“Indeed, history is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.”
— Voltaire
It cost the IDF almost 30 KIA and 40-50 wounded to take those two villages, and now they’ve given them back. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.
It was such a stupid war. It was thick-as-two-blocks-of-wood strategy on all sides. It was moronic for the Israelis to plan it out last year. It was idiotic for Hizbullah to cross over into Israel, kill soldiers, and take two captive. It was brain dead for the Israeli officer corps and politicians to think they could get anything positive out of bombing Lebanon back to the stone age and making a million people homeless. It was dim-witted for Hasan Nasrallah to threaten Israelis with releasing poison gases from Haifa chemical plants on them. It was obtuse for the Israelis to confront a dug-in guerrilla movement with green conventional troops marching in straight lines. It was dull of Hizbullah to fire thousands of katyushas into open fields where they mainly damaged wild grass. The few times when the rockets managed to kill someone, it was often an Arab Israeli civilian. Stupid.
Foreign policy “realists” considered Middle East stability the goal. The realists’ critics, who regard realism as reprehensibly unambitious, considered stability the problem. That problem has been solved.
How many souls over the decades have sallied forth into the desert, beaming with bright eyes and blueprints for a “new Middle East,” only to bog down in the dunes, blistered by sunstroke and bitten by scorpions?
Sidney Blumenthal: ‘Israel’s debacle, courtesy of Bush’.
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