Israel's war with puppets

John Podhoretz:

ISRAEL is fighting marionettes. The monstrous fanatics who make up Hamas and Hezbollah doubtless imagine they are freedom fighters seeking martyrdom, but pathetic marionettes is all they really are, bobbing up and down at the end of the strings being pulled by Iran and Syria.

There's a major geopolitical game going on here, and it has nothing whatever to do with the Palestinians. They are, once again, being used as playthings by other Arabs who have profited from Palestinian immiseration for six decades or more.

Rather, it appears that Iran is trying desperately to foment an all-out war between Israel and the Palestinians, and is bringing along Syria (its repulsive little yes-man of a nation) along for the ride.

You don't need a degree in international relations to figure out what Iran gets out of war between Israel and the Palestinians. Tehran wants to distract the world from its pursuit of nuclear weapons, especially this week - because the leaders of the G-8 nations are beginning their confab tomorrow and President Bush was intending to use the meeting to reach a stronger international consensus on halting the aggressive Iranian moves. Now, instead, the discussion will turn on how to rachet down the violence between Israel, the Palestinians and Lebanon.

Perhaps more important for the medium term, Iran needs to distract Israel and shift Israel's focus away from Iran's nuclear program - because the Iranians don't know whether the Israelis will take matters into their own hands to degrade or destroy it.

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Lebanon is obliged, by the rules of international law, to prevent attacks on a neighboring sovereign state from within its borders. That means the Jewish state is within its rights, according to the provisions of international law, to defend itself by attacking targets inside Lebanon.

But what makes this situation so unprecedented, and so uniquely frightening, is that Iran and Syria have no reason whatever to relent, to call off their dogs, to pack up the marionettes and put them away in a suitcase. Instead, the marionettes will continue to dance for their masters like the mindless puppets they are. And no one - no Palestinian, no Israeli - will be safe.

At some point Israel will have to destroy the Damacus regime. It can then destroy the terrorist sanctuaries that Syria has permitted as well as the headquarters for the terrorist in Damascus. Liberating the Syrians from the despotic Assad regime would be a bonus and the US should pressure the Syrians by massing troops on Syria's border with Iraq. The destruction of the Syrian terror nest will force the terrorist to retreat to their puppet masters in Iran which will be isolated and awaiting its own destruction. That might not end the war on terror but it should end the reign of the state sponsors and make it much more difficult for the terrorist to operate..