Hezbollah will win because world opinion will turn against the Israelis and force them to a peace negotiation, and such always favors the terrorists as they don't abide by them. Israel will win because it is fighting for survival. Israel is fighting to totally destroy Hezbollah. Israel is fighting to force the world to recognize the danger and enforce Resolution 1559 about security in southern Lebanon.
Various thoughts. Some are right, some wrong. Or will be, eventually, depending on who fights on and who doesn't. Take your pick.
I would bet on Israel's resolve and George W. Bush's. That is, the fight may come out one way with one set of leaders but the other side may win with another! It is totally incorrect to keep claiming that one path was wrong when one has not yet followed it to its end. War is more like hiking the Appalachian Trail than it is winning a chess match, though it has elements of both. At the end of a losing chess match one cannot simply keep on playing. It's over. But to complete the successful hike of the Appalachian Trail, one only has to keep hiking.
It is clear that George W. intends to keep hiking till the end of his term. Which brings up the question: Will the next president be a persistent hiker who will finish the journey or will he be someone who wimps out and throws in the towel--or, to avoid mixing metaphors, packs his tent in his backpack-- and calls his mother to pick him up at the Howard Johnson's near I64 in Virginia?
The terrorists--and guerrilla fighters in general--know they can't fight pitched battles and win and seldom engage in such. They hope to win through destroying the resolution of their opponents, through draining the resources of the opponents, or through influencing politics so that wimps are elected to office (as in Spain with the Madrid train bombing). In effect, destroying the opponent by thousands of little draining cuts rather than a single big wound. It is difficult, though not impossible, for a large military such as that of the USA or the Soviet Union to adapt to such tactics. Such large military forces have trained for big pitched battles, large maneuvers, an enemy which comes out and fights. Terrorists avoid those for the most part. In Vietnam the Tet Offensive, where the NVA came out to fight, proved they would be destroyed. However, thanks to Papa Walter Cronkite and others, the American people were convinced to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and give up.
The real lesson of Vietnam is that the world can't be counted on to help and that it is incumbent upon the USA to face up to the requirement to slog on when things get tough, hike up that next mountain--and the next and the next--until one gets to the end of the trail.
Which is not to say that we shouldn't recognize that Rumsfeld has been right all along: We need to partially transform the military so that there are lighter, more mobile units capable of dealing with terrorists in a more rational fashion.
To revert back to paragraph one above, it would certainly bring the war against Islamic Fascism to an end much quicker if the rest of the world understood the necessary actions. But we can't count on the wimps of the world. So far it's the USA, Israel, Great Britain (and the people there are disturbingly wimpy and delusional), now that Spain and Italy have knuckled under to terrorist pressures.
Apres nous, le deluge. If we don't keep hiking.
