Furtive Glances - Cease Fire Edition

I'd better take advantage of the current cessation of hostilities to produce the "cease-fire edition" of "Furtive Glances" before the whole house of cards falls apart.

• One of the more thorough and thoughtful bloggers around, Rick Moran of the Right Wing Nut House, will be passing 1 million visits shortly.  Congratulations to a good guy, who's produced excellent work on a regular basis, not an easy assignment at all.

One of the first exchanges I had with him was when I linked a piece he had written on terrorists.  I'm working from memory here, but I think it had something to do with negotiating with terrorists, and he had written that they'd "just as soon shoot you in the back."  My comment was that "I'd have written 'just as soon cut your head off,' but you get the point."  Rick (then known as "Superhawk") wrote that perhaps that was a more spot on observation.  I haven't found much of his that I could improve upon since.

For a good example of the thoughtful and thorough Rick Moran, check out this summary of mideast winners and losers.  I think it's a little early to be throwing in the towel over the outcome, but I will agree that, if the ability of UN resolutions and peacekeepers to accomplish, well, anything holds true to form, either the "fragile peace" is doomed or Israel is doomed to fight this war again.

• Ace of Spades has a story on university professors who want their academic freedoms to include violating anti-terrorism laws.  I kid you not.

Because it's good to demand compliance with the law about something serious like affirmative action quotas and protecting animals, but it's bad to demand similar compliance with trivial laws, like those forbidding the provision of material assistance to terrorist organizations.

• Karol Sheinin, hanging out at Michelle Malkin's place, discusses a New York Magazine article on "What if 9-11 never happened?" noted by Allahpundit at Hot Air.  Karol says it's just too soon.  Yeah, and simultaneously both too silly and too serious.  Allah wants to know:

President Gore also manages to take out Bin Laden with an airstrike five short months after a big terror attack. Does having a Democrat in office somehow make the Air Force more capable? Or was Osama simply forced out into the open by all those troops we have in Pakistan, who somehow don’t have their hands full with any Pakistani or jihadi forces objecting to their presence in the country?

Karol adds:

As I wrote on my own site, a child born to a man that died that day still doesn't understand what happened to daddy. I realize it's too much to ask that the media have some grace, and wait another decade, or so, to pretend that this life-changing event had never occured, but the rest of us should always remember what happened and how, and not buy in to the fantasy being peddled to us by those who just want to move on.

It seems that much of the anti-terrorist left, the ones who say absolutely they want to defeat terrorism, and that they would do a much better job of it than Mr. Bush, are living in fantasy worlds.  They imagine that this tactic, or that approach, or the other military strategy would get the job done and, voila, in their imagination it happens.  Mr. Sulivan is just another of these anti-terror leftists.  Fine, go ahead and believe your dreams.  I can't prove them wrong, just as you can't prove them right.  But you'd better leave defeating the terrorists as priority one.

• Finally, John Hawkins flags a Thomas Friedman column that takes a more optimistic view of how the Lebanese will view Hezbollah now that the fighting is over halted.

"On the morning after the morning after, Lebanese war refugees, who had real jobs and homes, will start streaming back by the hundreds of thousands, many of them Shiites. Tragically, they will find their homes or businesses badly damaged or obliterated. Yes, they will curse Israel. But they and other Arabs will also start asking Nasrallah publicly what many are already asking privately:

“What was this war all about? What did we get from this and at what price? Israel has some roofs to repair and some dead to bury. But its economy and state are fully intact, and it will recover quickly. We Lebanese have been set back by a decade. Our economy and our democracy lie in ruins, like our homes. For what? For a one-week boost in ‘Arab honor?’ So that Iran could distract the world’s attention from its nuclear program? You did all this to us for another country?”

On the other hand, if Hezbollah succeeds in keeping their arms and in focusing anger for the destruction at Israel (even though they put their arms and soldiers in civilian clothes in the cities) their influence will increase.  You can also be sure they'll continue to have the backing of Iran and Syria.