Nothing Achieves Peace Better Than Victory

When the pagers exploded in Lebanon an age ago, a friend who is a retired U.S. Army officer said, while approving, that those sorts of shenanigans are “funny once.” Meaning you can’t possibly set that sort of thing up again.

True. But while contemplating the machinations needed to put that operation into place along with the timing, I also came to the conclusion that once is all that was likely to be required.

Israel has since followed up the once-funny opener with a series of sequels, most notably the conventional air attacks on the Hezbollah leadership culminating with the killing in Beirut of the organization’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, along with other high-ranking Hezbollah and Iranian officials.

Nasrallah not only ran the world’s most powerful terrorist organization, he’d ordered the killing and torturing of hundreds of Americans. Unlike the Biden administration and the AP, I was not sad to see him go.

An Israeli ground invasion of Lebanon is now in the offing. If it happens, this will no doubt be terrible. But it also may be necessary.

Meanwhile, for the umpteenth time, our best, most educated and credentialed call for a “cease-fire.” “Deescalate,” adds our president.

To what purpose? To prolong the conflict? To reset and give the other side a chance to try a different course next time?

There are few if any calls for cease-fires in Africa’s various wars, even though more people die there annually than even in Ukraine—where calls for a cease-fire are unpopular, even treasonous—let alone in Gaza or Lebanon. Yet only Iran’s war against Israel seems to merit a time-out so the former can catch its breath and regroup for another go at the latter. Nobody really cares about Africa, so wars there—many prosecuted by Islamic militias—escape interest and attention. But there are babies and children in Africa too.

The calls for a cease-fire in the Iran-Israel war are not about saving lives and instead are specific to restraining Israel and, by doing so, helping Iran. This is a war where the U.S. diplomatic establishment has inconceivably come to view the two countries with a rough equivalency, even though one has been a staunch ally for more than 60 years and the other has wished us nothing but ill since the fall of the Shah in 1979. Given American involvement in Iran in the decades following World War II, one can understand the Islamic Republic’s animosity, at least for a while. But even Vietnam, which has a much greater historical beef with the U.S., has decided on bygones. Iran never will, and American officials from way back to the Key Cake are foolish to think otherwise.

Iran broke whatever cease-fire existed at the time when it sent its Hamas proxies into Israel last year on October 7—killing, raping, maiming, kidnapping thousands, all while proudly showing their crimes to the world on social media. Israel is under no obligation to curtail its prosecution of the war however it sees fit. Meanwhile, thanks to American fecklessness, we are often directly or indirectly putting our diplomatic weight behind Iran, even when the latter uses proxies to routinely attack U.S. Navy ships in the Red Sea and American soldiers in Iraq and Syria, all to the enduring shame of the Biden administration and U.S. State Department.

Diplomacy and electoral politics aside, the question remains: Why have the United States and the international community decided that one particular war should be restrained with a cease-fire and not those other ones? One of the most exalted voices in said international community is the BBC World Service, which unlike American news outlets actually does talk about wars in Africa and unrest in Asia, documenting the suffering of civilians and children in these places. I don’t hear a lot of calls for cease-fires in Mali, Congo or Afghanistan. This is because there is no constituency for cease-fires in these places, either in Western media or among Western policymaking elites. Correspondents complain about the lack of Western aid and food convoys. That’s it.

Also, the BBC World Service is entirely in the bag for Iran and its proxies in its reportage on the war Iran has started. Outside of rank antisemitism, it’s hard to understand the ever-present animosity toward Israel, which is judged by a completely different set of standards from any other nation in the world and always found wanting. After the killing of Nasrallah, I heard a story on the BBC World Service about how children’s eyes in Beirut were blank with fear. What’s next, “thoughts and prayers” for Nasrallah’s family?

Meanwhile, the regular calls for a cease-fire are not based on a humanitarian impulse. They are entirely political. Israel should resist these calls and press on until it achieves victory on its own terms, and its U.S. ally should give it all the military assistance and diplomatic cover it needs to help achieve this victory.

Over and above the fact that Hamas and especially Hezbollah have routinely kidnapped, tortured and killed American civilians and uniformed service members over the decades, the U.S. government has officially declared the two organizations as terrorist organizations. They have the blood of Americans on their hands and up to their armpits. They are funded and directed by Iran. So it shouldn’t be difficult for the United States to pick a side here. Yet, this seems to be the case as U.S. officials express exasperation with Israel for “escalating” the campaign against Iran and its proxies by the very act of fighting back to defend itself. By rights, the U.S. should have never lifted sanctions on Iran and should be backing Israel to the hilt against an enemy that is not only warring on America but helping Russia in its war with Ukraine.

I’m quite certain the Israelis will consign the droning cease-fire demands to a well-deserved place of background noise and get on with winning. After all, they don’t have the luxury of losing. As for the United States: We will likely continue, at least in the short term, looking for “a peaceful solution” in a place where such things are not currently possible absent an Israeli victory. And so we also will continue our long march to irrelevance in the region.

One of the best moments in the film “Apocalypse Now” is Robert Duvall’s Col. Kilgore saying how the smell of napalm in the morning smelled like victory. This was ironic. However, the character’s next line, his last in the superior theatrical cut, was an almost wistful: “Someday, this war’s going to end.”

As a work of cinema and a commentary on the Vietnam War, Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now” perfectly encompasses the duality of man that Stanley Kubrick strove for in his not as profound but still meaningful “Full Metal Jacket.” Victory is elusive at best, particularly in a dubious cause. And those practitioners that bring it about, or fail to, may at least partially regret their involvement.

This has given victory a bad name. In post-Vietnam (and now post-Iraq) America, victory is supposed to be impossible, or at least impolite.

Good movies, bad policy. Go for the win. Ignore the calls for a cease-fire. Nothing achieves peace like victory. Americans should be among the first to eschew war, but also the first to fight to win when war comes. Victory in the American Revolution. Victory in the Civil War. Victory against Nazi Germany. Victory against Imperial Japan.

Be magnanimous in victory. But win. Israel understands. At some point, the United States will need to figure this out again too. May that happen soon.