July 31, 2006 Got that old 1914 feeling yet? This time the guns of August will be different. Back then, the armies of Europe marched almost gaily off to what they thought would be a civilized little contest lasting a few months -- sort of like Franco-Prussian War Two -- and found themselves bogged down in the mechanized slaughter of the trenches for four years. Fifty thousand British troops died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme. Total casualties for both sides at the armistice of 1918 were 37 million.
This August, 2006, an aggrieved and energized Islam is mounting a holy war, a Jihad, against its infidel enemies, starting with the Jews of Israel and the Great Satan (America), and wishing to move along as far as Spain now -- according to the recent tapes of al Qaeda's point man, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
The current offensive, led by Islam's Shia branch with headquarters in Iran, has stated its objective of "wiping Israel off the map." And yet world opinion affects to be shocked that Israel is fighting Iran's forward troops, Hezbollah, as though for its life.
Now world opinion is further shocked that dozens of children have been killed in Israel's targeted bombings of Hezbollah missile emplacements at Qana, Lebanon. This is what happens when a fighting force uses little bodies for sandbags, which is what Hezbollah does when it hides its rocket launchers behind its most defenseless civilians. Israel has at least admitted to the tragic outcome of its actions there. Meanwhile, world opinion has failed to notice something: Israel's weapons are at least targeted at military objectives, even when tragic errors like this one occur. Hezbollah's Katyusha rockets are not targeted at all, just fired blindly across the border to land wherever they will, on hospitals, grandmothers, kids, whatever.
It's interesting because it illustrates the fantastic childish irresponsibility issuing from the sponsors and partisans of Hezbollah. Israel, they say, made war on them for no reason. They don't seem to remember crossing over into sovereign Israeli territory two weeks ago, killing eight IDF soldiers while kidnapping two others, and following up with the first missile barrage of what is now over 1500 Katyusha strikes. Lebanese children and women get killed, along with innocent UN observers, but that has nothing to do with Hezbollah planting missile launchers thirty yards away. The Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Seniora complains that his country is being brutalized, but fails consistently to explain why his government won't control the war-making activities of a vicious paramilitary operating freely within Lebanon's borders.
This world opinion can't face the reality of Islamic extremism. World War Three probably started on September 11, 2001. The responding campaigns by the US in Afghanistan and Iraq have proven to be inadequate efforts at political containment via the nostrum of "democracy." The Iraq campaign especially has backfired because the US pretended it was about something other than guaranteeing our continued access to Middle East oil. The ironic result a few years from now may be that oil fields of Shia-dominated southern Iraq will come under the direct management of Iran. Whoops.
Another evolving reality may also be the end of the conceit that the US controls Israel. Right now, the US is desperate to keep the Islamic world from exploding by reigning in Israel. But Israel is equally desperate to not be "wiped off the map." Israel may keep fighting in Lebanon longer than America wants it to.
Israel's own public management of its war against Hezbollah has been shaky. They sent Vice Premier Shimon Peres on CBS's "Face the Nation" Sunday morning, and the old guy's accent was so thick that his reasonable explanation for all this was barely comprehensible. (Meanwhile, Lebanese PM Seniora's mendacious complaints were delivered, at least, in clear English over on CNN.) Beyond this is the state of the war itself. This beast of world opinion seems to say that a failure by Israel to utterly vanquish Hezbollah will be a victory for that group and its sponsors.
For all the havoc it has created in Lebanon, Israel's military behavior appears less confident than it has in past conflicts with Islamic armies. So far, obviously, it has not overcome Hezbollah's despicable but effective use of civilian human shields to protect its military assets. Israel appears to have dithered for two weeks about the use of ground troops. The Katyushas keep raining down.
I'd guess that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has another week to stop the Katyushas, or else his government will fall and be replaced by the harder-line Benjamin Netanyahu (previously PM 1996 - 1999).
But Jihad, meanwhile, is on a roll -- or thinks it is, and that is not a fine distinction for so delusional a movement. Events of the past two weeks have evidently emboldened Iran. They will push harder in Baghdad, they will keep fresh rockets coming to Hezbollah. They will manufacture new sob stories of victimization for the masses of the so-called Arab Street. And they will keep toiling away in the labs to make an atomic bomb -- if they haven't already purchased one or two from North Korea.
One wonders what the leaders of the non-Shia Islamic nations are really thinking about all this, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan. They despise Israel, too, and they have their own political fanatics, but they may be troubled by the specter of maniacs like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hassan Nasrallah running this third world war on their side.
America has been reduced in the current affair to something only a little better than a nervous bystander. America's growing exhaustion and its inability to control events is on display for all to see. So is the foolish intransigence of our easy-motoring, suburban sprawl-building economy, which has made us psychologically the vassals of the Islamic oil-exporting nations. We're doing nothing to prepare for the day when all that oil stops coming through the Strait of Hormuz. Most of the American public not only has no idea what trouble we're in, but they're strangely proud of their cluelessness -- as they kick back and wait for "the market" to "come up with something."
But if the guns of August 2006 really do set something bigger off, and the oil fields go up in flames, or the shipping lanes get shut down, or if any number of other things that can go wrong do go wrong, America will have a whole lot more to think about than Nascar and Jennifer Anniston's love life.
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