Sometimes either a person or a nation, faced with adversity, has no choice but to push on to the end. Israel faces such a situation now, beset on all sides by enemies, still recovering from last year's horrendous and atrocious (in the original sense of the word) attack that resulted in the worst mass murder of Jews since the Holocaust.
It seems obvious that the only way out for Israel is through, and that means through the Iran-backed terror groups of Hamas and Hezbollah - and they seem determined to do just that, the whining of American "progressives" and invertebrates at the United Nations notwithstanding. Former U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in an interview on Sunday, stated as much.
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said it’s wrong for the United States to seek a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas and that the U.S. should instead tell Israel to “finish the job.”
“We should be saying plain and clear, finish the job,” Pompeo said Sunday morning on “Fox News Sunday.”
Pompeo’s comments follow the news that Israeli strikes killed several top officials of the Iranian-backed Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. The group’s top leader, Hassan Nasrallah, was killed, and on Sunday the Israel Defense Forces confirmed it had killed Nabil Kaouk, a preventative security commander.
Secretary Pompeo makes a good point. What's more, he understands the background of this issue, at least since 1948.
“Make no mistake about it. We know history. We know the history from 1967; we know the history from 1973,” Pompeo said. “There is only one thing that will protect Israel and make the Middle East more prosperous and peaceful and that is the demonstration of power and imposing costs on Israel’s adversaries.”
The history to which Secretary Pompeo refers is a history of Arab Muslim groups, from 1948 onward, trying to destroy Israel. This isn't a country like the United States, shielded from world affairs by what the great Robert Heinlein called "the ungrokkable vastness of ocean" with a huge land area and still, efforts of generations of Democrats notwithstanding, considerable industrial might. Israel is, area-wise, somewhere between Delaware and Maryland, facing the Mediterranean, the sea which Israel's neighbors by and large wish to drive it into. There are no places in Israel that can't be reached from Gaza, Lebanon, or the West Bank by terrorist rockets. Israel can't afford to surrender another square inch of land to her enemies.
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And last October 7th pretty much established what the worst-case scenario would look like for Israel.
Mike Pompeo, in this, is correct. The only way out for Israel is through, and that "through" means through Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as any other terrorist goblins who would join them. They don't need American troops on the ground; they have shown they are perfectly capable of handling things themselves, and they should continue kicking some and taking some until the goblins get the message that Israel should be on every nation's and terror group's "don't mess with" list.
It wouldn't hurt for the United States to have such a reputation, either, for that matter - but under the current administration, that isn't likely.
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