Loss Of Patience

Victor Davis Hanson has a piece up over at Real Clear Politics that points out that Western patience is wearing thin for the Islamists. Nothing we have tried for the last 50-odd years has worked especially well. Negotiations and concessions lead nowhere, but only provide a brief respite before the next outbreak on violence from one group or another.

But despite that sound conventional wisdom, an exasperated West is running out of choices in the Middle East.

For years, the Arab world clamored for the Israel "problem" to be solved. Then peace and security would at last supposedly reshape the Middle East. The Western nations understood the "problem" as being Israeli retention of lands it had captured in Sinai, the West Bank, Gaza, Syria and Lebanon after defeating a series of Arab forces bent on destroying the Jewish state.

But after the Israeli departure from Sinai, Gaza and Lebanon, and billions of dollars in American aid to Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinians, there is still not much progress toward peace. Past Israeli magnanimity was seen as weakness. Now Israel's reasoned diplomacy has earned it another round of kidnapping, ransom and rocket attacks.

Finally, the world is accepting that the Middle East problem was never about so-called occupied land — but only about the existence of Israel itself. Hezbollah and Hamas, and those in their midst who tolerate them (or vote for them), didn't so much want Israel out of Lebanon and Gaza as pushed into the Mediterranean altogether. And since there will be no second Holocaust, the Israelis may well soon transform a perennial terrorist war that they can't easily win into a conventional aerial one against a terrorist-sponsoring Syria that they can.

Hanson goes on to detail more of the outrages that meet concessions and appeasement. In the end it comes down to this:

Yet for all their threats, what the Islamists — from Hezbollah in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley to the Iranian government in Tehran to the jihadists in Iraq's Sunni Triangle — don't understand is that they are slowly pushing tired Westerners into a corner. If diplomacy, or aid, or support for democracy, or multiculturalism, or withdrawal from contested lands, does not satisfy radical Islamists, what would?

Perhaps nothing.

What then would be the new Western approach to terrorism? Hard and quick retaliation — but without our past concern for nation-building, or offering a democratic alternative to theocracy and autocracy, or even worrying about whether other Muslims are unfairly lumped in with Islamists who operate freely in their midst.

Any new policy of retaliation — in light both of Sept. 11 and the messy efforts to birth democracies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the West Bank — would be something of an exasperated return to the old cruise-missile payback. Yet in the new world of Iranian nukes and Hezbollah missiles, the West would hit back with something far greater than a cruise missile.

This, then may be the end result of wearing out the West's patience. You could see the beginnings of that at the G-8. Despite the almost mandatory complaints of "disproportional response" on Israel's fault, the group laid blame squarely at the feet of Hezbollah. Russia concurred. Even Saudi Arabia has reached a point where it is willing to break ranks with other Arab counties.

Let's hope the world pulls this together real fast. Read the whole thing. Hanson at his best.