In his words to the Lebanese Prime Minister about calling upon Israel to limit damage, one assumes Bush was just uttering platitudes. He’s good at that. And if he expressed a hope that civilian casualties would be kept to a minimum, he would only have been stating what is obvious: that is exactly what the Israelis have been doing. And the targets they have selected are either in Hezbollah-held territory, or meant to lessen Hezbollah’s ability to import and move weaponry around (those airports, those bridges) — and also to pressure Hezbollah, seen correctly by the Christians, the Druse, and the Sunni Muslims as the source of the problem, to finally deal with Hezbollah as they should, collectively, have done long ago.
Anyone who sees the entire picture, whether sitting it Val di Colle d’Elsa, or in Paris, or in the offices of MI5 in London, or in Mumbai, or in Bangkok, and recognizes what is going on around the world, realizes or should realize that the Israelis are not to be chastised but rooted for, urged to keep going and not to stop. For what they are doing now to two of the entirely fungible, interchangeable Muslim terrorist groups, Hamas and Hezbollah, is at least as important as what the Americans did to Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, or whatever tiny benefit has accrued to Infidels from the removal of Saddam Hussein. (No benefits have accrued to Infidels from that ongoing and expensive “Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations” business in Iraq).
This is a war. The war has gone on, with long intervals of non-war when the wherewithal was lacking, and the need unperceived, since the beginning of Islam. It is the war of Believers against Infidels. It can, but need not, proceed through qital, combat. Other weapons — the “money weapon” and “pen, speech” and now the demographic weapon, are all available.
The war continues within lands controlled by Muslims whenever and wherever possible. Muslims control Bangladesh, but they still persecute, still drive out, still murder Hindus. Muslims control Indonesia, but they make war on Christians in the Moluccas, in Sulawesi. They make war, when they can, on Hindus, having driven Hinduism back to its sole redoubt of Bali. They make war in Egypt on the sole remaining Egyptians who have remained true to their pre-Islamic heritage (how many of those “Muslim Arabs” in Egypt are really the descendants of Copts forcibly converted, say, in the 12th or 13th centuries?).
And the war now is being waged, in forms less obvious to those who think of “war” as boots and bombs alone, all over the countries of Western Europe. It may not be obvious, because a war conducted through the instruments of Da’wa and demographic conquest doesn’t look like “war,” even if the final goal is the same as that of the violent Jihad conducted, for long periods continuously, for long periods intermittently, over 1350 years. The highest point of Muslim expansion was marked in the West by the defeat near Poitiers. This was followed, as the tide of Islam receded, by the 700 years of the Reconquista in Spain. In the East, the high point was marked by the two attacks on Vienna, the last in 1683. But Muslims never ceased, when and where they could, to continue raiding parties up and down the coasts of Christian Europe, or on Christian shipping, until the military response of the Christian victims became too vigorous and effective — as happened in the early 1800s with the so-called Barbary Pirates.
Now the Israelis, who live in a state of maximum peril, and always will, have been forced, and are being required, to inflict such damage as they can to force the enemy to not be quite so wrongheaded in its interpretation of the withdrawal from north and from south. And a sound defeat is needed — one that Israel keeps being prevented from achieving. The last time it did so was in 1948, when it received no military aid from outside, and the only thing that prevented the Jews of Israel from taking, as they could and should have, all of Western Palestine, was Ben Gurion’s belief that, for practical nation-building reasons, it was best to stop where, and when, they did.
They should be encouraged and cheered.
And after that, every effort should be made to encourage them, as well, to come to their senses about the nature of the war against them, the need not merely to be more powerful than the enemy, but to be obviously so, in order that the Arab and Muslim leaders may invoke Darura — that doctrine of necessity. For that is the only way, in the end, to keep the peace, if that is the goal, in that part of the Middle East, between the Infidel state of Israel, and all those who are commanded to forever wage war on Infidels in order to spread Islam and to ensure that the conditions for the imposition of Sharia are attained, and Muslims rule everywhere.