“See, the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it’s over,” Bush pointed out. “I felt like telling Kofi to get on the phone with Assad and make something happen. We’re not blaming Israel. We’re not blaming the Lebanese government.” The comments drew extensive media coverage. But as is so often the case, reporters missed the story entirely.
“After days of polite diplo-speak, reading from talking points and sticking to the script, here was the unguarded Bush, the impatient Bush, the small-talking Bush,” Peter Baker of The Washington Post wrote on July 18.
But that ignores the fact that the international talking points are wrong, and the president is correct. Syria probably could rein in Hezbollah if it wanted to. And it’s sad that Bush only “felt like” telling U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan to speak to Syria’s president. Bush should have insisted Annan do so. The fact that he’s constrained from doing so by diplomatic niceties is a sign of Western weakness, not Western strength.
Winston Churchill supposedly said about the Korean War, “To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war.” Of course, the quote is also attributed to another British prime minister, Harold Macmillan. Somehow the latter seems more likely.
Churchill, after all, well knew the failure of jawing. He’d spent the 1930s trying to get British politicians to take the Nazi threat seriously.
In 1936 Hitler violated the Versailles treaty by remilitarizing the Rhineland. Instead of facing him down, which might have required fighting, the Western governments preferred to talk. Two years later Hitler wanted the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. Again, jaw-jaw failed. Hitler dismantled the relatively powerful Czech military without firing a shot. By the time Hitler launched a war, he was positioned to sweep across western Europe.
The lesson: Always take militant leaders at their word.
Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran have repeatedly made clear they favor war. We’ll never get their respect through talking -- only through the use of force. That may not be the polite thing to say, but it’s true. And the sooner we realize it, the better.