On the Right - The War Parties At Work.(some in the media are urging Israel to attack the Palestinians)(Brief Article)

NEW YORK, AUGUST 28

The bugles are sounding, to rouse not the American military, but the Israeli military. George Will, writing in his syndicated column, wants war. At greater length, in an essay in The Weekly Standard, Charles Krauthammer pleads the same case. What they have said is that Israel can't sustain the fusillade of terrorist attacks that have bloodied the state in the devastating eleven months since the breakdown of the peace negotiations. In their view, and the view of others, nothing is evolving on the long, hapless road from Oslo, save the hardening of Palestinian resolution to end the state of Israel.

The analysis is not new. Norman Podhoretz, the critic and former editor of Commentary, has said much the same thing for years. The Palestinians, as he put it, are to be likened to the Viet Cong in the Sixties. Their mission was to infiltrate and to engage in terrorism and to prepare themselves to do the same thing for year after year after year until South Vietnam, toppled by a final thrust of military force, succumbed. Israel does not suffer notably from infiltration. The enemy is over there, at the other end of the line. Within Israel, there are no Viet Cong, though that too could change if Israeli Palestinians came to believe that the land of their forefathers might one day be returned to them. Many South Vietnamese were friendlier to the north when it became plain that the north was taking over the country.

The philosopher-strategist James Burnham once remarked to his colleagues at National Review, "You know, it's simply not true that wars never settle anything." That would appear a cliche, but the words were spoken at a time when advocates of peace-at-any-price were proposing capitulation at every point on the globe where the Communists had struck a salient. Of course, wars can accomplish things, as the Carthaginians and the Nazis learned. But to generate a war requires a reasonable sense of capabilities, ours, and theirs.

Mr. Will thinks in terms of a war of three or four days, no less devastating for its brevity. Mr. Krauthammer pretty well goes along. Both agree that terrorists ...