Is the weakness of the West now being revealed for all to see?

Israel is losing. Is that the canary keeling over? J.R. Dunn lists the mistakes, and they are legion.

The errors of this campaign will require months to work out, but here's the short list:

* Ohlmert, apparently one of the few prominent Israeli political leaders with no combat experience, refused to take advice from experienced officers and directly interfered with the set war plan.

* There's evidence of further micromanagement, particularly in the "siege of Bint Jibeil", which any competent commander would have masked and bypassed. It appears that the IDF was ordered to concentrate on the place, thus hitting the Hezbollah where they were strongest. It's a faulty strategy that has been tried before in other wars, at places like Verdun and Stalingrad.

* Announcing to Hezbollah, Syria, Iran, and the world at large what Israel was not going to do. At several points in the past weeks Israeli authorities told the world they were not going to move any deeper in Lebanon, not attack Syria, not duplicate their 1982 invasion, not advance on Beirut, etc., thus allowing the enemy to shift men and resources from these areas to where they were most needed. In1965, Lyndon Johnson said exactly the same thing about North Vietnam. He lived to regret it.

* Making an enormous public play about avoiding civilian casualties in a situation where they couldn't possibly be avoided, rather than putting the blame where it belonged.

* Continuing infrastructure strikes long after they stopped making tactical or strategic sense, guaranteeing the hatred and fury of the Lebanese, the people they have to work with to control Hezbollah. (Yet another bridge was struck on Saturday the 29th, days after the decision not to invade was made.)

* Depending on air power to do the job, attempted by such conquerors as LBJ, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton. It worked for Bill in Serbia because everything works for Bill. It has never worked for anyone else.

Ralph Peters seems to agree with that assessment.

All efforts to make war easy, cheap or bloodless fail. If Israel's government - or our own - goes to war, our leaders must accept the price of winning. You can't measure out military force by teaspoons. Such naive efforts led to the morass in Iraq - and to the corpses of Qana.

Despite one failure after another, the myth of antiseptic techno-war, of immaculate victories through airpower, persists. The defense industry fosters it for profit, and the notion is seductive to politicians: a quick win without friendly casualties.

The problem is that it never works. Never.

Bret Stephens agrees.

Israel is losing this war.

This is not to say that it will lose the war, or that the war was unwinnable to start with. But if it keeps going as it is, Israel is headed for the greatest military humiliation in its history. During the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Israelis were stunned by their early reversals against Egypt and Syria, yet they eked out a victory over these two powerfully armed, Soviet-backed adversaries in 20 days. The conflict with Hezbollah--a 15,000-man militia chiefly armed with World War II-era Katyusha rockets--is now in its 21st day. So far, Israel has nothing to show for its efforts: no enemy territory gained, no enemy leaders killed, no abatement in the missile barrage that has sent a million Israelis from their homes and workplaces.

Generally speaking, wars are lost either militarily or politically. Israel is losing both ways. Two weeks ago, Israeli officials boasted they had destroyed 50% of Hezbollah's military capabilities and needed just 10 to 14 days to finish the job. Two days ago, after a record 140 Katyushas landed on Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told visiting Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice he needed another 10 to 14 days. When the war began, Israeli officials spoke of "breaking" Hezbollah; next of evicting Hezbollah from the border area; then of "degrading" Hezbollah's capabilities; now of establishing an effective multinational force that can police the border. Israel's goals are becoming less ambitious while the time it needs to accomplish them is growing longer.

The reason this is so distressing is that their war has melded into our war, as Charles Krauthammer points out.

Something radically new is emerging in the Middle East: the century-old Arab-Israeli dispute has been transmuted from a nationalist to a religious war. And as a result, the Arab-Israeli wars are now merging into the global conflict between radical Islam and the West.

The transformation was swift in coming. Hamas' electoral landslide in Palestine just six months ago marked the political death of Yasser Arafat and the secular, vaguely socialist and entirely nationalist movement he represented. Hamas is fighting not to create a 23rd Arab state but, as its charter explains, to recover "an Islamic Waqf." Meaning? Territory claimed under the Islamic precept that "any land the Muslims have conquered by force ... during the times of [Islamic] conquests" more than a millennium ago belongs to Muslims forever because "the Muslims consecrated these lands to Muslim generations until the Day of Judgment."

Krauthammer goes on to say that there are now two camps in the Islamist host, the Shiites led by Persian Iran and the Sunnis led by Arab Al Qaeda.

Michael Ledeen says it feels like we are living through the 1930s again, as a growing global menace is willfully ignored by the West.

Certainly there is lots of bad news, most of which confirms what we already knew: The Western world hates Israel; the taboo on anti-Semitism is off; the Western world has been P.C.’ed to the edge of death; there is no stomach for fighting the war against Islamic fascism.

Sounds like the Thirties to me.

I always have my doubts about “trends.” The history of 20th-century America is largely about a country that never prepared for war, and was always compelled — by our enemies — to conduct enormous crusades. It was seemingly all or nothing for us. The history of America in war, like that of most others, is largely about making enormous blunders at the beginning, and then sorting it out. Our great strength is not so much avoiding error, but the ability to recover quickly, change tactics and even strategy, and get it done. I think that applies to the three world wars in the last century.

The scary thing about our current jam is that 9/11 was supposed to have been the wakeup call, but we are again asleep. For this I blame our leaders — both the administration and the Dems. The administration is constitutionally unable to explain itself, and the Dems have no qualms about losing all present battles so long as they can elect their candidates and bring down this president.

It is all part of the weakness of the West. It is a weakness built upon the best of intentions. In the West, after centuries of bloodshed and suffering, we have created societies that are marvelous engines of economic prosperity, unprecedented medical advances, great progress in science and technology, all directed toward the elevation of the human condition. We are, as societies, wealthier and healthier than any societies that have ever existed in the history of mankind. And yet, the very things that make our lives easier have made us less spiritual and more selfish and self-centered. We find ourselves unable to withstand suffering, or even the prospect of suffering. We find ourselves unable to muster up the moral courage to defend our way of life and our civilization. We find ourselves unable to elect leaders who have the courage to ask of us the sacrifices necessary to make such a defense. We may very well be on the verge of creating a society so rich and so smug as be defenseless. If the Israelis, who we all thought were hardened by the very fact that they live in such a tough neighborhood, are unable to defend themselves against the likes of Hezbollah, is it not a certainty that the Europeans will be unable to defend themselves and, yes, even Americans?

I wish I knew the answers.