"The Revolution was made, not to make France free, but to make her formidable,"

said Edmund Burke in 1796. The formidable fight put up by Hezbollah, so rare among Arabs in recent generations, underscores the lunacy of the neoconservative theory that the problem with Muslim countries and the reason they don't get along with Israel are the elderly dictators who run them, and that the solution is for the U.S. to promote democratic revolution, faster please.. In reality, the rickety, illegitimate regimes in Egypt, Jordan, Syria (and, formerly, Iraq), have meant that battlefield opposition to Israel has been hopeless for a generation. How many Syrians would fight for the Alawite heretic regime, unless Syria was invaded? In Hezbollah, however, Israel has now run into an organization whose people actually believe their bosses' pronouncements and are willing to die for them.

Fortunately, Hezbollah doesn't have much of a population and economic base to draw from (maybe 1.5 to 2.0 million people, most of them poor), and only about $100 million per year in chump change from Iran.

By the way, Bush's idea of using Israel as America's proxy in our struggle with Iran is a lot like our attempt to use Israel's old ally, apartheid South Africa, as our proxy to fight the Soviet Union's proxy, Cuba, in African countries like Angola in the 1970s. Militarily, it made a lot of sense, but politically it was so disastrous that it didn't work. Was it fair that everybody around the world was so prejudiced against the Boer State? No, but, then, life isn't fair.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer