An interesting interview with Walid Phares, on the Middle East:

The U.S. and its allies can be accused of certain shortcomings as well. While the speeches by the U.S. president, congressional leaders from both parties, Tony Blair, and Jacques Chirac were right on target regarding Lebanon, and while the U.S. and its counterparts on the Security Council were diligent in their follow up on the Hariri assassination and on implementing UNSCR 1559, there was no policy or plan to support the popular movement in Lebanon. Incredibly, while billions were spent on the war of ideas in the region, Lebanese NGOs that wanted to resume the struggle of the Cedar Revolution and fighting alone for this purpose were not taken seriously at various levels. Policy planners thought they were dealing with the

An interesting interview with Walid Phares, on the Middle East:

The U.S. and its allies can be accused of certain shortcomings as well. While the speeches by the U.S. president, congressional leaders from both parties, Tony Blair, and Jacques Chirac were right on target regarding Lebanon, and while the U.S. and its counterparts on the Security Council were diligent in their follow up on the Hariri assassination and on implementing UNSCR 1559, there was no policy or plan to support the popular movement in Lebanon. Incredibly, while billions were spent on the war of ideas in the region, Lebanese NGOs that wanted to resume the struggle of the Cedar Revolution and fighting alone for this purpose were not taken seriously at various levels. Policy planners thought they were dealing with the

An interesting interview with Walid Phares, on the Middle East:

The U.S. and its allies can be accused of certain shortcomings as well. While the speeches by the U.S. president, congressional leaders from both parties, Tony Blair, and Jacques Chirac were right on target regarding Lebanon, and while the U.S. and its counterparts on the Security Council were diligent in their follow up on the Hariri assassination and on implementing UNSCR 1559, there was no policy or plan to support the popular movement in Lebanon. Incredibly, while billions were spent on the war of ideas in the region, Lebanese NGOs that wanted to resume the struggle of the Cedar Revolution and fighting alone for this purpose were not taken seriously at various levels. Policy planners thought they were dealing with the

Lileks has some thoughts on current events in the Levant. There’s a hint of sarcasm to them:

The US continues to support Israel. This is becoming difficult, since many important nations with well-dressed, urbane spokesmen have decided that Israel should stop its strange policy of firing rockets on UN-run stem-cell research facilities for no apparent reason. These diplomats will tolerate a little wartime madness

Is Hezbollah on the ropes? And Syria and Iran getting nervous?

If Israel continues to chase them north, it would be interesting to see what kinds of things have been stashed in the Bekaa Valley. Particularly of vintage early 2003…

This is old news that I missed while at the NewSpace conference, but Lileks has a screed up about Howard Dean and the war that’s still timely. It’s funny, and sad (as Lileks often is):

…the revelatory moment in Dean

Why is this not a functional declaration of war?

Iran awarded Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez its highest state medal on Sunday for supporting Tehran in its nuclear standoff with the international community, while Chavez urged the world to rise up and defeat the U.S., state-run media in both countries reported…

“Let’s save the human race, let’s finish off the U.S. empire,” Chavez said. “This (task) must be assumed with strength by the majority of the peoples of the world.”

This time, Mark Steyn takes on the moronic “chicken hawk” argument:

Aside from anything else, I wonder if the gentleman (if that’s the word) understands how freakish it would strike every previous generation of Americans (and, indeed, almost every other society in human history) to berate a blameless young lady for not grabbing a rifle and heading for the front. And, if the issue is “extraordinary disrespect” to the troops, it’s utterly self-defeating to argue that only active-duty servicemen get proprietorial rights in a war.

In fact, the notion that “fighting” a war is the monopoly of those “in uniform” gets to the heart of why America and its allies are having such a difficult time in the present struggle. Nations go to war, not armies. Or, to be more precise, nations, not armies, win wars. America has a military that cannot be defeated on the battlefield, but so what? The first President Bush assembled the biggest coalition in history for Gulf War I, and the bigger and more notionally powerful it got, the better Saddam Hussein’s chances of surviving it became. Because the bigger it got, the less likely it was to be driven by a coherent set of war aims.

I’m hearing cries of outrage from the world over “Israeli war crimes.” Where are the accusations against the organization that launches rockets from civilian population centers, in the cynical hope that the world will respond to Israel’s predictable actions in exactly the way it is?

I can no longer take seriously any of these so-called human rights organizations.

[Update a few minutes later]

I’m watching video on Fox News of rocket trails (presumably Hezbollah rocket trails) departing from a building that reportedly looks very much like the one that was hit in Qana.

[Update a few minutes after that]

Well, there’s not complete silence:

THE UN’s humanitarian chief Jan Egeland called for a three-day truce to evacuate civilians and transport food and water into cut-off areas…

…Mr Egeland blasted Hezbollah as “cowards” for operating among civilians.

“When I was in Lebanon, in the Hezbollah heartland, I said Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending in among women and children,” he said.

The accompanying picture is indeed damning, but this denunciation aside, the general asymmetry of the criticism, and the associated media coverage, remains sickening.

It bears repeating: Israelis kill civilians when they miss their targets. Hezbollah (and other terrorist organizations) kill civilians when they hit theirs.

[Update at mid-Sunday morning]

Josh Trevino has further thoughts on the asymmetry:

Let us call the childrens’ deaths in Qana what they are: a horrific freak of war. They were not intended; they were not actively sought; and they were not the product of criminal negligence. In weeks of war and thousands of sorties against a foe that intentionally hides amongst civilians in the active hope of just this manner of carnage, the remarkable fact is that this hasn’t happened before. Contrary to founding advocates of airpower — and unlike its battlefield foes — Israel does not seek the death of civilians for their own sake. Pace the rationalizations extended to Allied aircrews obliterating Western European villagers unfortunate enough to live near a rail junction, Israel does not even regard acceptance of this manner of death — unintended, incidental, and not worth especial efforts to preclude — as acceptable within the moral parameters of war. The uninformed and the insane will react with bitter derision upon being told this, on the heels of the news from Qana: but their emotional self-indulgence does not negate the fact at hand.

Need it be said — and it is a sign of our fallen age that it does need to be said — Israel’s enemy in this war operates under no such constraint. (One assumes that in bygone days, the difference between a Western democracy and a band of murderous savages would not need repeated explanation.) Hezbollah and the average Islamist do not shrink from direct assaults on civilians as such and as an end in itself. Indeed, it has been their sole tactic in this entire war. If they have not produced scenes of masses of dead children, it is not for lack of trying — it is, after all, the only thing they try for. That they have not managed it is indicative of the confluence of blind luck and Israeli battlefield superiority. But give it time: give it infinite time to launch its rockets and try its luck, as the braying proponents of ceasefire would have it, and eventually we’ll see Jewish children, too, incinerated in their sleep. The difference, of course, is that the perpetrators then will celebrate.

So, up in Seattle, a Muslim goes Jew hunting in a target-rich environment, killing one and wounding several others, all of them women, one of them pregnant (he almost got a twofer, there). Once again, we’re assured by the authorities that there’s no reason to think that this is terrorism. In fact, the police are now reportedly guarding the local mosques against “retaliation,” ignoring the fact that the vast amount of such incidents seem to occur not against mosques (in which much hateful propaganda is propagated), but against synagogues.

Stop and think about the absurdity of that for a moment. A man walks into a building full of Jews, says that he’s angry about Israeli actions, and starts shooting at innocent civilians. But we should be relieved, I guess, because it’s not terrorism.

This is just the latest example of the ongoing folly, begun in the wake of September 11, of calling the conflict in which we suddenly found ourselves (but had really been going on since at least 1979) a war against “terror.” As has been oft stated before, while the people who are trying to kill us largely are terrorists, the terror is a tactic (and a very successful one, given the nature of our news media), not a cause. Anyone can engage in it, and to say that we are at war with terror is to misidentify the enemy, in a profound and counterproductive way.

The problem of this misnaming of the war manifests itself in many ways. It allows opponents of the liberation of Iraq to claim that it had nothing to do with the war, because somehow “terrorist” has been rendered synonymous with Al Qaeda and bin Laden, and as we all know (at least those of us fundamentally and perhaps willfully ignorant of the actual history), Al Qaeda would have nothing to do with Saddam, and vice versa. By focusing exclusively on the “terrorists” that are Al Qaeda, it obscures the much larger enemy. And it allows the “authorities” to absurdly claim that the Pakistani who just went on the shooting spree in Seattle isn’t a “terrorist,” because he didn’t bring along his Al Qaeda membership card and decoder ring.

As was the case with the first three world wars, we are at war not with terror or any other particular tactic, but with an idea, or rather, a large set of ideas, most or all of which are inimical to our culture, and to the civilization that is an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. There is no win-win outcome to this war. There are, in the words of divorce courts, irreconcilable differences between the West and the Jihadis. There is, ultimately, not room enough on this planet for both ideologies, because theirs demands submission of all to it.

And despite their sectarian differences, it is an idea shared by Al Qaeda, by Hezbollah, by Hamas, by the Taliban, and by (unfortunately) vast swaths of people across the Middle East and Asia. It is not a new idea–this is just the most recent flareup of a war that has been going on for over a millennium. All that is new is that technologies have evolved, and our culture softened and grown unconfident in the value of our own ideas, in a way that gives them hope that finally, victory may be at hand.

Israelis, even the Israeli left, now finally understand that “land for peace” was a chimera, a hopeless endeavor, because their enemy doesn’t want land, or peace. They are like the alien in Independence Day who, when asked what it wanted of us, hissed, “I want you to die.”

Our culture is an offense to them, our material success is an offense (and rebuke) to them (because infidels have no right to be successful), our very existence, and particularly the existence of Jews in what they consider their own holy land, is an intolerable ongoing offense to them, made more offensive by the fact that this lowest form of life has made the desert bloom in a way that they never could.

It is all one war, and it’s not a war against “terror.” It is a world war largely of the Anglosphere (and some of its new allies, such as Poland and eastern Europe, and Israel–an honorary member) against fundamentalist Islamism. It is a war in which much of Europe has been cowed into sitting on the sidelines, by the enemy within. Russia and China are torn, partly for purely mercenary reasons, because our enemy is hungry for their arms and has abundant resources with which to purchase them, and partly due to their desire to see the Anglosphere and particularly its lead nation, the “hyperpower,” brought low. But Chechnya and the Uigers in western China demonstrate that they will only be able to feed others to the alligator for so long, before they become the next meal.

We are at war with an idea, and it’s an idea shared by the man up in Seattle. Part of that idea is that Israel shouldn’t exist, and that it’s intolerable when it does anything to defend itself and ensure its future existence. That part at least of the idea was clearly shared by the shooter in Seattle, by his own words. He may not (or he may) be a member of Al Qaeda, but we are not at war exclusively with Al Qaeda, which is just one front, one manifestation of the much larger enemy. We battle over a divide of ideologies, and there are many on the other side of that divide, some of whom, sadly, live among us. And they can unfortunately constitute a fifth column. He walked among us, in normal garb, but when he felt his time come, he picked up arms and made war against the nation that had welcomed him, and not against our military, but against helpless women.

The authorities don’t want to call him a terrorist. Fine.

Let us, then, call him what he is. He is the enemy. He is a foreign operative on our soil, a spy, a combatant out of uniform, and there is no need for a civil trial. The laws of war allow him to be summarily shot. And if that were to happen, it would, finally, be a welcome recognition of the true nature of this war.

[Late Saturday morning update]

Hugh Hewitt has some related thoughts.

[Early afternoon update]

Steve Sailer says: “Anti-Semitic terrorism … another job Americans just won’t do!”

[Sunday morning update]

In honor of the occasion, Mark Steyn reprises an article from the LAX 4th of July shooting a couple years ago: “Fancy that, another free-lance Jihadi.”