Not Over

I wrote this shortly after last summers Israel/Hezbollah war

Today's Hezbollah rally in Lebanon is a sign that the War on Terror is far from over. The Syrian government is using these events, Hezbollah quitting the government, killing 1 and attempting to kill another member of the parliament to make the government fail, and now these rallies, and soon, as promised, they will resort to violence. Iran has in the past used Hezbollah as their front line troops in the war against Israel.
I have long believed that we will not win this war until we change the status quo in these two nations. It was my hope that changes in Iraq would lead to changes in Syria and Iraq. This no longer seems to be the case. We fight against an enemy who is ruthless and determined, they do not want reason, they do not want peace, they only want to spread terrorism.
Terrorism is a weapon of war which uses the camera lens to magnify its effectiveness. Terrorism is only effective in the court of Pubic Opinion, in that the attacks have little military impact. However when the military responds, the terrorist can use that response to clam excessive use of force, as in Lebanon this summer (with the UN's help of course). So restraint has a strategic place in our conflict in Iraq; however there is a time when little else can be done and force is the only option. We have to go for the source to make this as painless as possible. We now see what happens when you give the bad guys a break i.e. Moktada al-Sadr. We stopped our attempts to arrest al-Sadr. We also held back in Fallujah. We did so mainly to avoid the perceived backlash that many in the western press said we were sure to face. Now they are the loudest voices saying that it is too late to stop him, they say we must talk with him… NEWS FLASH we did, it didn't work. We had to go back and finish in Fallujah and now we have to finish the Mahdi Army. The longer we wait to do something the worse it's going to be! These media elites are the same people who say we must talk to Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, and Hamas.And say what? Please don't hurt us? Please keep selling us oil? Please don't make us convert?I will not submit!!

Oh I forgot to add that this post is only my uninformed opinion and may not be all that useful, but it did make me feel better just to get it out of my system.