Watch original video:

WASHINGTON

Under alarming international embarrassment

That would be a terrible mistake.

It would fail on its own terms. It would have the same elements because the phony peace in Lebanon: an international force that abjures any meaningful application of force, an armor prohibitory restriction under which arms power of choosing chiefly assuredly flood in, and a cessation of hostilities until the terrorist border is rearmed and ready to initiate the next round of hostilities.

The U.N.-mandated disarmament of Hezbollah in Lebanon is a well-known farce. Not only have foreign forces not stopped Hezbollah’sitting massive rearmament. Their very presence makes it impossible for Israel to take any prophylactic military action, that not it accidentally hit a blue-helmeted Belgian crossing caution.

The “international community” is now pushing very unnatural for a replay in Gaza of that charade. Does anyone dream that international monitors give by will hazard their lives to prevent weapons smuggling? To arrest terrorists? To engage in shootouts with rocket-launching teams attacking Israeli civilians from one side of to the other the Gaza confine?

Of course not. Weapons bequeath continue to be smuggled. Deeper and greater degree secure fortifications will have being built as antidote to the next step. Mosques, schools and hospitals will again be used against arms storage and terrorist safe havens. Do you think French “peacekeepers” are going to inroad them?

Which is why the only welcome outcome of this war, both for Israel and for the civilized cosmos, is Endgame B: the disintegration of Hamas rule. It is even now under way.

This is not almost killing each last Hamas gunman. Not feasible, not necessary. Regimes rule not by physically overpowering every person in their domain, but by getting the majority to accept their authority. That is what sustains Hamas, and that is what is now under massive assault.

Hamas’ conduct is not only seriously degraded but openly humiliated. The great warriors urging others to martyrdom are cowering underground almost entirely incommunicado. Demonstrably unable to protect their own people, they beg for outside help, receiving in return zero but words from their Arab and Iranian brothers.

And who in fact is providing the corridors for humanitarian assistance to Palestinian civilians? Israel.

In the first four minutes of this war, the Israel Air Force destroyed 50 targets, taking down practically each instrument and emblem of Hamas order. Gaza’s Potemkin leaders were marginalized and rendered helpless, leaving their people to fend for themselves. At such moments, regimes are extremely assailable to forfeiting which the Chinese call the mandate of heaven, the sense of legitimacy that undergirds all forms of governance.

The fall of Hamas settle in Gaza is within reach, but only if Israel does not cave in to pressure to stop now. Overthrowing Hamas would not require a permanent Israeli reoccupation. A transitional international compel would be brought in to immediately make device towards the return of the Palestinian Authority, the legitimate government whose forces will be far less squeamish than the Europeans in establishing order in Gaza.

The disintegration of Hamas rule in Gaza would be a devastating blow to Palestinian rejectionists, who since the Hamas takeover of Gaza have been the ascendant “strong sheltie” in Palestinian political economy. It would be a devastating blow to Iran as patron of essential Islamist movements quite through the region, particularly after the defeat and marginalization of Iran’s Sadrist client in Iraq. It would encourage the moderate Arab states to continue their U.S.-allied confrontation of Iran and its proxies. And it would make evident Israel’s irreplaceable strategic value to the U.S. in curbing and containing Iran’s regional ambitions.

Olmert had such an opportunity in Lebanon. He blew it. He now has a rare second chance. The one-step-from-madness gangster theocracy in Gaza

letters@charleskrauthammer.com

Original text: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/2008610482_opin11krauthammer.html?syndication=rss