity government or bring people from both parties into the cabinet, then go to war against Syria and hope that by neutralizing Syria you solve the Lebanon problem and deny Iran a foothold in the region. Considering that Syria is boycotting the Arab League, I don't suppose too many in the region would cry for Assad.

There is a silver lining to the events of the last month in Israel: The divisions in the country that came about through the withdrawal from Gaza have been mostly healed – almost all of the country now agrees on what needs to be done and what won’t work. There is no constituency to withdraw from the West Bank, though there is no desire to retake Gaza either. Neither the Jordanians nor the Egyptians want to be custodians of the Palestinians so the PA is in the unenviable position of being wanted by nobody, unable to govern itself and in a state of anarchy and poverty. They’d be best off having the Israelis reoccupy it. If a deal for the Golan can work, people will go for it. If not, they will gladly fight in Lebanon or Syria if they feel they are there for good reason. Nobody wants to be in uncertain times; right now, it is felt that war would remove uncertainty because the conditions for peace are unfavorable and untrustworthy.

During the past month, I have talked with Israelis in Israel, Lebanese in Lebanon and Palestinians from the region. My Lebanese colleague feels that the Israelis and Americans wanted this war, that it is a loser because of the thousands of additional martyrs in waiting that have been created as a result of the hatred engendered toward Israel, and that if the Israelis would just make a few concessions to Lebanon the Hizbullah would have no excuse to be there in the first place, so obviously they want to have a problem with Lebanon that never goes away. One Palestinian feels that the Americans and Israelis planned this war in advance (something I totally disagree with, based on what I wrote earlier in this piece and despite what Seymour Hirsch writes if for no other reason than the heads that will roll in Israel attest otherwise). One Palestinian I met with this month feels the situation in the territories has become so hopeless that he wouldn’t care at this point if the Israelis re-occupied the territories because at least before 1987 people made a living and anyone with a brain has left by now. One Israeli in the foreign ministry feels that Israel broke legs in Lebanon like a big mafioso and made its point about what happens when you mess with it. I haven't spoken to as many people as I should and will do more this month.

A big part of Nasrallah's appeal is the idea that he restores Arab dignity, and I want to address this. Does dignity only come from resisting Israel? I went to a Jewish bookstore yesterday and I didn't see one book about Arabs. Just about learning Jewish laws, diets, keeping fit, calendars and household goods. I have competitors in my business but I don't spend an hour a year thinking about them; I get my dignity from building my family and my company. Thinking about how to destroy someone else is a drain of resources, time and happiness. If all these people want dignity, they would get more of it if they focused on building up their own mountains rather than trying to move someone else's. As a parent, I'm not going to get up and say that my kid should be a martyr; I hope she'll be secretary of state. All this talk about Islam being the solution and dignity being restored is a cop-out for failing to deal with reality and to try and create a better future in-house. As I said, making Israel disappear will improve nothing for 99% of the Arab population -- right now, Israel is part of the solution, not the problem because it is a model for how something right can be built in the Middle East. 

My brother was in Israel last month for his holiday during this campaign which didn’t affect him much in Jerusalem. He says that there are opportunities in Israel for immigrants who put money into political parties while living in Israel and who themselves are willing to run for office. Till now, the money going into politics from outside the country is of little effect because the donors don’t actually live there. The current government has no immigrants on the Kadima party list and right now immigrants have no say on anything. Outsiders willing to live there and get involved with money at their side can make a difference in the country’s politics.

A few other Notes this month: About the Airline scare with Al Qaida – Until security starts looking at People instead of Things, we will never be anywhere near safe. Right now, if they are suspicious of you, instead of asking you questions they just ask you to remove your shoes and start looking at more things. It is stupid and I don’t care what anyone says about racial profiling – when someone other than an Islamist wants to commit suicide and blow up planes, I’ll entertain the subject. 

Another point – the UK ought to think about how it should punish the people involved in the plot to blow up airplanes. Just putting them in prison or even killing them isn’t really interesting and will not deter them – after all, they want to die. A better idea in my opinion is to remind them that citizenship is not a right but a privilege, something I was taught in school. If someone is acting against the state, they and their families should be deported, their citizenship stripped and told that this punishment will be irrevocable, and that their family will never be readmitted to the country. I think that would better deter such acts because a terrorist would know that if he has been born and raised in the UK and will be so ungrateful to that country as to want to commit terrorism against it, he or she should think about the consequences of being cut off from it to the detriment of the future opportunities of his or her entire family. If these people want to fight for Islamists in Pakistan, let them go there. Europe has a fine history of throwing out Jews throughout the centuries for no other reason than they were Jews; they can very well throw other people out who want to make life unbearable for their fellow citizens.

Summing up, when you have an enemy who wants to destroy you and doesn’t play by the rules but is gaining access to the toys that can destroy you, it is verging on suicidal to talk about platitudes such as the UN, the cycle of violence, proportionality and international law. That enemy doesn’t recognize any of the above. At a certain point, you have to do whatever you can to eliminate the threat so that all these items of ordinary discourse can be maintained. Otherwise, you may not be around to talk about them. Nobody will, when their back is against the wall, stand on ceremony so why pretend otherwise? You think the British didn't do it against the Germans in WWII or the French didn’t do what it wanted to do when it wanted to? The Russians killed 250,000 people in Chechnya during the past decade which was by no means an existential threat to it. They were also caught giving via Syria anti-tank weapons that they promised not to sell to them which caused great damage to the Israeli effort. So the Israelis and anyone else with a sense of proportion don’t need to hear morality as preached by the so-called civilized countries. We have a real problem here – in World War II, it took 37 million people and 2 atomic bombs to set things straight. The Russians played by the rules during the Cold War and the world was generally safe; the Iranians are led by a character who much like Hitler looks like a character in a Warner Brothers cartoon but who is deadly brilliant and means the fanaticism that he preaches. The Iranians don’t play by the rules and are joined by North Korea and Pakistan which are also unstable and unpredictable states with all the toys that the big boys have who don't care where this technology goes. They want to shut down the world and are preparing their people for the Armageddon. We aren’t there yet but now you can’t even take your toothpaste or a bottle of water on the airplane because it might be part of a bomb meant to blow you to smithereens and there's only one class of people today known as Islamic fundamentalists that scare everyone else. What will happen in the next decade? It may be divinely inspired and perhaps it is God’s plan, but the Israelis are now united in being the world’s litmus test for determining if they are prepared to deal with the reality that faces them today. The stakes are higher than in WWII because the tools of destruction are that much more available.

When I hear Kofi Annan blame Israel for breaking a ceasefire when they send commandos on an interdiction raid because Syria after one week is rearming Hizbullah in violation of the ceasefire and the French have sent 200 troops for a force of 15,000 that they were responsible for creating after a war that Hizbullah started in the first place, you have to get sick to your stomach. This is today’s version of international law and it is a joke. Israel is a target that can be sanctioned because it exists and plays by the rules. Hizbullah can’t be sanctioned by the UN and doesn’t care. It’s easy to place outrage against the easiest target you can find – but is it helpful? Remember the priest who after World War II said that he didn’t object when the Nazis went after all the other groups but by the time they got to him there was nobody left to object. We are in such times now because everyone is objecting without understanding that the real object of outrage is the one that wants to eliminate everyone else. The Israelis would be thrilled if its enemies would just worry about themselves, build universities, cities and societies and simply get a life instead of living every waking moment only for the purpose of destroying it. Blaming Israel for existing and resisting this threat when no one else is prepared to do so and thinking that its disappearance would get conflict off the TV screen and make everything better is a form of appeasement that blinds people to the greatest threat of all. The Iranians will not be deterred by the UN, economic sanctions, the diplomats of Europe and the Arab League or the warnings of the Americans. If the Lebanon border is truly Iran, the fight there must end with Israel backed by the world laying down the law to those who utterly disregard such law and making it clear that the price of such actions are not worth taking.

Next week (while I still can...), I’m heading out for several weeks of vacation, to Halifax, Nova Scotia Canada, the Greenbrier in West Virginia and finally a week in Portugal. Was going to the UK but decided to pass on Osama’s 5th Anniversary Bash.