Aug. 5, 2006
 
COMMENTARY: Israel Must Absolutely Not Lose This War
 
By Jay Ambrose
Scripps Howard News Service
 
When an Israeli air strike destroyed an apartment house in the Lebanese village of Qana, killing a disputed number of women and children and causing outrage throughout the world, I thought to myself that Israel has now lost this war.
 
Later, when I read how Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was calling for Israel's destruction -- the "elimination of the Zionist regime" -- I thought to myself that Israel must absolutely not lose this war, just as America had better not lose hers in Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
The deaths in Qana were a reminder of the horror, the tragedy, the ugliness of war, but they were a reminder, too, of how the terrorist organization Hezbollah was cynically sacrificing the lives of Lebanese civilians as a ploy to defeat Israeli forces.
 
Hezbollah lives off lies. It has violated U.N. resolutions by arming itself, and despite its complaints that Israel has acted "disproportionately" in defending itself, it started this war by killing and kidnapping Israeli soldiers. It is supposedly motivated by Israel's occupation, but that attack came long after Israeli forces had evacuated Lebanon. Then this group that lobs missiles intended to kill Israeli civilians -- including Muslims -- surrounds itself with human shields, turning to the world for pity when Israel inadvertently kills them.
 
The Hezbollah tactic is working while Israel's overreliance on air power isn't.
 
I was among those initially believing that the Israel showing up for this confrontation would be the one that destroyed a vaster array of enemies in six days in 1967. It was a naive assumption, in part because Hezbollah is sophisticated about manipulating world opinion, is well-armed, has major support from Iran and Syria, deploys suicide bombers, is capable of disappearing into the civilian population when it has to and is finally fanatical.
 
There is the sense, too, that the Israeli leadership may not be of the same order as of old. Some military critics lament too little use of foot soldiers.
 
The tragedy in Qana is among a number of incidents prompting calls for a quick cease-fire, for immediate peace. But as astute observers note, peace in the short term does not mean peace in the long term. Done the wrong way -- without a truly reliable international force in the southern part of Lebanon -- a cease-fire will amount to an Israeli surrender imperiling that tiny nation while emboldening Hezbollah as it intimidates the Lebanese government into further empowering it. Done the wrong way, it could in fact spell Israel's doom and an eventual nuclear war, as Ahmadinejad's remarks remind us.
 
The Iranian president -- engaged in a spooky game to secure nuclear weapons despite frantic concerns among the civilized -- has previously called for Israel to be wiped off the map. How can anyone doubt that he means it, or that he would be brandishing those weapons now if he had them or that one threat could lead to another and another and to action? There are those who blithely assure us that we could keep a nuke-armed Iran in control in the same way we long contained the Soviet Union, as if the rule of Islamist ayatollahs and Marxist bureaucrats are clearly comparable or as if there was never a close call of nuclear war with the Soviets.
 
The Ahmadinejad remark also reminds us that what motivates Israel's enemies is undying hatred. I agree with the thesis that it will take nothing short of decent government and reasonable prosperity to diminish Muslim resentment of Western success, including, of course, the fascistic, fundamentalist resentment of the United States that led to the attacks of 9/11.
 
Just as Israel is facing extreme difficulty in combating Hezbollah, the United States and its partners are facing extreme difficulty in Iraq, where the violence seems to grow almost daily and the possibility of all-out civil war seems more probable by the minute. The idea that we are made safer by fleeing is almost certainly false, though, for an Iraq once more in Saddamlike hands or the hands of ayatollahs would be a frightening setback in the war on terror, a retreat to conditions that were of a frightful danger many now blindly minimize.
 
This hour is not a heartening one, but it is an hour that calls on the United States and our friend Israel to have strong hearts.
 
Jay Ambrose, formerly Washington director of editorial policy for Scripps Howard newspapers and the editor of dailies in El Paso, Texas, and Denver, is a columnist living in Colorado. He can be reached at SpeaktoJay@aol.com.