Just Wondering...

Frequent reader Bec sends along this link, via the comments, which falls right in line with the post I had planned for today until I was overcome by events. Anyhoo, it seems like Nasrallah has appointed one Imad Mughniyeh as the new Hezbollah military leader/commander for south Lebanon.

Military and counter-terror sources maintain that this appointment raises the conflict to a new and dangerous level on several counts.

Mughniyeh, wanted for a quarter of a century by the FBI for the huge bombing attacks he orchestrated on the US embassy in Beirut and American and French troops, as well as a spate of hijackings and murders, is important enough to take orders from no-one ranking lower than Iran’s supreme ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Informed circles in the West have a high opinion of Mughniyeh’s military, intelligence and tactical skills. His hand was seen in the transformation of al Qaeda’s 2001 defeat in Afghanistan into a launch pad for its anti-US campaign in Iraq and many other ventures in the terror war against America. After the death of Abu Musab al Zarqawi, Mughniyeh is rated the world Islamic terror movement’s most outstanding field commander. Therefore, while the appointment is a measure of Israel’s belated military success in the Lebanese war, it also brings the conflict ever closer to two dangerous orbits – Tehran and al Qaeda.

So. Apparently we now have a direct command and control link from Tehran to south Lebanon, if one believes what is written in the referenced article. And there’s more, of course. YNet reports Iranian Revolutionary Guards are fighting alongside Hezbollah, and there have been many reports about Iranian long-range missiles (not the Katyushas), along with Iranian “technical experts” to man them, circulating about since this war began. You don’t have to be much of a conspiracy theorist to see the handwriting on this wall, now, do you?

There have been more than a few editorials and essays lately pointing out Tehran’s direct links to the current violence, and each of these editorials/essays wonders aloud just how long we’re going to continue to give the initiative to Tehran before we strike back. One of the better essays I’ve read on the subject appears in NRO (“We’re Losing World War IV,” by Barbara Lerner):

Despite all this and more, we have yet to admit that Iran is at war with us, or to seriously consider striking back at her, and, in speaking of our own war aims, we never dare use the v-word — victory — anymore. Instead, we make head-in-the-sand happy-talk about “peace,” “democracy,” and “ceasefires,” rejecting any military action against Iran for fear of “widening the war” — as if Iran were not already at war with us — and rely on the U.N. and “the international community” to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions and to prevent her proxies, Hamas and Hezbollah, from continuing to bring death and destruction to our smallest, truest, and most vulnerable ally, Israel. In doing this, we ignore two obvious realities: rather than restraining Iran, U.N. heavyweights Russia and China are busy arming her, and the perfidious EU will not even recognize the plain fact that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization. Instead, these old-Europe “allies” join with our Islamofascist enemies in demonizing our brave soldiers in Iraq, and damning Israel for daring to fight back against unprovoked aggression, pursued with openly genocidal intent.

[…]

Most Americans are still unaware of Iran’s promise to light up the skies with a great surprise on August 22, but Muslims everywhere are keenly aware of it; most await the day with growing excitement.

[…]

We should not wait, passively, for the Iranians to unveil their surprise. We should light up the skies with our own surprise: a massive aerial bombardment that wipes out most of Iran’s nuclear facilities, and decimates the ranks of its mullahs as well as those of the Revolutionary Guard and Basij forces that keep them in power, defeating these monsters and decimating their fan base by shattering their image of invincibility.

Ms. Lerner provides background and history of this conflict to refresh the memories of those who haven’t been paying attention, and to support her right-wing saber rattling (my tongue is in my cheek. Obviously.). Her points are well taken.

And then there’s this op-ed in yesterday’s New York Sun:

Why is America waiting to be attacked by Iran? Why do we sit on the sidelines while Tehran makes war on our ally Israel in order to provoke America to join the fighting, first against Syria and then against Tehran itself? Why do we listen to the European appeasers as they pretend the Lebanon front is a regional conflict, a national liberation contest, when it is demonstrably the prelude to the wider war — the Spain 1936 to the continental war of 1939? What is the explanation for America's willful fiction that the United Nations Security Council can engineer an accommodation in Lebanon, when it is vivid to every member state that this is a replay of September 1938, when Europe fed Hitler the Sudetenland as the U.N. now wants to feed the jihadists the sovereignty of Israel?

The most threatening answer is that America waits to be bloodied because it has lost its will to defend itself after five years of chasing rogue-state-sponsored gangsters and after three years of occupation in failed-state Iraq against Tehran- and Damascus-backed agents. A grave possibility is that America is now drained, bowed, ready to surrender to the tyrants of Tehran.

Then again, perhaps America has been here before, and it is part of America's destiny as the New Jerusalem that we rarely start wars but that we are unusually good at finishing them.

What I want to know is…Is anyone, anyone at all, in Washington reading/listening to these voices? WHY do we persist in believing, accommodating, and participating in these terrible “willful fictions,” as Mr.Batchelor so aptly put it? Why do I feel like the guy with the fatal diagnosis who puts off treatment in the hopes that “it’ll get better?” Well, it never it gets better, it just gets worse. And worse, in this case, means that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people will die at the hands of Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. And it’s not like we haven’t been warned, repeatedly and often.

It’s less than two weeks until August 22^nd. I hope that day comes and goes quietly. But, I wonder. I really, really wonder.