TigerHawk

I've run across a few things worth reading today. First among them, Mike Gerson's outstanding essay in Newsweek. It includes the answer to this comment in the previous post, and Jon Stewart's mockery in this post. A teaser from Gerson's RTWT essay:

From those events [of September 11], President Bush drew a fixed conclusion: as long as the Middle East remains a bitter and backward mess, America will not be secure. Dictators in that region survive by finding scapegoats for their failures—feeding conspiracy theories about Americans and Jews—and use religious groups to destroy reformers and democrats. Oil money strengthens elites, buys rockets, funds research into weapons of mass destruction, builds radical schools across Africa and Asia and finds its way to terrorist organizations. Terrorist organizers exploit the humiliated and hopeless—channeling their search for meaning into acts of murder—and plot, as London 2006 proves, to surpass the mad ambitions of 9/11.

In the traditional diplomatic view, this chaos can be contained through the skillful management of "favorable" dictators. But what if the status quo in the Middle East that produced Muhammad Atta and his friends and successors cannot be contained, or boxed up, or bought off? What if the false and shallow stability of tyranny is actually producing people and movements that make the whole world less stable? And what if the problem is getting dramatically worse as the technology of weapons of mass destruction becomes more democratically distributed?

On this theory, President Bush set out a series of policy changes from the weeks after 9/11 to his second Inaugural in 2005. Threats would be confronted before they arrive, the sponsors of terror would be held equally accountable for terrorist murders and America would promote democracy as an alternative to Islamic fascism, the exploitation of religion to impose a violent political utopia. Every element of the Bush doctrine was directed toward a vision: a reformed Middle East that joins the world instead of resenting and assaulting it.

That vision has been tested on nearly every front, by Katyusha rockets in Haifa, car bombs in Baghdad and a crackdown on dissent in Cairo. Condoleezza Rice calls this the "birth pangs" of a new Middle East, and it is a complicated birth. As this violent global conflict proceeds, and its length and costs become more obvious, Americans should keep a few things in mind.

[I]t is quite impossible that everybody who is calling for a cease-fire is a zionist traitor. I think the problem is that those people don't have any dignity, or at least have the wrong definition of dignity. Don't be hard on them, god knows I was one of them before I saw the light. I always thought the definition of dignity was that you have a good job, a decent house, could afford your kids a decent living in a peacefull country with a future. What american zionist propaganda. Dignity is getting attacked due to the actions of your leader, to the point of losing everything, and still refusing to hold that leader accountable. Dignity is having your entire neighborhood bombed, your children killed, and your only reaction is to dance in the streets like zulu warriors in support of Hezbollah. That's what dignity, pride and honor are all about. I get that now.

But we can help them get it too. Think about it: those people- cursed christian, sunnis and druze-who call for the cease-fire don't have dignity for a very good reason: Their houses are still standing. Hell, more than 80% of the country is still not destroyed. That's a lot of people without dignity oh great ayatollah Nasrallah, and we need to teach it to them. So please, for their own sake, continue bombing Israel from their villages and eventually those zionists will fall into your trap and bomb them as well, giving them instant dignity. Don't worry about any backlash on the short or long run. I mean, look at Nasser: He too entered wars against enemies far stronger than him, and caused the death of thousands of egyptians and the economic destruction of the country for decades to come. Do the people hate him? Noooooo. They love him, because he gave them dignity. Hell, your biggest supporters in Egypt keep comparing you to him, and they love you for reminding them of the dignity they feel whenever arabs die. Thank you for reminding them how it feels like to have dignity. Thank you.

And please, don't listen to those people who talk to you about the mounting lebanese civilian casualties due to Israeli bombing. Those people are idiots. First of all, you can't have an omlet without breaking some eggs. What? They thought liberating Palestine was going to be achieved with no people dying? Helloo, we have to kill 8 million jews to do it, and they are not big fans of getting killed. Deaths are inevitable. But, unlike them, our dead go to Heaven. Instant martyrs. Even the israeli muslims we kill are martyrs, as you said yourself. Those people are the same people who complained about the half a million iraqi children that died from malnutrition and lack of medicine from the sanctions imposed on the glorious regime of Saddam. They don't understand that Saddam gave them Dignity for breakfast, Honor for lunch and Pride for dinner as one Iraqi friend once told me, or that those half a million children are now playing in Heaven, after dying with the dignity that Saddam's rule gave them. But don't get mad at the ignorant my dear sir; they just don't know any better, since they don't understand dignity.

You have to understand what an Israeli invasion of Lebanon looks like. When Americans go to war they fly to the other side of the world and spend weeks or even months preparing to tackle some fly-blown dictatorship, then push hundreds of miles through enemy territory on the way to their targets. Israeli soldiers just take out some wire cutters, snip holes in the fence, and walk into Lebanon.