Robert Fox: Weak and muddled

The First Post is carrying an opinion piece by Robert Fox on Israel's strategy against Hizballah which starts off as fairly insightful, but quickly veers off into the land of hand-wringing and bed-wetting--over the fates of Hizballah, Syria and Iran. Fox offers nothing but fretting over Israel's intentions in the middle east and stops just short of diving under a bed with his hands over his ears screaming "Make the bad man go away!".

First, there's the warning that Hamas and Hizballah have powerful friends:

Hezbollah, like Hamas, has many state allies and sponsors who help with weaponry, tactics, training and morale-boosting propaganda. But it is not entirely dependent on its state supporters. It will not be destroyed by Israel trashing Lebanon in the short term, or attacking Syria and Iran in the longer term. It will likely survive as a grassroots organisation and its perceived persecution - even martyrdom - will boost the calls to jihad from the mosques of Bradford to Jakarta.

All true, but so fucking what? What's so bad about a grassroots (read: underground and hiding) organization with no more rockets and missiles to lob indiscriminately into Israel? Fox then goes on at length extolling the military hardware of Hizballah, and almost sounds like he's masturbating over thoughts of Hizballah's al-Fajr 5 rockets and Mirsad UAVs wreaking havoc on Israeli civilians and the IDF:

In the past week Hezbollah has employed a new arsenal of ground-launched rockets, among them the al Fajr-5 with a range of up to 50 miles and new Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, principally the Mirsad 1.

It was a Mirsad that struck the Israeli gunboat in the Mediterranean on Friday night. The ship was bombarding the Lebanon coast when it was hit by the drone packed with conventional explosive. The Israeli defence ministry announced that four crew had been killed, and then imposed a news blackout.

And then in true leftist, BDS-afflicted, anti-American form, he lays blame for the current crisis on Bush:

The problem today is that there is no Henry Kissinger, or James Baker, or Madeleine Albright for that matter, with their hands on the levers of power. The present crisis shows a glaring lack of engagement and influence on the part of Washington, and this, I fear is the biggest flaw in Israel's thinking.

Any US plan to help Israel deal with Syria and Iran, with Hezbollah as the casus belli, is hardly likely to clear the ground. How can a weakened and muddled Bush administration, after pitching its allies into ill-considered wars of choice in Iraq and Afghanistan, now persuade us that fighting Syria and Iran are wars of necessity?

OK...maybe it can be argued that Iraq was a "war of choice". But Afghanistan? Right...in the same way World War II was a "war of choice".

Weakened and muddled, indeed.