Time to Get Tough on Israel -- ?

As gas prices start climbing again in my neighborhood—up to $2.00 a gallon (regular) for the first time in weeks, there is less and less doubt in my mind. How easy would it be for the people who take American dollars and buy rockets and guns for Hamas to tell Hamas to start a shootout with Israel? The dust up will put oil profits at least part way back to where they were this summer.
Use rockets bought with American money (spent for oil) to kill Israelis and, when Israel shoots back, get the same Americans to pressure Israel not to retaliate. Newsweek Magazine has a cover headline this week that reads, “Time to Get Tough On Israel.”
The author of the piece insists it just isn’t nice of Israel to make life miserable for civilians in the Gaza strip while the insurgents among them are left unrestrained to send Israeli citizens into their bomb shelters a dozen times a day. Oh Pish and Tosh.
This nonsense comes from a nation that made life hell on earth for civilians in Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki after their military bombed Pearl Harbor. A nation that may have killed as many as half-a-million women and children in a single day of bombing Hamburg after the Nazi military bombed London and Rotterdam.
We invented unrestrained retaliation. Going back to the Indian Wars and Sherman’s March through Georgia and the Carolina’s, American military doctrine has been: Discomfit and kill enough civilians and their military will become discouraged and quit. (Didn’t always work, but we never stopped trying.)
And our World War II retaliation didn’t just raise our oil prices, it got us rationed to something like two gallons a week. The Japanese took over Indonesian oil fields; German subs sank oil tankers from the Middle East and Latin America. Now there’s an argument for restraint in dealing with the Axis. Maybe if we’d been nicer to Hitler and Tojo, they’d have kept our oil supplies plentiful.
Just as an aside—since we went into Iraq in the first place, the traditional American strategy of making war on the civilians might have been a better strategy than the one we employed (assuming we had one). MacArthur and Napoleon both had a point when they said, If you’re going to send your sons to fight and die in war—win it. At whatever cost to the enemy.
The blood of our boys is too precious to be sprinkled about willy-nilly, in confusion. If we feel we must spend it, let us be certain we get a terrible return on our investment—one that will make others fear to open that account. Caesar, Grant, Roosevelt, MacArthur, Genghis Khan and nearly any military commander in history worth his salt understood this bitter reality.
War should be an absolute last result; but if it must be waged, it is waged most successfully completely without restraint. Wars in which you must restrain yourselves probably should never be fought.
Oh, how I would have loved to have been a fly on the White House Wall the day after Pearl Harbor had some coalition of uninvolved nations decided it was time to “be tough on Roosevelt”—that it was his duty to show restraint.
Let’s understand that in a tiny nation like Israel, rockets exploding over every inch of their territory is an even more serious attack—for them—than Pearl Harbor was for us. For them, restraint means more Israeli death. American talk isn’t going to stop Hamas rockets.
Oh, but there must be a political solution, they say. Well, if a political solution is so possible, why didn’t we seek one after Pearl Harbor or Fort Sumter? Why didn’t Churchill seek one after Dunkirk? When the Arabs have announced in a dozen Arabic Mein Kampf’s that they will accept no other political solution but the destruction of Israel, what political solution do you suggest for the Jews? Mass suicide?
THERE IS NO POLITICAL SOLUTION POSSIBLE in the Near East until the Arabs renounce the Islamic faith that forbids any lands once claimed for Allah to fall into Infidel hands—or the Jews get on a boat and sail off somewhere.
Or, God help us (and our oil prices), one side or the other wins such a total victory that the other is no longer capable of getting back on its feet. That is, admittedly, too a grim a possibility to contemplate. But the other two are equally unlikely.
You want to be President Obama for a week or two? That’s only one of the sheer impossibilities he faces. I’ll pray and hope for the man, but I wouldn’t be him for the world.
Next time, (I did say it would be this time—but other considerations intervened) let’s take a look at the genesis of Arab/Jewish hostilities. You can go back about 4,000 years to when Isaac’s mom got Ishmael’s mom kicked out of camp, left to starve with her child in the desert. Hagar and Ishmael, progenitors of the Arabs, survived—but it is doubtful there were any warm feelings left for Sarah and Isaac, progenitors of the Jews.
But we’ll start tomorrow with the Arab incursion on Jewish, Ammonite and Edomite lands after a Babylonian king carted everyone off to Babylon (Iraq). That was in the sixth century before Christ.