ARTICLE: "Cease-Fire to Nowhere," By David Brooks, The New York Times, July 30, 2006.

Tom writes:

Excellent piece by Brooks. Once we let Israel engage Iran's pre-emptive war against our interests in the region, we need to let nature take its course. Demonizing Israel by making them the implied bad guy in any quickie cease-fire/withdrawal will come back to haunt us by creating the impression that diversionary wars get you off the hook vis-a-vis the U.S. Plus, letting the carnage pile up a bit incentivizes everyone in the region toward some effort better than that simple sit-down in Rome recently that accomplished nada.

Best yet, the more intractable Lebanon gets, the quicker Israel moves toward letting a coalitional force ultimately take over security for the entire fence. The sooner that happens, the better, because it facilitates Israel's "one-state" solution, and once that happens, the big red-herring that is the Arab-Israeli conflict is shelved, strategically speaking, and we concentrate the debates on what really needs to change: the Arab/Persian autocracies themselves.