When Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert addressed the Knesset and claimed victory against Hezbollah, some members of the body audibly scoffed, reports WorldNetDaily.com. Israel's tentative military campaign, Olmert
asserted, "changed the strategic balance in the region." Well, he's right about that part.

By failing to crush Hezbollah, as 90 percent of the Israeli public, the U.S. government, the French and even the Saudis hoped they would do, Israel has sustained the most damaging defeat of its history -- and this defeat has hurt the United States as well. An Israeli columnist, calling himself an "optimist," notes that contrary to Hassan Nasrallah's prediction that Israel would "'collapse like a spider web,' it didn't collapse." Those are not words to chill the hearts of Hamas and Hezbollah.

In a better world, the tactics of Hezbollah -- crossing an
international boundary in an unprovoked act of ruthless aggression;
kidnapping soldiers; using civilians as human shields; deliberately
targeting Israeli civilians -- would have provoked universal revulsion.
Every death of an innocent Lebanese would have been laid at the feet of
Hezbollah. But in the world we actually inhabit, the European Union, Muslims
throughout the world and many on the left in the United States condemned
Israel instead. This war brought us not embedded journalists but embedded
terrorists, woven into the fabric of civilian society -- missiles hidden in
mosques, launchers within laundries.

Hezbollah, with a large assist from the Reuters news agency,
boldly and blatantly falsified photographs and other news from Lebanon --
strategically posing human beings (dead and alive), stuffed animals and
weeping women for world media consumption (see
www.aish.com/movies/JP/PhotoFraud.asp). Thanks to alert bloggers like those
at LittleGreenFootballs.com, we have come to recognize the ubiquity of
figures like "Green Helmet Guy" posing as a Lebanese rescue worker when he
almost certainly works for the terrorists -- the Leni Riefenstahl of
Hezbollah.

One part of the world that proved particularly vulnerable to
this manipulation was Israel itself. It fought this war with one eye on the
camera. And though utterly unskilled in such tactics itself (where were the
pictures of suffering Israelis?), the Israeli government worried excessively
about the public relations price it was paying to defend itself. But by
failing to finish the war, Israel did itself far more damage than any public
relations hit could do. It emboldened the enemy -- and Israel's enemy in
this war is our enemy, too.

How do you fight people who are not afraid to die? Well,
certainly not by letting them believe that such tactics succeed. Iran, the
font of so much misery in the world right now, has no reason to believe that
defiance of the United Nations, Nazi-like belligerence toward the U.S. and
Israel, funding and training of suicide bombers, and the pursuit of nuclear
weapons have brought them anything but gain. Hezbollah was their cat's paw.
Had it been crippled, they would have felt the pain. The psychic blow would
have been enormous. The psychological war is every bit as important as the
one fought with bullets (it has always been so). It's one thing to blow
yourself up for a great cause that is everywhere on the march. It's quite
another to sacrifice your life for futility.

At this moment, Israel has done the most dangerous thing we in
the West can do: It has withdrawn from a fight without victory. The U.S. has
offered some wobbly signals as well. Michael Rubin of the American
Enterprise Institute reports that after Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice
announced that the U.S. would "engage" Iran, a top Iranian official jeered,
"Why don't you just admit that you are weak and your razor is blunt?" A few
days later, an Iranian Revolutionary Guards boat unfurled a banner as it
passed a U.S. Navy ship in the Persian Gulf. It read: "The U.S. cannot do a
damn thing."

A Hamas columnist has predicted that Hezbollah's "victory" will
open the door to a "third intifada."

We await the consequences elsewhere around the world -- from
London to New York to Baghdad to Bali to Calcutta -- of jihadists who feel
the wind at their backs.

To find out more about Mona Charen, and read features by other
Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web
page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2006 CREATORS SYNDICATE INC.