You know you've lost when you have to use heavy duty airpower to kept the bad guys under control. Seymour Hersh wrote an excellent article on this a couple of years back:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/12/05/051205fa_fact

A different take on Israel's use of airpower in it's loss against Hezbollah last summer:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/24/AR2006072400807.html

And perhaps the most heart-felt take by Bruce Cockburn in his "If I Had A Rocket Launcher":

"Here comes the helicopter -- second time today

Everybody scatters and hopes it goes away

How many kids they've murdered only God can say

If I had a rocket launcher...I'd make somebody pay

I don't believe in guarded borders and I don't believe in hate

I don't believe in generals or their stinking torture states

And when I talk with the survivors of things too sickening to relate

If I had a rocket launcher...I would retaliate

On the Rio Lacantun, one hundred thousand wait

To fall down from starvation -- or some less humane fate

Cry for Guatemala, with a corpse in every gate

If I had a rocket launcher...I would not hesitate

I want to raise every voice -- at least I've got to try

Every time I think about it water rises to my eyes.

Situation desperate, echoes of the victims cry

If I had a rocket launcher...Some son of a bitch would die"

let me see if I understand your position: Arafat's leadership was weak, and the peace process was a waste of time, so the Palestinians needed action not talk, right? Like... Hammas? The ones you kinda sorta railed against in your original letter?

Gosh, this middle east thing is so confusing, let's just hand it over to President Numbskull and keep dropping bombs, as long as armchair warriors and chatroom denizens are safe and sound, then why bother questioning our leaders?

If you haven't already.

I guess all these dying soldiers and Iraqi civilians don't know about "mission accomplished". And by the way, no one needs to "ask the right questions" about terrorists' standards-- we already know they attack civilians and don't follow any rules of engagement-- that's the definition of a terrorist.

I'm certainly no master strategist, I'm just saying Bush needed to listen to experts (Schwarzkopf & Bush Sr warned against Iraq and they should know) and that this battle is a totally different beast. No, we can't treat it like it's unpaid parking tickets, but we can't just blow up everything in sight while the network keeps moving and permutating (hence my example of the 9/11 terrorists in Florida-- an ounce of prevention would've been worth a pound of cure, no? Bush ignored pre-9/11 warnings too, and our FBI & CIA could've worked together more effectively with this admin)

No, federal indictment didn't get Bin Laden, but did bombing Afghanistan do any better? Yes, we toppled the Taliban-- for a while. But it bounces back and moves around. That's the problem with this new kind of war against networks (not nations) -- they replenish their ranks and permutate around the globe. I agree with Andrew Bacevich (sorry, I forget his rank) who says that we need new strategies-- and we can't design those new strategies with a President who won't listen to the military, intelligence and diplomatic experts but insists on proceeding in his ignorant way. The CIA was just arm-twisted into building support for the Iraq war.

And as an aside, and I know this will alarm many people, I don't see how we can get around wiretapping. It's not new and I think that judiciously used, is probably necessary. Also, I'm not saying that terrorists should enjoy full Bill of Rights protections (I think that the 4th doesn't apply to them) but we should at the very least try to abide by international law & Geneva conventions.

Finally, I wasn't giving Israel & Palestine as an example of what works- but what doesn't work. The Israeli gov't was very aggressive with the Palestinians, and it only built sympathy for them and perpetuated terrorism in return. Just because I think the Palestinians have some legitimate complaints doesn't mean I'm going to defend suicide bombers, sorry. I'm of Irish descent, and while I take issue with Britain's handling of the Irish conflict, the IRA was guilty of many atrocities as well.

Both are examples of similarly new and complex conflicts. What I'm saying is that in the new context of war, the old strategies don't seem to work any more-- they tend to bolster the terrorist's cause.

In these conflicts, enemy combatants aren't clearly defined, combat zones aren't demarcated-- it becomes a guessing game -- hence the total chaos we see ground soldiers enmeshed in. And the problem is that these conflicts become endless and as the years drag on, sympathies tend to build for terrorism -- how else can you explain people sympathizing with Palestinian suicide bombers? It becomes self-fulfilling prophecy.

Once again, I'm not saying I have any winning strategies, but that the Administration needs to listen to the experts and analysts and not imperial presidents and VP's with dubious agendas. Bush was also warned about the complexity of battle with the apocalyptic, Jihadist mindset and as well as of the political volitality of the region. But perhaps you're more of an expert than them.

When I look at the last 30 years of the Israeili-Palestinian conflict, I look at what has been gained for the Israeli people, and the Palestinian people.

The Palestinian people have done poorly in terms of standards of living, education, and, most of all, their own civil rights, particularly in those locales they have been self-governed by corrupt Palestinian "leaders."

The reign of Arafat through much of that time, until his death from AIDS, was nothing less than a kleptocracy.

So there you have the roots of the failure in the peace process. Thank goodness for American leadership that will not accept the miserable, desultory status quo in which the Palestinian people are the permanent pawns of Arab-state grievance politics.