Hirsh Feathers (Micheal Hirsh) of Newsweak against rehashes his “Bush sucks” thesis again proving that he is clueless about the Middle East or the dynamics of fighting a war. His basic “thesis” is that Bush lumps Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah into the same boat and that’s a mistake because as he puts it, they’re not the same. Really now? Let’s compare:

Al Qaeda brought us 9/11, Hezbollah assorted attacks on Americans since 1983 (itself enough for us to take them out). But that aside - yes Hirsh, terrorist thugs all alike, here is where he really careens off the edge:

“How does this affect current events in the Mideast? In strategic terms, the U.S. endorsement of Israel’s retaliation against Hizbullah had some merit at the start, within limits: a Lebanon with an armed Hizbullah in its midst was never going to graduate to real democracy. The Israeli action is also, in a way, a proxy war against Iran and its nuclear program. Reducing Iran’s influence in the region by degrading the power of its principal means of terror (and therefore of retaliation) is in America’s interest, as well. This is the unspoken logic both of the fierce Israeli assault and Bush’s fierce defense of it: “In the back of everyone’s head is Iran looming as a threat over the region,” says one Israeli official.But with each errant bomb that kills more Lebanese children, the U.S. position becomes less defensible. By walking in lockstep with the Israelis, we Americans make it impossible for Muslims not to see us as an enemy. And every Muslim official knows, even if Bush does not, that Hizbullah is not identical with Iran but is a client of it, in a relationship not unlike that of the United States and Israel. By making Israel’s war our own we ensure that the Lebanese group and the Tehran mullahs will be even closer allies in the future. We place the Muslims whom we desperately need as allies, like Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in an impossible position. Maliki, a Shiite, can no longer stand with Bush, as he showed during his tense visit to Washington this week.

And at cafes and around kitchen tables throughout the Arab world, good-hearted Muslims can no longer defend America against their more hate-filled brethren. They have fallen silent; they have no arguments left. “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” as the poet Yeats memorably put it.”

Of course this is the new line of bashing from the left. “We’re pissing off the Muslims”, so they won’t help us any more!” This is because Hirsh like the left uses arguments they don’t even believe in, such as this quote from a lefty site commenting on the article:

“As most U.S. military experts now acknowledge, these tactics violated the most basic principles of counterinsurgency, which require winning over the local population, thus depriving the bad guys of a base of support within which to hide.”

Well “most military experts” on wrong on this point. “Winning over the population” to counter an insurgency was important in other wars against traditional enemies, but that’s NOT what we are fighting. We are fighting an “ideology”, we are fighting Islamofacist who associate with any group that hates the west and want’s Israel dead. That incompasses Hezbollah, Hamas, Al Qaeda, and many other groups no one even mentions.¬† We are fighting people who do this.¬† It doesn’t matter what headband they wear, the heart is the same. This makes what we are fighting an ongoing definition as we daily discover new “identities” they have. Previous administrations - such as the Clinton administration - refused to deal with this threat and as on 9/11 and even now we are paying the price.

To this Hirsh writes:

“Yes, the war against Al Qaeda called for a stretching and changing of the rules. We had to be ruthless with the maniacs who struck us on 9/11. But for that very reason, it required that we be very precise in identifying the enemy. Just the opposite occurred. “You can’t distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror,” President Bush declared on Sept. 25, 2002, as he made the case for the Iraq invasion. This was the kind of thing Bush often repeated as he sought to wheel the nation 90 degrees, in the middle of the fight against Al Qaeda, toward Iraq. The truth was quite the contrary: not only could you distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam, it was imperative that you do so, that you wage this fight with precision analysis as much as precision weaponry. We could not afford to let our soldiers see all military-age men as potential enemies.

Today, more from the muddled strategic thinking of the Bush administration than the actual threat from Al Qaeda, the “war on terror” has become an Orwellian nightmare: an ill-defined war without prospect of end. We are now nearly five years into a war against a group that was said to contain no more then 500 to 1,000 terrorists at the start (in case anyone’s counting, 1,776 days have now passed since 9/11; that is more than a full year longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Japan, which was 1,347 days). The war just grows and grows. And now Lebanon, too, is part of it.”

And that is exactly what the President said at the beginning. This war is going to take a long time to win. Yet it didn’t begin on 9/11, it began decades ago - from the slaughter at the ‘72 Olympics to the Marine Barracks in Beruit, to the Kobar Towers, it’s been a long time coming, and it’s going to take a long time to complete the mission.