Posted by
jwookie on Tuesday, August 15, 2006 7:36:36 PM
[cross posted at my other
Cake or Death]
AllahPundit over at Hot Air has a great piece about how he feels the ceasefire is a win for Hezbollah simply because they survived and a loss for Israel because they couldn't kill every last man in Hezbollah. He goes on to speculate that Lebanon being the timid democracy that it is, could follow in the footsteps of Palestine and elect Hezbollah as Palestine elected Hamas. Lebanon could therefore stop being controlled by terrorist state Syria and just fully controlled by Hezbollah.
I bring in order to frame
this story...
|
In a defiant address on Tuesday, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad praised Hizbollah for "the glorious battle" that it had waged, which had shifted the security balance in the region.
"From a military perspective, it [the battle] was decided in favour of the resistance. Israel has been defeated from the beginning," Mr. Assad said. He added that Israel had surrounded Beirut within seven days of its invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In comparison, "After five weeks it [Israel] was still struggling to occupy a few hundred metres."
Mr. Assad said the U.S. had failed to impose its will on West Asia. "The Middle East [West Asia] they [the Americans] aspire to .... has become an illusion." He wrote off the Bush administration as incapable of promoting peace in the region. "This is an administration that adopts the principle of pre-emptive war that is absolutely contradictory to the principle of peace," he said. "Consequently, we don't expect peace soon or in the foreseeable future." |
This is just a reminder that though we've made significant inroads in the Middle East through Iraq and Afghanistan, we've still got work to do, and it's not just because of
wackypants Ahmadinejad. And it makes Iraq all that more important. If we want to continue to use democracy as the carrot we dangle in front of oppressed muslim peoples, we need a solid, successful democracy to use as a base. Iraq can be that, and every insurgent that dies and every election they hold is a step in the right direction. That of course means "staying the course" as the president likes to put it. It means no time table for withdrawal (like you can really wage a war, especially one like this on a strict schedule... Tuesday: kill all insurgents. Wednesday: draft framework of new representative government. Thurday: elect new government officials. Friday: election results. Saturday: everything is hunky-dorey. That's John Kerry's wet dream), so it's quite possible we'll have some number of troops there for years to come. Will it always be 130,000 or whatever we have there now? Of course not. You'll notice we have troops stationed over in South Korea, have since the Korean War. Iraq may turn out to require years of presence like that.
So buck up. The world's not as dismal as it may seem and use
Michelle's latest Vent as an inspiration. With people like that around, we've got a damn good chance at changing the course of history in the world.