Column One: An Acceptable Cease-Fire, By Caroline Glick
Excerpts;
Benn continued, “The moment Hizbullah took control over… south [Lebanon] and armed itself with thousands of Katyushas and other rockets, a stable balance of deterrence was created on both sides of the border.”
On Thursday, Benn wrote a follow-up column excusing his own blindness by noting that “the IDF, the intelligence services and the government, which have at their disposal much better sources of information than mine, thought the same” of Nasrallah in the days before his Iranian bosses ordered him to war.
Benn’s strategic befuddlement is noteworthy not merely because of what it says about the quality of analysis he provides to his readers, but also because it makes clear that there is a gaping chasm between the perceptions of reality shared by a disconcertingly large and influential segment of Israel’s governing elite and reality itself.
Happily, today Benn and his like-minded colleagues in the IDF, the intelligence services and the government are no longer being looked to for guidance by the Bush White House. While the Israeli elites, including Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and her colleagues in the government, still speak of a need for Israel to seek some sort of accommodation with Hizbullah, its terrorist allies in the Palestinian Authority and Syria, as well as with the terror apologists in the EU and UN, America has stopped listening.
US President George W. Bush, his press secretary Tony Snow, US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton and both houses of the US Congress have made it clear over the past week of war that America is unwilling to continue to abide by the view that it is possible to deter terrorists.
As Snow put it in a press briefing on Tuesday, “What we want is… the cessation of violence in a manner that is consistent with stability, peace, democracy in Lebanon, and also an end to terror. A cease-fire that would leave the status quo ante intact is absolutely unacceptable. A cease-fire that would leave intact a terrorist infrastructure is unacceptable. So what we’re trying to do is work as best we can toward a cease-fire that is going to create not only the conditions, but the institutions for peace and democracy in the region.”
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