Below The Beltway

So argues John at Op-For:

[W]hen the wall fell, the Islamists rose. New York, Saudi, Bali, Chechenya, London, Madrid; the war that Israel fought for decades has become global.

Does anyone disagree that we are fighting the same war as the Israelis, against the same enemy?

We stand as democracies, they as terrorists. Perhaps it is time that we treat the proxy war as history, the Syrians and Iranians as enemies, and Israel as a real ally.

And I think he’s correct. Hezbollah is the same organization that murdered American marines and blew up and American embassy more than 20 years ago. Hamas is the successor to the people who hijacked a cruise ship and murdered a man in a wheelchair.

The often repeated idea that the War On Terror began on September 11, 2001 is a conceit that may yet prove fatal.

Update: Bill Kristol makes a similar argument

What’s happening in the Middle East, then, isn’t just another chapter in the Arab-Israeli conflict. What’s happening is an Islamist-Israeli war. You might even say this is part of the Islamist war on the West–but is India part of the West? Better to say that what’s under attack is liberal democratic civilization, whose leading representative right now happens to be the United States.

An Islamist-Israeli conflict may or may not be more dangerous than the old Arab-Israeli conflict. Secular Arab nationalism was, after all, also capable of posing an existential threat to Israel. And the Islamist threat to liberal democracy may or may not turn out to be as dangerous as the threats posed in the last century by secular forms of irrationalism (fascism) and illiberalism (communism). But it is a new and different threat. One needs to keep this in mind when trying to draw useful lessons from our successes, and failures, in dealing with the threats of the 20th century.

And argues that we should be focusing our attention not on Hamas and Hezbollah, but on their sponsors:

The war against radical Islamism is likely to be a long one. Radical Islamism isn’t going away anytime soon. But it will make a big difference how strong the state sponsors, harborers, and financiers of radical Islamism are. Thus, our focus should be less on Hamas and Hezbollah, and more on their paymasters and real commanders–Syria and Iran. And our focus should be not only on the regional war in the Middle East, but also on the global struggle against radical Islamism.

It was said in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks that the War on Terror Radical Islam was going to be a long war. It may end up being as long as the Cold War was.

H/T: Outside The Beltway

Update # 2: This from Jay Tea at Wizbang

I’ve always been a staunch supporter of Israel, and this just reasserts my beliefs. They’re fighting another head of the same Islamist hydra we have been. In fact, they’ve been fighting more heads than we have, and for longer.

What amazes me is the number of people who don’t recognize what’s going on now for what it really is. The Israeli Front in the War on Terror.