War Continues in Israel and Lebanon; Iran's Fingerprints are Everywhere

Over the weekend, Hezbollah-fired rockets continued to fall on on northern Israel's major towns and cities, including Israel's third largest city, Haifa.  Eight civilians were killed when Hezbollah rockets slammed into a railway workshop in Haifa.  According to the Israeli army, Hezbollah used an Iranian-built radar-guided anti-ship missile in an attack on Friday on an Israeli warship off Lebanon's coast.

Hezbollah terrorist leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah said that the battle has just begun.  Nasrallah said on Hezbollah's Al-Manar TV that his "missile stockpiles are still full. . . our capacity to launch is still much, much, much more."

Israel bombed Hezbollah's headquarters in Beirut and again hit the fuel tanks at Beirut airport.  The British sent an aircraft carrier to anchor outside Beirut.

The G-8 summit at St. Petersburg, Russia has issued a call for the terrorist group Hezbollah to be disarmed.  The statement stopped short of naming Iran and Syria, who have had a major hand in bringing about this crisis.  The G-8 statement also urged Israel to show the restraint in its campaign and to strive to avoid civilian casualties.

Obviously, avoiding civilian casualties is something Israel always strives to do anyway, as Cox and Forkum (via Michelle Malkin) has again pointed out.  The party that really needs to be warned to avoid inflicting civilian casualties is Hezbollah, but everyone knows that such a plea would fall on deaf ears.

Iran has threatened Israel with "unimaginable losses" if it attacks Syria.  "We hope the Zionist regime does not make the mistake of attacking Syria, because extending the front would definitely make the Zionist regime face unimaginable losses," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters.  Strange talk indeed from a country that is feverishly working to develop nuclear energy for what it claims are solely "peaceful" purposes.

Jeff Jacoby argues persuasively in the Boston Globe that this war all boils down to Iran.  "Terrorist organizations cannot function without state sponsorship, and no state anywhere sponsors more Islamist terrorism than Iran."  It is Iran that supplied Hezbollah with its arsenal of artillery rockets.  "When Hezbollah launches them at Israel, it is doing the bidding of its patron."  Hamas is also financed by Iran, as is that other major state sponsor of terrorism, Syria.  Jacoby continues:

Gaza, Hezbollah, Iraq, Al Qaeda: It is all the same fight. ``No one should have any lingering doubts about what's going on in the Middle East," writes Michael Ledeen, an expert on terrorism and Iran. ``It's war, and it now runs from Gaza into Israel, through Lebanon and thence to Iraq via Syria. There are different instruments, ranging from Hamas in Gaza to Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon and on to the multifaceted `insurgency' in Iraq. But there is a common prime mover, and that is the Iranian mullahcracy, the revolutionary Islamic fascist state that declared war on us 27 years ago and has yet to be held accountable."

Twenty-seven years ago was 1979, the year that Islamist radicals loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini invaded the US embassy in Tehran and held dozens of American diplomats hostage for the next 444 days. Washington's response was weak and feckless, as it would be time and again in the years that followed. Only after 9/11 did the United States finally acknowledge that it was in a war with militant Islam and began fighting back in earnest. But not against Iran, which continues, unscathed and unrepentant, to stoke the terrorist fires. Its goals, unchanged since Khomeini's day, are to become the dominant power in the Middle East, to create Islamist regimes worldwide, to annihilate Israel, and to kill Americans.

We will never win this war, Ledeen and others argue, until the Iranian theocracy is brought down. That does not have to mean military action. Our aim instead should be to empower Iran's restive population, which is largely pro-Western and moderate. Give them as much support as possible, much as the Reagan administration did for Lech Walesa and Solidarity in Poland -- and let them find the means to reclaim their government for themselves.

And Larry Kudlow writes in National Review Online that the free world owes Israel a big "thank you" for standing up to Iran and its terrorist subsidiaries, including Hezbollah:

All of us in the free world owe Israel an enormous thank-you for defending freedom, democracy, and security against the Iranian cat’s-paw wholly-owned terrorist subsidiaries Hezbollah and Hamas. Israel is doing the Lord’s work. They are defending their own homeland and very existence, but they are also defending America’s homeland as our frontline democratic ally in the Middle East. Commentary’s Norman Podhoretz was exactly right when he coined the term World War IV to describe the global terror conflict. Repeatedly hostile actions by the totalitarians in Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and North Korea are all connected. So are the recently foiled terrorist-cell-block plans in Canada, the U.S., London, and elsewhere around the globe. We are fortunate to have a staunch ally like Israel to assist us in this fight.

Tanks and armor were reported to be massing on the border with Lebanon and a reserve infantry division mobilized, as the Israeli air force dropped leaflets warning residents to leave.  Tens of thousands of civilians reportedly are fleeing southern Lebanon as Israeli forces appeared ready to launch a ground assault.

The Daily Telegraph quoted Israel's defense minister, Amir Peretz, as saying, "We do not plan to end this war before reality is transformed. The terrorists will no longer be sitting on Israel's northern border."

Peretz said that Israel intends to create a buffer zone in southern Lebanon to stop the rocket attacks from Hezbollah.  "We intend to complete this operation. We have no intention of allowing anyone to stop us before we complete the creation of a buffer zone," Peretz said.

That seems reasonable to me.

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Update 7/17/06 a.m.:  The U.N.'s Kofi Anan and U.K. prime minister Tony Blair have called for an international peacekeeping force at the Lebanese-Israeli border.  Given the U.N.'s lack of military or moral courage in recent years, I doubt the idea will go anywhere.  And if U.N. troops were actually deployed, they wouldn't necessarily mean a whole lot on the ground, other than additional troops to be shelled, bombed and taken hostage by terrorists.  Captain's Quarters also points out that the U.N. has a very poor track record of success anywhere it has deployed troops in recent years.

And do I care that George Bush was overheard using a mild profanity in reference to what Hezbollah is doing?  No.  The media have eagerly rushed us the news that George Bush remarked to Tony Blair during a private lunch conversation, "See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this s--- and it's over."  Reporting such an off-hand remark is an effort to put a critical focus back to the left's favorite target, President Bush.  Of course, those who try to make something sinister out of this remark will be primarily those who routinely use far worse profanity in their own private and public remarks, or who frequent websites that routinely do.