Politicians and generals everywhere, repeat after me: "Air power alone can't win wars; you can't defeat terror on the cheap with technology; and (in the timeless words of Nathan Bedford Forrest) War means fighting, and fighting means killing."
The U.N. resolution called for Hezbollah to disarm - a fantasy only a diplomat could believe. As soon as the refugees began flowing southward and packing the battlefield, Nasrallah told the international community to take a hike. He knows that U.N. peacekeepers won't try to disarm his forces - if they ever show up - and the Lebanese military not only won't try, but couldn't do it.
The world's response? The French (who talked so boldly) took a cold swig of Vichy water: Now they say they won't send in their peacekeepers until Hezbollah is completely disarmed - which isn't going to happen. And Lebanese leaders stated openly that not only wouldn't the Lebanese army attempt to take away the terrorists' weapons, it wouldn't even confiscate caches it stumbled on.
So we've learned two lessons.
One, the UN won't protect us from the jihadi scum who delight in our deaths in the most gruesome fashion possible. This lesson is coming up faster than even I thought possible. I admitted that ultimate victory depended on whether Hizbollah would be disarmed and kicked out of southern Lebanon, but even I didn't think the UN would falter even while they are still affixing bright ribbons with waxed stamps to the freshly printed UN resolution.
And second, when we decide to fight, we must make a concurrent decision to kill our enemies and endure the casualties until we win. You'd think that those two naturally go together but in our PC-clouded world where we care for our enemies children more than they do, it is a lesson we must recall.
So thank you to Israel for demonstrating these two lessons. Sorry you paid a price for them. May you learn from the experience. You thought Kosovo in 1999 was a template. You forgot that we got lucky with our immaculate victory in Kosovo when Milosevic blinked.
And may we learn, too. The siren song of Kosovo still entrances us at times despite our most recent combat experience.
