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JonBenet, Iran, and Israel John LeBoutillier We are at war in Iraq; sadly, our soldiers are dying daily and there are many badly injured troops coming home to a new life of rehab and challenges. We are also at war – in Afghanistan, worldwide and here at home – against al-Qaida. Our ally Israel is in a mess of a conflict with Hezbollah. Iran is flexing its muscles. Two Fox News Channel correspondents in the Gaza Strip were kidnapped and haven't been heard from since. So, what happened last week? JonBenet Ramsey's murder case - 10 years old - knocked every other story off the news for three days! Some weird little guy in Bangkok claims he did not kill her – "it was accidental" – and he is suddenly better known than any 2008 presidential candidate. And no one believes he even did it!
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Why and how can this happen? Precisely because of the unrelentingly bad news coming from the Middle East these days.
JonBenet is an escape – an unsolved riddle – with all sorts of weird and duplicitous and incompetent players involved.
Everyone has an opinion – and we'd all rather talk about this case than focus on the awful facts facing us from the Muslim world.
Americans know that we have stepped into a major hornet's nest over there and that there is no real solution to that mess. It will haunt us for years to come.
We all are searching for a leader here to emerge who can frame this thing in a way that gives us some hope that things might get better. But McCain? Hillary? What a joke they are! We must do better.
More and more you hear the same talk written here over a year ago: the need for an independent third candidate.
Meanwhile, over in Israel, we have just seen what was always unheard of: Israel becoming soft and being unprepared for a war. And, in fact, losing against Hezbollah in the sense that an Israeli enemy is still standing, still arrogant, and already prepping for another deadly encounter.
How did this happen?
Overconfidence combined with an Omert government that lived off the past triumphs of former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. As always happens with a new government, it faced a "test" of some sort: Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, 9/11, etc. Olmert was so focused on the mess in the Palestinian Authority after Hamas' huge January victory that he and his generals and their supposedly top-flight intelligence had no clue that Hezbollah was dug in with 10,000 Iranian-supplied missiles. What a failure of intelligence!
Olmert will not last long as prime minister; his approval ratings in one month have fallen from 78 percent to 40 percent. He will not be in office a year from now.
Israel is in a stunned state of total shock.
Fifty-eight years of successful defense again Arab attackers lulled them into believing they couldn't lose. But as we are learning all over again in Iraq, guerrilla warfare where the enemy mixes in with innocent civilians is a whole different ball game.
Plus, the PR war is always totally against Israel. The United Nations is totally against them – witness Kofi Annan's disgraceful pre-judgment about the U.N. observers' deaths early on.
All in all, Israelis are demoralized and angry – especially at their own government's incompetence and selfishness. (Olmert is being investigated for somehow buying a luxury apartment in Jerusalem at a cut rate, and their General Harrutz spent the day before invading Lebanon selling his own stocks.) Sixty percent of the Israeli people opposed the cease-fire that their own government agreed to!
And that cease-fire agreement made no mention of the two captured Israeli soldiers. Can you imagine that? Can you believe Israel wouldn't have made that an absolute deal-breaker?
They should have made one thing clear: We get the two men back alive – or we level Lebanon and Syria, and we systematically kill the leaders of Syria and Hezbollah.
Look for big political changes there – and for a renewed military toughness reflecting the will of the Israeli people.
Iran is growing more assertive and confident by the day.
Why?
Because they know Bush is weak and our operation in Iraq is a disaster.
Last week on CBS's "60 Minutes," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad specifically mentioned Bush's declining approval ratings. So, obviously, Iran sees Bush's political weakness here – mostly brought on by the failure in Iraq – and figures they can afford to taunt us and rub our noses in our weakness. Oh, by the way, one other idea: Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nazrallah, is apparently holed up in the Iranian Embassy in Beirut. Israel wants to kill him. Why don't Israel troops just shoot their way into the Embassy and grab this murderous bastard? Oh, sure, protocol says you can't do it ... sovereignty, etc., diplomatic immunity, all those striped-pants niceties. Well, if there is any one country in the world that doesn't have a leg to stand on when it comes to invading someone else's embassy, it is Iran! The hostage situation in 1979 showed that they couldn't care less about the sovereignty of another country's embassy. Wouldn't that be a delicious irony?
Editor's note:
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