sisu

"Life has a way of reminding you of big things through small incidents"

Like Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Tiny and Baby have never believed you base foreign policy on trust. This morning Tiny's frequent gentleman caller (Chelsea-Grayish hottie below), a regular patron of the Gardener's Catnip Pub out on the terrace, put the Chelsea Grays on red alert (above). Our camera's shutter was too slow to catch Cartier-Bresson's "Decisive Moment" when, all fur and fury, our feline border guards rushed the intruder and ran him off the property.

"I have never believed you base foreign policy on trust," Defense Secretary Robert Gates is telling inquiring reporters at a live Pentagon press conference this morning. Fox News dipped into it briefly but then left the press room to bring us the latest on the burning question of "Where is Caylee?" Fortunately, C-Span's priorities more closely matched our own, so we were able to catch the Secretary's punchline:

I believe you base foreign policy on interests and on realities.

Like President Reagan, Tiny's suitor would never trust before verifying. Here he freezes in fight-or-flight mode, calculating how much of a threat we pose focussing our camera from the back door nearby. Just after this shot, he continued down the path past the Gardener's Catnip Bar toward the spot just beyond the gate where Tiny and Baby lay in wait (above).

"We must keep up our guard, but we must also continue to work together to lessen and eliminate tension and mistrust," said President Reagan in his farewell address to the nation from the Oval Office January 11, 1989, as relevant as ever in the context of recent developments in the Russia-Georgia conflict:

But life has a way of reminding you of big things through small incidents. Once, during the heady days of the Moscow summit, Nancy and I decided to break off from the entourage one afternoon to visit the shops on Arbat Street--that's a little street just off Moscow's main shopping area. Even though our visit was a surprise, every Russian there immediately recognized us and called out our names and reached for our hands. We were just about swept away by the warmth. You could almost feel the possibilities in all that joy. But within seconds, a KGB detail pushed their way toward us and began pushing and shoving the people in the crowd. It was an interesting moment. It reminded me that while the man on the street in the Soviet Union yearns for peace, the government is Communist. And those who run it are Communists, and that means we and they view such issues as freedom and human rights very differently …

I want the new closeness to continue. And it will, as long as we make it clear that we will continue to act in a certain way as long as they continue to act in a helpful manner. If and when they don't, at first pull your punches. If they persist, pull the plug. It's still trust but verify. It's still play, but cut the cards. It's still watch closely. And don't be afraid to see what you see.

Those who do not study Reagan's words are doomed to repeat the mistakes of history?

Update: Those who do not study the animals are doomed to miss out on all things bright and beautiful. Solution: Modulator's Friday Ark #204.

"Seeking shelter beside a sleeping monster"

"Political interests can bring together people who otherwise have little in common," goes the Bartleby.com blurb. "This saying is adapted from a line in the play The Tempest, by William Shakespeare: Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. It is spoken by a man who has been shipwrecked and finds himself seeking shelter beside a sleeping monster." (Willie Anderson as Caliban in Michael Smuin's The Tempest by Ballet San Jose Silicon Valley. Photo by Robert Shomler)

"Those two countries [Iran and Syria] have focused their efforts on one mutual goal for now which is again defeating America in Iraq in order to go ahead with more future steps to dominate the region, and they will support anyone and receive support from anyone in this quest, even some former or potential enemies," writes Omar of Iraq the Model, shaking his head at the West's apparent failure to have long since grasped what the New York Sun headlined yesterday as "Iran's Secret Plan For Mayhem," which reported:

Iran is supporting both Sunni and Shiite terrorists in the Iraqi civil war, according to secret Iranian documents captured by Americans in Iraq . . .

The source was careful to stress that the Iranian plans do not extend to cooperation with Baathist groups fighting the government in Baghdad, and said the documents rather show how the Quds Force -- the arm of Iran's revolutionary guard [whose top commander was captured in the raids] that supports Shiite Hezbollah, Sunni Hamas, and Shiite death squads -- is working with individuals affiliated with Al Qaeda in Iraq and Ansar al-Sunna.

. . . The document concludes, according to these sources, that Iraq's Sunni neighbors will step up their efforts to aid insurgent groups and that it is imperative for Iran to redouble efforts to retain influence with them, as well as with Shiite militias.

"Where's the secret in this!?" asks an exasperated Omar:

I mean really, with some good common sense and some humble analysis this would have never been a secret nor would it have taken years to figure out.

I think this stands as one example of the state of information people in the west have about the geopolitics of the middle east. I can feel that ethnic and sectarian lines are perceived to be concrete lines that no one in the middle east would think of crossing to achieve goals.

As we noted in the comments at Iraq the Model, we are encouraged by the Sun's report that

Rough translations of the Iranian assessment and strategy, as well as a summary of the intelligence haul, have been widely distributed throughout the policy community and are likely to influence the Iraq speech President Bush is expected to deliver in the coming days regarding the way forward for the war, according to two Bush administration officials.

"One of the documents captured in the raids . . . is an assessment of the Iraq civil war and new strategy from the Quds Force . . . the equivalent of "Iran's Iraq Study Group," notes the Sun. The media frenzy at the time notwithstanding, our own "Iraq Study Group" report, with its clueless suggestion that we try to find common ground with our mortal enemies, Iran and Syria, was dead on arrival. We're glad to see Iran's common-sense if sobering equivalent of that report is receiving -- in Omar's words -- some "humble analysis" in the Oval Office. We're wondering whether a close reading of the Iranian document is responsible for what Confederate Yankee is calling "The Negroponte Shuffle."

"Worse than evil is invisibility"

"Worse than evil is invisibility," writes Shelby Steele, putting his finger on what makes Islamofascist leaders like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tick. Above at a press conference in Tehran last spring with a mural of his totemic animals --  "peace doves" -- projecting that "aura" he would later experience at the UN, the Iraqi President calls for the destruction of Israel as a "fake regime." (Kheirkhah photo)

"The dark achievement of bin Laden, Nasrallah and Ahmadinejad, names we know only because of their association to menace, is that they have used menace to make their people visible in the world, to bring them back into the scheme of history," writes Shelby Steele in an Opinion Journal essay, arguing that "America has gone to war not against Islam but against menace as a formula for power":

And yet the end of the Cold War has made these wars between the West and the Third World inevitable. When the world was clearly divided between the free West and the communist East, Third World countries could play the ingénue by offering their alignment to the most generous suitor. At the center of a market in alignment, they could extract financial support and enjoy a sense of importance.

But after the Cold War, these countries suddenly became crones without appeal or leverage in the West. And it was out of this sense of invisibility, this feeling of having fallen out of history, that certain Middle Eastern countries found a way to play the ingénue once again. They would not compete with or seduce the West; they would menace it.

Exactly the point we've been making here for years, with reference to Dr. Peter F. Rowbotham's 1992 essay "The importance of being noticed" [Full article available here -- scroll down]. As Rowbotham wrote:

We search for honor in favored venues and in chosen social institutions. We avoid those places and those social groupings which inhibit our search, which do not advance, and may even set back, our moral careers. As Harre (1980) has pointed out:

"Recent studies of adolescence have shown many young people to have an almost obsessive interest and preoccupation with the maintenance of dignity and the careful scanning of the social environment for occasions and acts of possible humiliation."

And as we commented in one of many posts on the subject:

In this context, the unorthodox bonding rituals of, for example, Hell's Angels and British soccer fans -- and now the deadly rituals of adolescent jihadi recruits -- may be seen as examples of a "system of honor that is an alternative to mainstream moral orders."

"And they are greatly loved for this," writes Steele of the princes of darkness who call us the Great Satan. "If their achievements follow from evil rather than from good, this is a small thing. Worse than evil is invisibility." As for the Great Satan himself, he asks rhetorically:

Could it be that our enemies are really paper tigers made formidable by our unceasing ambivalence? And could it be that the greater good is in both the idea and the reality of American victory?

Yes. And that is why, as Jedd Babbin wrote at Real Clear Politics yesterday, "Rumsfeld will be smiling when he takes his leave."

Vote daily now through December 15 for sisu in the 2006 Weblog Awards HERE!

Update: At the invitation of Jay of Stop the ACLU, we're linking and trackbacking to his Weekend Free For All. Jay's a top competitor for the same award we're campaigning for, "Best of the Top 250 Blogs" in the TTLB Blogosphere Ecosystem. Jay is a "Higher Being" at #7, while we are a "Large Mammal," #232 at the moment. But what the hey? We shamelessly headlined one of our recent posts "What Britney's Crotch Did To My Stats," after all, and the site meter is still soaring.  Ann Althouse linked to said post this morning, and now we're enjoying a pleasant Annalanche on top of the Crotchalanche. Be sure to check out Ann's fascinating discussion -- with graphic links -- of the vagina dentata.

Update II: The estimable Professor Bainbridge puts in a good word:

Sissy Willis' post of that title manages to be both thoughtful and funny, as well as offering links to some must read news and blog items.

Technorati tags: weblog awards, althouse, britney, spears, crotch

Why were there no men of fighting age in the rubble?

"The massacre of Qana, on this first anniversary, seems already to have become the single event which most profoundly represents the grief for the past and fear for the future that continues to haunt Lebanon, and which should occupy, trouble and, indeed, haunt the conscience of the entire world," commented the anti-Israel Al Jadid Magazine re the1996 shelling of Qana, the same Southern Lebanese village that dominates the news this morning. Then, as now, Hezbollah seemed to be winning the propaganda wars on the Arab "street" and in the salons of elite opinion in the West by using civilians and the UN as human shields. It is an ancient wound. Above, memorial of "the infamous Israeli 'Grapes of Wrath' offensive against South Lebanon" (© Børre Ludvigsen photo 1997-1998)

Waking up early morning to CNN International live coverage of breaking events in Lebanon, we were dismayed to find ourselves witness to the spinning -- LIVE -- of  anti-Israeli/anti-American propaganda out of whole cloth:

Lebanese seething over civilians killed in airstrike.

That was the banner across the bottom of the screen. The facts: Israelis had targeted a four-story building in the southern Lebanese village of Qana because they had determined that rockets had been repeatedly launched from the area into Israel. The rocketeers having apparently fled, all of the estimated 50-plus casualties were said to be civilians, including 20 or more children. Where were the fighting-aged men, we wanted to know, but CNN wasn't interested. The spin, encapsulated in the words of CNN International's chipper and cheery anchor Richard Quest, referring to Condoleeza Rice's diplomatic mission in the area:

She may be talking logic and sense, but you wanted to shake her and say Mrs. Rice, while you're talking, people are dying.

"There is no room on this sad morning for any other movement than an immediate and unconditional ceasefire," offered Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora, announcing cancellation of a scheduled meeting with "Mrs." Rice, who told reporters it was in fact she who had initiated postponement of the meeting under the circumstances.

Meanwhile heartthrob CNN International anchor Shihab Rattansi was browbeating an Israeli military spokesman, seemingly bent on getting him to "admit" the Israelis, with their precision-guided weaponry, had in fact deliberately targeted civilians. Unlike the tendentious Rattansi, on-the-scene Fox News reporter Greg Palkot, calling it "a very complicated, ugly scene, the deadliest of the conflict so far," had more questions than answers: Why were the victims there? Had they not gotten the warning fliers dropped by Israeli planes prior to the bombing? Were they too destitute or otherwise too helpless to leave? Had they thought they would be safer staying inside the building rather than risking escape? Were they members of Hezbollah families being used as human shields, and where were the men of fighting age? At that point, no one knew, but the propaganda mill was in full cry:

Hezbollah's al-Manar TV was reportedly whipping up a frenzy with wall-to-wall airing of images of -- in the words of a CNN International man in the field -- the "horrendous casualties," and a hired "Arab Street" mob was storming the UN building in Beirut, apparently unaware of the irony as they chanted anti-American slogans. War is hell, but why is today's bombing being cast -- again in Richard Quest's words -- as a possible "turning point" of "world" opinion against Israel and the United States? Listen to the words of CNN White House Press Corpsman John King for a clue:

[Secretary Rice's] diplomatic efforts aren't likely to get much attention today because of the drama of this bombing.

Ah, yes, "the drama of this bombing." A propagandist's dream. The probable goal is to deflect attention from Secretary Rice's mission or even, as one of the CNN International anchors suggested, to show that

She just does not have the stature to broker a cease-fire . . .

Or "that she does not have the will," chimed in a hopeful John King. Our imail correspondent this morning catches the gist:

She: No person of sane mind can believe that Americans or Israelis deliberately target civilians. How did that twisted spin grow legs?

We: Repetition.

She: Yes . . . pants not yet on . . . THEY are the ones who want to "talk things out," and now they twist it and blame HER for "talking."

Heads I win, tails you lose. So tell us again -- since CNN isn't asking -- why were there no men of fighting age in the rubble?

"To stop apologizing for our positions"

Across the bay due north from Haifa in northern Israel, the ancient port city of Akka/Acre "changed hands many times between Christians and Muslims" during the Crusades. It "was ceded to the Arabs in the United Nations partition of Palestine in 1948 but was captured by Israel shortly thereafter." Above, eastern walls at dawn (left) and prison, part of Crusaders' underground city. Normally a tourist spot, the underground city is "now open 24 hours a day as a makeshift bomb shelter," reports the Boston Globe. (Antonio Vasquez photos)

"This song is relevant today, because Nasrallah is a naked king who is dragging an entire nation into war, and the ones who pay the price are innocent civilians," says a member of the Arab Israeli rock band "Khalas," quoted in a ynet news story linked by Israeli blogger Lisa Goldman of On the Face:

In contrast to what one may think, Khalas is not using their songs to criticize Israelis or Jews. Their criticism is directed toward Arab society.

“We think that we have to fix our own house and criticize the Arab sector before we complain about the state and the government”, said Beromi. “In the song ‘The King Is Naked’ we are protesting the behavior of Arab leaders who do not listen to their people." The band is based in Akka.

"Nasrallah's great achievement," headlines Israeli blogger Lisa Goldman of On the Face, providing an English translation of this Time Out Tel Aviv cartoon: "I just got into the Guinness Book of World Records for holding the biggest number of hostages ever: The entire nation of Lebanon!"

Blogger Goldman herself is featured in a Wall Street Journal story (subscription only) today on the strange blogfellows of the Israel-Hezbollah war, a group of mostly Western-educated Lebanese and Israeli bloggers who comment and imail across the frontline. A taste of the tangled threads of their correspondence:

The Internet has made it possible "to have a Beirut-Tel Aviv online IM chat in real time," Ms. Goldman wrote . . . "That's what happened to me and this blogger a few nights ago. We chatted while he was sitting on the roof of his apartment building in Beirut watching missiles from Israeli planes fall on his city and describing it to me. He was carrying on an online conversation with another Israeli at the same time."

The Lebanese blogger, who runs the Lebanese Political Journal blog, won't disclose his identity because he believes his online chats with Israelis could be considered an act of disloyalty. He says in an email: "Chatting with Israelis from Lebanon during war is very awkward." But, he says, "One remembers that we are still humans regardless of where the borders lie."

One of Goldman's dearest Lebanese blogfriends "made a 180-degree turn since the beginning of the war and has become an Israeli hater":

"It was really tragic for me," says Ms. Goldman. "That was one of the things that was the hardest thing about this fighting, because we had this really fragile new community, and we were slowly peeling back the layers of prejudice." 

"Arabs and Jews all live together in Acre [Akka]. We are like a model of co-existence for the rest of Israel," the mayor of the ancient Haifa Bay town told a Boston Globe reporter recently. "All the people here support the government campaign against Hezbollah. We hope they can solve the problem quickly because if there is peace there will be lots of tourists and lots of money to help all the people whose businesses have been closed for the past week."

to Nasrallah, one man's "naked king" is another man's holy warrior. One of the bloggers at Lebanese Political Journal thinks the man in the black turban and his sponsors in Iran and Syria are winning the propaganda war:

Nasrallah is becoming an absolute Shia idol. He is the hero of the Syrians and Iranians . . .  His charisma is still there and his followers are ready to do anything to please him.

More insight from a July 16 International Tribune analysis:

Sheik Nasrallah is shrewdly rallying the faithful by evoking his party's claim to a holy mandate. "You are fighting the sons of Muhammad and Ali and Hassan and Hussein and all the prophet's household," he told the Israelis in a recorded message broadcast on the group's satellite television station, Al Manar, and on several Arab satellite news stations. The sheik's black turban in his picture onscreen signaled his own descent from the Prophet Muhammad. "You are fighting people who have faith," he said.

"Nasrallah led Hezbollah into a disastrous contest with Israel, to establish himself as the champion of Lebanese Shias, as that constituency seeks a revision of the country's politics," Steven Schwartz adds in the latest TCS Daily:

Nobody can say whether his destructive adventure will reinforce or undermine the political power of Hezbollah. Worldwide Shia opinion, even in Iran, is divided. More Shia Muslims around the world may see Nasrallah as a terrorist than as a hero.

He does look rather dashing in his prophetic [PBUH] finery, but we prefer a man in a white hat. Ten gallon, preferably. Two were on display this afternoon in a joint press conference of Number One and Number Two of the Anglosphere at the White House. The ever eloquent Tony Blair's rhetoric invoking the good guys' faith in freedom was rousing. A couple of tidbits:

The bond between Britain and the US is stronger than ever. We share the same goals, and we share the same values, and we share the same determination to defeat the terrorists.

I think the American leadership is indispensable. We shall prevail.

One of the things we have to do is to stop apologizing for our positions.

That last bit is key to winning the propaganda war.

So's your old man

Like President Bush at his best, Tiny is not afraid to express her feelings. Above in a post-catnip stupor at the base of Goomp's scratching post over the weekend, she let it all hang out.

"What we ought to have learned from the terror attacks of September 11th and subsequent events is that multiculturalism has sapped our will to fight back and thus to survive," said James Bowman -- American editor of The Times Literary Supplement and author of Honor: A History -- in a recent NRO interview with Christina Hoff Sommers, putting his finger on exactly what's wrong with our "nuanced" fellow citizens of the left who've lost their nerve and dare not call a spade a spade:

If American patriotism has to be expressed at the expense of non-Americans, even non-Americans who want to kill us simply for being Americans, we are ashamed to express it.

Of course not ALL of us are ashamed to express it. "If you want to impress an honor culture, try a touch of Texas 'swagger,'" wrote Bowman -- who blogs here -- in the Washington Times the other day. Listen to a bit of what he has to say about the President's toe-curling p.c. "admission" last May that he had been wrong to use "cowboy" expressions like "bring it on" to taunt the enemy:

The offending remarks that the president now professes to regret were calculated for their effect on the enemy, but their collateral effect was deeply to offend the media.

Now he says that "I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted." What he doesn't say is that the main parts of the world where it was misinterpreted were New York and Washington and London [Don't you LOVE it?], where the educated elites think such remarks encouraged the insurgency in Iraq.

But in the Arab honor culture, they were much likelier to have been interpreted, correctly, as a warning and an assurance of U.S. resolve. Mr. Bush's kind of masculine vaunting behavior had to have been well understood as part of the age-old rituals of fighting. Like a boxer making the "come here" gesture in the ring, Mr. Bush was saying in effect: "I'm not afraid of you. Hit me with your best shot and I'll still defeat you."

Honor-code dynamics -- the Darwinially driven dynamics of bonding within groups through honor codes among one's chosen peers, as explicated in Peter Rowbotham's "The Importance of Being Noticed" -- are, of course, the great unifying theme of this blog. Educated elites' honor codes are "mostly useless in terms of their survival value," Bowman elucidates:

When an honor culture breaks down, honor itself doesn’t simply cease to exist. Rather it is transmuted into other forms, though forms which are mostly useless in terms of their survival value. One such alternative to traditional honor culture is to be found in the exaltation of victimhood . . . the decline of traditional honor proceeds pari passu with the loss of national identity and finally even the will to survive as an identifiable people distinct from those who would destroy that identity.

Eurabia's creeping dhimmitude -- itself on many levels an honor challenge to American hegemony -- comes to mind and reverberates as "world opinion" weeps and moans about Israel's "disproportionate" military response to existential threats from certified victim groups:

To deflate American power and assure themselves a steady supply of oil, European leaders accepted "the traditional cultural baggage of Arab societies, with its anti-Christian and anti-Jewish prejudices and its hostility against Israel and the West." In exchange for markets in the Islamic world, Europe turned its back on its Judeo-Christian heritage and set the stage for its own Islamization.

"The jihadists who fight us today belong to a primitive honor culture and hold us in contempt, partly because we have abandoned our own [honor culture]," summarizes the Bowman blurb at AEI, where you can listen online to that book forum. Adds Bowman himself in a recent FrontPage interview with Jamie Glazov:

The point remains, however, that Saddam was unquestionably weaker than U.S. and Western intelligence thought he was and, I believe, that the reason for this misapprehension [about the status of his WMDs] was our failure to understand the imperative of the Arab honor culture, like other honor cultures, to hide weaknesses and wear the mask both of fearlessness and of fearsomeness.

But not all Westerners are held in contempt by jihadists. Dr. Sanity explains:

Isn't it interesting that Hezbollah is suddenly willing to talk? After all their huffing and puffing of the last week? Isn't it interesting that Hamas is ready to talk, after all their posturing and certainty of victory? What's happening? I suspect that the leadership of both terrorist organizations are really confused right now.

Every time they behaved this way before, it led to simultaneously enhancing their eternal victimhood, and that, in turn inevitably led -- not to a victory; but it certainly never led to defeat, and it always improved both their status in the world as well as their fortunes.

Doesn't look like that's gonna happen this time. Enough momentum has been generated by the Bush policies in the Middle East to preclude yet another award for victimhood.

Bush's fault!

Update: A gorgeous head shot of the Babe is the show stopper over at the 122nd Carnival of the Cats at Creatures of the Earth.

The Mother of All Root Causes

This delicate volunteer blue-and-white perennial in our garden isn't a Wandering Jew (Tradescantia pallida -- a native of Mexico), after all. We had thought it was all these years and went out this morning to get an image (above x10) to serve as a metaphorical lead-in to our post. But a quick search in Newcomb's Wildflower Guide revealed it's Asiatic or Common Dayflower (Commelina communis), first cousin to the Wandering Jew (More about the Dayflower Family here). Which is just as well. We had been thinking vaguely of the Wandering Jew of Christian folklore as metaphorical personification of the Jewish diaspora, or more broadly of "the doomed sinner, forced to wander without the hope of rest in death till the millennium." But before anyone gets the wrong idea, some of our best friends are doomed sinners.

"The reason Israel must not agree to a cease-fire now, and why a UN force must be rejected is the fact that the Arab nations may be starting to open their eyes," writes Jed Babbin in a clear-eyed, must-read Opinion Journal essay this morning:

The Hezbollah attacks began about two weeks after Israel suffered the usual international condemnations for its response to the Gaza-based Hamas kidnapping of an Israeli soldier. Even after the Gaza incursion, Iran and Syria -- emboldened by international condemnation of Israel's "disproportionate" response -- were convinced that Israel would do no more than make token raids into Lebanon. For the first time, Israel has acted in accordance with what used to be President Bush's theory: that a government that contains, supports or harbors terrorists is responsible for their actions. Israel is now demonstrating that there is a price to be exacted from nations who collaborate with terrorists.

The partition plan for Palestine adopted by the UN in 1947 "took on a checkerboard appearance," writes Mitchell Bard in the Jewish Virtual Library. "These boundaries were based solely on demographics. The borders of the Jewish State were arranged with no consideration of security; hence, the new state's frontiers were virtually indefensible." Even then, the UN was worse than clueless.

Speaking of opening one's eyes, the UN itself can be seen as the Mother of All Root Causes, its eyes tightly shut from the get-go, as the excellent Jewish Virtual Library explains. Take a good look at the UN's 1947 partition plan for Palestine (above), and ask yourself, what were they thinking? Isolated patches of land loosely connected by the narrowest of corridors in a vast matrix of land occupied by the enemy. As JVL says, the UN plan for Israel was "virtually indefensible":

The British tried to work out an agreement acceptable to both Arabs and Jews, but their insistence on the former's approval guaranteed failure. They subsequently turned the issue over to the UN in February 1947.

The UN established a Special Commission on Palestine (UNSCOP) to devise a solution. Delegates from 11 nations went there and found what had long been apparent: The conflicting national aspirations of Jews and Arabs could not be reconciled.

"On May 14, 1948, the day Israel declared its independence, the armies of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq invaded the tiny new country with the declared intent of destroying it."  (Jewish Virtual Library map)

"As the partition vote approached, it became clear little hope existed for a political solution to a problem that transcended politics: The Arabs' unwillingness to accept a Jewish state in Palestine and the refusal of the Zionists to settle for anything less," JVL continues:

The implacability of the Arabs was evident when Jewish Agency representatives David Horowitz and Abba Eban made a last-ditch effort to reach a compromise in a meeting with Arab League Secretary Azzam Pasha on September 16, 1947. Pasha told them bluntly:

The Arab world is not in a compromising mood. It's likely, Mr. Horowitz, that your plan is rational and logical, but the fate of nations is not decided by rational logic. Nations never concede; they fight. You won't get anything by peaceful means or compromise. You can, perhaps, get something, but only by the force of your arms. We shall try to defeat you. I am not sure we'll succeed, but we'll try. We were able to drive out the Crusaders, but on the other hand we lost Spain and Persia. It may be that we shall lose Palestine. But it's too late to talk of peaceful solutions.

Who are you going to believe? The UN or your eyes -- and ears?

"It's a matter of results"

"Hezbollah is nothing but yet another Islamic death cult, dedicated to death and darkness for all of humanity," writes Dr. Sanity, quoting Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah's condemnation of the infidel's love of life, as contrasted with jihadis' "willingness to sacrifice their blood, souls, children, fathers, and families for the sake of the nation's honor, life, and happiness [which] has always been one of our nation's strengths." No wonder they never accomplish anything worthwhile. Above -- speakiing of worthwhile accomplishments -- Discovery shuttle returns safely to earth this morning.

"There's been a lot of discussion on the blogosphere about this war, of course. It's the most important thing going on in the world today, and I'm going to begin with the two principal arguments against Israel," says Pajamas Media CEO Roger L. Simon in the scoop of the 'sphere, an exclusive PoliticsCentral podcast interview with Ambassador of Israel to the US, Daniel Ayalon:

Roger Simon: One is that it is not acting proportionately, and the second -- which is probably partly the same question -- what about the argument that you are making enemies with the Lebanese people?

Daniel Ayalon: First of all, about the issue of proportionality, let me tell you that Israel is being very, very careful, and we are not targeting the buildings in the country. The problem is that there are no [indistinct] camps in Lebanon because precisely what they are doing is hiding all their equipment, their missiles, in residential areas. This is part of their strategy. And secondly, we have been quite restrained in the past six years. We are the ones who evacuated Lebanon altogether. We pulled out of Lebanon -- every inch of it -- in May of 2000. The other side of it was for the Lebanese to assume control all the way to their border and to disarm the terror organization of the Hezbollah, which didn't happen.

That's the dilemma of asymmetric warfare, where the enemy doesn't play by the rules of war but knows you will, while the world is watching your every move. Like many others on the right side of the blogosphere, we weren't buying the "disproportionate" argument, no way. Theorists and lawyers may debate the finer points of "Just War" theory," but as commenter george at Stuck in Beirut  -- blogged here -- said sensibly yesterday, "Disproportionate force is what enables a military force to win. It's necessary, and nothing to be ashamed of." Ambassador Ayalon told Roger very much the same thing:

This is an existential issue for all of us, and we have the right to defend ourselves.

An astronaut's-eye-view from the Discovery's cockpit on approach to the landing strip (top center) at the Kennedy Space Center this morning.

Likewise Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who declared today, "There are moments in the life of a nation, when it is compelled to look directly into the face of reality and say: no more!" A few more words of wisdom from Ambassador Ayalon before you go over and listen to the whole thing:

There is here a very dangerous strategic equation, whereby Iran and Syria are trying to promote their interests in the Middle East, which are very radical in nature. They want to turn the entire Middle East into a very extreme Islamist Republic, which will continue to promote terror, as they do, which will have weapons of mass destruction, you know -- nuclear weapons, that they are working on -- which is to destabilize the entire region and the country. And this is what's at stake, not just the abductions and soldiers. This is just the first manifestation, or one of the manifestations of their very dangerous policy. Now they are the ones that pushed us over the brink which we are all finding ourselves in. The only way to extricate ourselves and to get out of it is to make sure Hezbollah will not be able to do it anymore in the future and hold hostage the entire region. Certainly the poor Lebanese people, the government of Lebanon, we have nothing against them. So it's not a matter of tit for tat, its not a matter of proportionality. It's a matter of results. And the results can be done only with decisive action, and this is what we are doing, and we are targeting Hezbollah and their infrastructure and nothing else.

We especially liked Ayalon's reponse to the question "Do you follow the blogosphere?":

Well, absolutely . . . I believe more and more Americans and people around the world will get their information from blogs, and the of course great advantage of blogs is that they are interactive and they can also participate in making the news and also offering their opinion . . . and I see in the blogs and also when I hear Americans all across this great land of yours, they are very supportive of Israel . . . understanding that we are at the forefront of the war, the global war on terror.

We are all Israelis now.