All Quiet on the Middle-Eastern Front (so far)

Well, with the ceasefire uneasily taking hold in the Middle East, we in the Western world can sit back for a while and wonder what, exactly, just happened, if it all went wrong, and if it did, why it did. After all, it surely doesn’t seem that anything got accomplished by this last round of fighting.  Michael Ledeen at NRO does a good job of analyzing what is the problem with our current policy in the Middle East. A portion of his analysis below:

Both campaigns and both debates suffer from the same narrow focus, the same failure of strategic vision, the same obsession with a single campaign in a single place, when the war itself — the real war — is far wider. Our leaders and our pundits are fighting single battles, and, since their strategies are not designed to win the real war, they are doomed to fail. The failure of strategic vision is not unique to politicians, or pundits, or military strategists; it seems common to them all. It is extremely rare to hear an authoritative voice addressing the real war. [. . .]

The longer we wait, the larger the real war becomes. Iran has been at war with us for 27 years and we have yet to respond. As time passes, and our fecklessness is confirmed, the mullahs’ confidence grows. Surely they must believe that their moment has come, that we will never respond, that they can bloody us and force us to retreat. That is the clear lesson of Lebanon, and they are undoubtedly raising the stakes for the next round.

There seems to be a lot of discussion about why we in the Western world are proving so incapable of seeing this war for what it is: a regional war against “Islamic fascism” that is sending out tendrils into our homes because of terror cells and homegrown terrorism. Meanwhile, we are impotent to even name the people we’re fighting against, and pat down grannies, nuns, and 7-year-olds in airports because we’re pretending that there isn’t a common thread to every terror plot that we’ve been up against for the past three decades.

Normally voluntary ignorance just leaves me to shrug and roll my eyes, but in this case, blinding ourselves to the truth is the equivalent of committing national suicide. Well, at least of leaving ourselves right in the path of their “locked and loaded” weapons. I tend to think that, once faced with the obvious in a suitably painful way, we’ll eventually get our act together and fight that real war–even after the idiocy of appeasement in the 1930’s, the Europeans managed to fight the Nazi threat eventually. (Though they were very close to being wiped out in the process.)

An article at Haaretz talks about being “drugged by political correctness,” and I think that one could level that accusation at the bulk of Western intelligentsia–it may have even filtered down through the middle classes, as well, through the influence of the radical leftists of academia. (The article takes aim at the elite class of Israel.)

It’s frustrating, though, to have to sit here and watch it happen. I’m convinced that we’re headed directly down the path to another larger and more deadly terrorist attack that will kill thousands of Americans. After all, as you keep hearing, we have to be successful in deterring them every time, but they only have to get lucky once.

Speaking of which, I wonder if we’re ever going to get around to a proper focus on Iran now that their proxy has declared victory in the recent conflict?

From Armageddon Cocktail Hour (which has been posting regularly about the possible significance of August 22nd), this post:

Meanwhile, Mike Wallace’s interview with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, which aired on 60 Minutes last night, does prove one thing that many of us have been suspecting for some time: whatever happens on August 22 (27 Rajab or 31 Mordad, if you prefer), Ahmadinejad has essentially already given the West his answer — nothing will deter Iran from continuing its nuclear program. Through brilliant white teeth and with every nuance of his body language, Ahmadinejad may as well have told the West to go pound salt last night.

Interestingly, the unedited interview will be shown on C-SPAN tonight at 8 p.m. EDT (courtesy of little green footballs).

We live in momentous times, don’t we? I’m intrigued to watch what will happen in the next few months. Especially seeing that Baghdad, where I’ll be, is so very close to where everything is likely to happen . . .