The Way to Dusty Death

Michael
Totten examines the quagmire that never was. How did Israel achieve the
task, regarded as impossible by media analysts and many diplomats, of defeating
the Intifada? He quotes the "New Republic".

Israel's triumph over the Palestinian attempt to unravel its society is the
result of a systematic assault on terrorism that emerged only fitfully over
the past four years. The fence, initially opposed by the army and the
government, has thwarted terrorist infiltration in those areas where it has
been completed. Border towns like Hadera and Afula, which had experienced some
of the worst attacks, have been terror-free since the fence was completed in
their areas. Targeted assassinations and constant military forays into
Palestinian neighborhoods have decimated the terrorists' leadership, and
roadblocks have intercepted hundreds of bombs, some concealed in ambulances,
children's backpacks, and, most recently, a baby carriage. At every phase of
Israel's counteroffensive, skeptics have worried that attempts to suppress
terrorism would only encourage more of it.

The most remarkable thing about Israel's campaign against the Intifada was
not it's adoption of new warfighting concepts, like Europe's Human
Security Doctrine, but its reversion to the oldest method of all: winning by
fighting back. Social historians in the future, should we ever attain it, may
endlessly wonder how it was possible for Western European and liberal American
intellectuals to forget 5,000 years of military experience in favor of the
slogans, some composed facetiously, of the Peace Movement of the 1960s. However
that may be, Totten concludes that Israel is a test case, the pathfinder to
America's future in the war on terror. "Israel's present may be our future.
Best get used to it now."

The necessary corollary is if Israel's future is to America's then Palestine's is to the Islamic world's: a bleak landscape of impoverished, poorly educated people living
on a diet of fantasy: the least necessary tragedy in history. The Jihad
like the Intifada is the highroad to vacancy. But the Left encouraged Yasser
Arafat to hold out for more at every turn; solemnly assuring him by whatever
gods of historical determinism they worshipped that the Intifada was
unstoppable; the wave of the future. What they forgot to tell him was that it
was unstoppable only for so long as it wasn't stopped. To listen to the Left is
to share it's epitaph. Time to stop listening.

a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more: it is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.