Yet another repetition of why we must steel our nerves.

Jimmy Carter can't keep from minding everybody else's business. His latest encyclical begins:

The Middle East is a tinderbox, with some key players on all sides waiting for every opportunity to destroy their enemies with bullets, bombs and missiles. One of the special vulnerabilities of Israel, and a repetitive cause of violence, is the holding of prisoners.

You can see where this is headed. It's Israel's fault because it misled Hezbollah into thinking that it could commit yet another act of war and get away with a simple prisoner exchange.

If we were seeing Israelis entering the neighboring territories and blowing themselves up in the midst of crowds of civilians, I might have some sympathy for these arguments, but the fact is that Israel has not been the aggressor or first offender in any of its conflicts, with the exception of the Suez Crisis and its war for statehood.

Meanwhile, Bret Stephens in the Wall Street Journal argues that:

. . . if it keeps going as it is, Israel is headed for the greatest military humiliation in its history.

He cites the slowness of this operation, intelligence failures, and claims that the government has been too reluctant to use ground forces, basically hoping to use precision bombing to degrade Hesbollah, which hasn't worked, and caused extensive civilian casualties among the Lebanese who are being used as hostages by the terrorists.

It seems that Israel has decided to clear a strip on the south of Lebanon, but hasn't gone all out against Hezbollah because it hopes an international force will come in and protect it from future rocket barrages. That strikes me as giving Syria and Iran more time to resupply Hezbollah. We Americans, Judeo-Christians that we are, don't like killing, collateral damage or friendly fire deaths. Both we and the Israelis would prefer to live in peace. But I can't see why anybody thinks that delaying the final showdown with the people whose avowed aim is to destroy all Jews and to take away the religious freedom of all non-Muslims. They are not going to be persuaded by ceasefires and peace talks. Their goals are as non-negotiable to them as our freedoms are to us. They see overtures for peace as an opportunity to regroup to attack us again.

We understood these things about the Nazis and the Japanese regime which attacked us at Pearl Harbor, but we seem to think that it's different this time, just as we did in Vietnam. We've seen how well that worked out. The fact is that if a cause or an enemy justifies war, then war should be all out until the enemy is destroyed. Beginning with Korea, we have pursued the ethereal vision of a limited, more nuanced, more humane war. No such thing ever existed. We've done about all we can to avoid unnecessary carnage in our military weapons and methods, but our enemy sees that as a weakness and uses it against us by using non-combatants as shields in violation of international law. After all we can do, war still comes down to mangling and/or killing other people and destroying property.

It's a shock to see carnage, even in nature. That's why you seldom see a poster of a wolf killing a sheep with blood around its face. It's even more of a shock to see another person with a head, arm or lower body missing. We instinctively avoid such thoughts and images. But that will not prevent us from being forced to confront them by people who think we can't take it. As long as they think so, we're going to be attacked by them. They think that if they blow up the WTC or send suicide bombers among us, we'll fall to our knees and beg for them to stop. Some of us will and have done so. But that isn't how we got to be the most free, most powerful culture on earth. We got there by summoning all our might and slamming it to those who have tried to take our freedom.

We once thought we could make the world safe for democracy. That ended up with the rise of fascism and communism. We defeated both, but common sense should tell us that making the world safe for democracy and freedom is not a one-time thing, it's a continuing struggle. Our leaders understood that during the Cold War, but we have a large minority today who actually believe that if we refuse to fight back, these people will recognize our good faith and realize that we're really not a threat to them and become our friends. That might work if the only motive people had for war were to drive back a threat, as it is for us. What it fails to acknowledge is that there are people who seek power and don't care what our attitude toward them is. They see us the way wolves see sheep, not as fellow wolves. What we need to make them understand is that beneath our placid exterior we're their worst nightmare.

There's one way that has worked with such enemies in the past and that is conversion. We could preach and testify and convince them that their hatred and violence toward us is sinful and wrong. Unfortunately, the West is losing its traditional faith, even as the fundamentalism of Muslims is resurging. The only thing left for us is to fight. If we aren't willing to do so, then we'd better get ready to submit. That's what Islam means.