Posted by
Silvio Canto, Jr. on Sunday, July 16, 2006 9:42:37 AM
Winston Churchill had the best line of the 1930s:
"An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last".
Churchill spent most of the 1930s warning everyone about Hitler. No one listened and 60 million died including 6 million Jews in concentration camps.
In the summer of 1939, most of the serious people of the world understood that Hitler and Japan had to be stopped. Yet, no one was willing to do it. It all became academic when Hitler marched into Poland in September '39 and Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
Today, we are at war with Islam fanatics, an extreme wing committed to the destruction of everyone who disagrees with them. You can't negotiate with them. They don't wear uniforms or fight for a country. They hide among civilians so that Israel or the US are forced to bomb residential areas.
Will we stop them?
William Kristol wrote a good summary of the threat:
"Here, however, is one lesson that does seem to hold: States matter. Regimes matter. Ideological movements become more dangerous when they become governing regimes of major nations. Communism became really dangerous when it seized control of Russia. National socialism became really dangerous when it seized control of Germany. Islamism became really dangerous when it seized control of Iran--which then became, as it has been for the last 27 years, the Islamic Republic of Iran."
(http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/433fwbvs.asp)
I see this conflict moving beyond Beirut and into Damascus and Tehran. It won't be pretty but we need to go to the source in Iran and cut the snake's head off!