and I’m afraid that I’ll stick with “spineless”…when you’re in charge of protecting the safety of your citizens and you let political pressure stop you from doing that, then that qualifies as spineless, gutless, feckless as far as I’m concerned (shrug)…I tend to be blunt, no offense intended…and no, I am most decidedly NOT the same person I was 20-30 (unfortunately plenty old enough for the 30 years to work…lol) years ago, not in many important ways, and I seriously doubt Ehud Barak is either…see link below…apparently he’s the one arguing FOR giving Hamas a breather to rearm and redeploy:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/dec/31/israel-rejects-gaza-ceasefire-move

re: Arafat…the Israeli’s big mistake – the one that may well end in the nation’s destruction eventually – is that they let the Americans and Euros talk them into letting the bastard and his thugs back into the country in the first place…the Palestinian areas were a completely different – much better and improving – world until he was let back in to turn it into the terrorist disaster area it is today…this would be another good time for the Israelis to wake up and ignore what the Euros and Americans (as George W Bush continues his descent in feckless, unreliable ally land) are telling them to do about Hamas…stay the course, finish the job…it would be far better to have never bothered starting this if you don’t go all the way, just as it turned out with Hezbollah.

As for what I mean by finishing it?

Every…last…terrorist…dead. At least, every last one close enough to directly attack citizens of Israel in their own country. Why in the world Israelis insist on believing that stopping short of that – “showing mercy” as it were – will do them a solitary bit of good with the people and nations and media around the world who hate them, I have never been able to figure out. If you’re going to be hated by as many groups/nations as Jews and Israelis are hated by, then you damn well better make sure you are also feared if you want to survive. I’m not sure the Israelis have the stomach for that sort of thing anymore (and surely not the current political leaders), hence my skepticism about this new round of fighting accomplishing much of anything other than more bad PR for Israel. I hate to say it, but that’s my read. I would love for them to prove me wrong, but I ain’t holding my breath.

In fact it’s so outrageous that the only people who will ever admit believing it have to first stammer & blush “but please understand, i HATE Joe McCarthy” before they can own up to seeing all those threads leading back to 1917 Moscow and the Kremlin where a few thousand dedicated eastern illuminati keep the nightmare alive and the Lenin unburied.

People who live by choice (theirs and their leadership’s) in squalor, and who by choice are permanent basket cases of UNRWA, need humanitarian aid in the form of an army of psychiatrists to cure them from their derangement, which within two generations has reached genetic proportions.

I made a confusion, he retired the troops from Lebanon and was not Defense Minister. I apologise for my mistake.

and even if I bought into the idea of Barak being willing to do the bitter end thing, HE IS NOT THE BOSS over there…he’s taking orders from as spineless a bunch of politicians as has ever been in charge of Israel. And they’ll pull back before finishing the job. Count on it.