Hezbollah and its sponsors, Iran and Syria, are relying upon our soft hearts and softer heads to destroy us. Many think Israel suffered a major defeat last Sunday (July 30)  when the Israeli air force bombed a building in the village of Qana, near the Lebanese port city of Tyre. Initial reports were that 57 people -- most of them women and children -- had been killed. The Red Crescent (the Muslim version of the Red Cross) has been able to confirm only 28 deaths. The bombing's aftermath featured some of the most dramatic pictures of the war.  Several featured a man wearing an orange reflective vest and a green helmet, carrying a dead child from the rubble to an ambulance. Dr. Richard North, a British Web logger, noticed something odd about the photos.  Some of the workers are wearing different gear in different photos, yet they were clearly carrying the same corpse.

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. 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. 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. 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. Their greatest failure is their refusal to see the war plain, which means Iran and Syria.

Warren Buffett can feel confident about sinking his $4 billion into Israel - at least from an electronic-security point of view. I can say with utmost certainty that the country's most sensitive secrets are safely stowed away on secure servers, inaccessible to the public. Try as I might, I couldn't find any Word documents marked "top secret" regarding Israel's plans regarding Iran on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Web site; no PowerPoint presentations on Israel's alleged nuclear weapons program on the Ministry of Defense site; no PDFs on future political plans on the main government site - nothing, nada, not a thing!  Even using the special advanced "Google hacking" techniques I learned from Johnny, I couldn't get an untoward, scandalous or headline-making fact on any of the burning issues of the day. One less thing for Warren Buffett to worry about.

In military parlance, a "spoiling attack" is when you see your enemy mobilizing to strike you, you hit him first to throw him off balance. By responding more vigorously to the kidnapping of its soldiers and the rocket attacks on its cities than Hezbollah likely expected, Israel may have launched a spoiling attack on Iran. On July 20, Iran said it would reply on August 22 to the Western package of incentives for ending its nuclear program.  For Westerners, the only thing peculiar about this is the length of time Iran is taking to respond, since for us, the date August 22 has no special meaning. But it may have more significance for Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

If you knew the U.S. government was going bankrupt primarily because of spending on Social Security and Medicare, and the only solutions were the following, which one would you pick? (1) Doubling individual and corporate income tax rates. (2) Immediately cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits by two-thirds. (3) Immediately cutting all federal discretionary spending (including defense) by 143 percent. (4) Reforming Social Security and Medicare by moving from the current defined benefit plans to a program of individual investment accounts, like the current 401(k) and Medical Savings Account (MSA) plans. Many leading economists of the political right and left have concluded the U.S. government will not be able to pay its creditors, including its current and future retirees, the full value of promised benefits, unless current policies are radically changed. So we must choose.

The Israeli-Hezbollah war wouldn't have happened if John Kerry were president, John Kerry told the Detroit News last Sunday. President Bush hasn't devoted the attention to the Middle East that he would have, Mr. Kerry told reporter Valerie Olander. Sen. Kerry didn't explain how his personal attention would have prevented Hezbollah's abduction of two Israeli soldiers, or its firing of rockets into Israeli cities, and Ms. Olander didn't ask. Sen. Kerry has misplaced confidence in his own persuasive powers, and in what can be accomplished by diplomacy.  The lesson liberals like Kerry can never seem to learn is that diplomacy based on hubris and cowardice inevitably leads to failure.