(RealClearPolitics) Jed Babbin - Unless he is extraordinarily lucky, Israeli Army Corporal Gilad Shalit won't live to see his twentieth birthday. Shalit's mind must be focused on the soldiers' dilemma his comrades face. They will do anything to rescue him, but nothing to trade for him. Shalit's kidnapping can be turned into a strategic defeat for the Palestinians. It should be used to destabilize the relationship between the Palestinians and the nations that use them as cannon fodder in a perpetual war against Israel. Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and others fund and provide sanctuary for Hamas and other Palestinian terror groups to keep alive the Palestinians' hope of erasing Israel from the map. Israel can never settle the Palestinian problem by dealing only with the Palestinians. Because Israel's neighbors are the sources of their problems, so they must be the focus of the solutions. Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal - operating from his headquarters in Damascus - ordered the raid in which Gilad Shalit was kidnapped. Mashaal, and pretty much every other terrorist leader other than bin Laden, operate from Syria with impunity. Bashar Assad has no fear that through American or Israeli action his support for terrorism will be interrupted. From Syria money, weapons, and terrorists flowed into Iraq for months before and ever since the American invasion of 2003. The writer was a deputy undersecretary of defense in the George H.W. Bush administration.
2006-06-30 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive