Like Clockwork

....does the Enemy Media progression vis-a-vie the Hamas conquest of the Gaza Strip unfold in dismayingly predictable fashion.

One of the central pillars of the Blogtheon, Hugh Hewitt, has been chronicling it. First, he took note of how this major defeat in the War Against Islamic Fundamentalism failed utterly to penetrate the EM bubble:

Had Israel used even a distant cousin of Hamas' tactics, the international outcry and coverage would have been enormous and enduring. Condemnations would have rolled down on Israel like an avalanche, and would have kept rolling as they do after every clash between Israel and its enemies.

But here as we watch the rise of an ominous terrorist enclave just as brutal as the Taliban was or al Qaeda in Iraq is, the world is largely silent, paralyzed at the prospect of condemning an enemy of Israel. "The rise of Hamas in Gaza represents the extension of Iranian influence to Israel's south," Scott Johnson notes at Powerline this morning. "The result is untenable. It constitutes one more chapter in what Churchill called 'the gathering storm.'" He's right of course, but American media seems almost wholly indifferent to this expanding crisis. Democrats can't stop demanding defeat in Iraq long enough to note the connections between the battles in Iraq and those in Lebanon and Gaza.

This translates to, "What's the big deal? Hamas and Fatah are fighting all the time. Why do we need to say anything about it? There'll just be another cease-fire and the whole thing will blow over. Now can't we get back to our round-the-clock Paris Hilton Watch?"

This "ignore it and it'll go away" meme didn't last for long, because the significance and implications of the Hamas triumph are too powerful:

Gaza has fallen to Hamas, but not just to Hamas: the group is the newest member of Iran’s growing portfolio of allies, clients, and proxies, and thus its victory was also a triumph for Iran’s policy of manifest destiny in the Middle East. This should not be surprising, as Hamas has never been shy about explaining where its loyalties lie. In 2005 while visiting Tehran, Khaled Meshaal said, "Just as Islamic Iran defends the rights of the Palestinians, we defend the rights of Islamic Iran....We are part of a united front against the enemies of Islam." In 2006, Sa'id Siyam, the Hamas interior minister, told Al-Jazeera that:

"Iran is an Islamic state, which is being targeted by the USA and Israel. Syria is an Arab state that is targeted. Hezbollah is also targeted and so is Hamas. Therefore, we can call this the axis of resistance and defiance. What unites them is the fact that they are all targeted. Therefore, we have the right to establish ties with states that open their doors for us."

Fair enough. The collaboration between Iran, Syria, and Hamas, and the millions of dollars that Iran has poured into Gaza, have indeed paid dividends. America and its allies in the Middle East are being surrounded: There are now two Iranian clients, Hamas and Hezbollah, on Israel’s borders; Syria and Iran bracket Iraq and provide money, training, leadership, and manpower to the insurgents fighting there; and Lebanon is once again being subjected to Syrian bombings, assassinations, and terrorism in an attempt to wrest the country from its westward-looking citizens.

As I said in my overtime podcast today, and as Micheal Ledeen has been warning for years, Gaza and Lebanon and Iraq and Afghanistan are not separate local conflicts with individual antagonists, but a cohesive regional war being orchestrated and waged by the Iranian mullahgarchy with the ultimate goal of driving us out of the Middle East so that they can dominate it as the platform from which to make a bid for the global Islamic Caliphate. Bashar Assad and his stooge Ba'athist regime in Syria, radical Shiite Hezbollah in Lebanon, radical Sunni Hamas in Gaza and al Qaeda in Iraq and Afghanistan are the proxie tentacles the mullahs are using to bog us down and erode our will to resist. And Tehran's burgeoning nuclear weapons capability is the ace in the hole, the trump card, the short cut to what they believe will be our unconditional-without-firing-a-shot surrender.

Whether we would actually be THAT supine is a matter of conjecture, though at this stage of the game the possibility cannot be entirely ruled out. But that's the impression we're building up in the enemy's mind. And that makes the BIG war nobody (on our side, anyway) wants all the more likely.

Parenthetically, the similarity to Nazi Germany in the late 1930s is harrowingly eerie. Amir Taheri revealed in the New York Post this week how a number of top Iranian military commanders, including in the Revolutionary Guard hierarchy that were Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's top backers in his bid for Iran's ceremonial presidency, are, beneath their public Ameriphobic bluster, less than eager for the all-out confrontation with the United States their protege is pushing. While neoAdolph evidently is a genuine Islamic "fundie" who really believes that "Allah" is on Iran's side, others, such as General Yayha Safavi, the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Defense Minister Muhammad Pour-Najjar, and Admiral Ali Shamkhani, the former defense minister and current chairman of the High Council of Strategic Defense are hedging their bets.

Whether that means they have enough of a historical perspective to recognize that America is as likely to retaliate swiftly and murderously beyond a sufficiently high level of direct provocation as she is to lose interest and run away at pretty much any provocation level short of that is uncertain. But to a man they candidly believe, according to Mr. Taheri, that the mullahgarchy would be unlikely to survive a direct military conflict with the U.S. Which makes news of the mullahs' latest internal crackdown more than a little ominous.

For those literate in the history of the last century, this will bring immediately to mind the trepidation of Germany's military leadership at Adolph Hitler's brazen foreign policy brinksmanship in the immediate pre-WWII years. The latter began with the fuehrer's decision to reoccupy the Rhineland, the strip of German territory west of the Rhine River that was supposed to remain demilitarized according to the terms of the Versailles Treaty. Any attempt to change that status on the part of the Germans was, by definition, an act of war.

The Wermacht's elite Prussian officer corps feared an Anglo-French incursion into the Ruhr, the key industrial area of western Germany, would result from any move into the Rhineland, so much so that they were prepared to carry out a coup de tat against Hitler to forestall it. But then a funny thing happened; when Hitler made his move, the British and French did....nothing. Two years later when Germany annexed Austria - also verbotten by the Versailles Treaty - they still did nothing. But when Hitler demanded Czechoslovakia's Sudentenland, which just happened to contain all of the country's vital military installations and emplacements, Neville Chamberlain and Eduard Daladier didn't do nothing - they actively ceded the area to Hitler on the Czechs' "behalf".

With each of these steps, Hitler's internal clout and prestige grew, and whatever restraining prudence remained in Germany's leadership correspondingly shrank. By the time Hitler moved against Poland, Anglo-French threats of war were ignored because he had dismissed their leaders as (Does this sound familiar?) empty suits and paper tigers who would never truly try to stop him.

Even after war was declared, the Brits and French still did nothing - the infamous "sitzkrieg" or "Phony War" - while Germany invaded and conquered Poland, then transferred their forces to the West for the attack that began in May 1940 and overran France in a month and came within two weeks later that summer of knocking out Britain as well. And the greatest tragedy is that it all could have been averted, prevented, "pre-empted" by a firm, determined action years earlier to stamp out a dictator's fevered dreams of empire before they had the opportunity to germinate into mass death and destruction.

History is currently repeating itself in the Middle East, as well as in the Democrat Party and American newsrooms. A fact that Double-H considers "astonishing" but which doesn't surprise me in the slightest. He writes:

It would be a service to readers and viewers if the MSM began to treat the war with many fronts as just that, and to repeatedly remind the audience that Iran's various pushes and policies are all guided by the same men towards the same end of destroying Israel. The other side of the radical Islamist coin - the al Qaeda/Salafist extreme - also aims to destroy Israel and to usher in the return of the Caliphate. (See Lawrence Wright's The Master Plan from the September 11, 2006 New Yorker.) MSM's narrative - that all is wrong with the world because of the Bush Administration's invasion of Iraq - is not merely wrong, it is dangerously misleading.

But it's what they want to believe. It's what they have to believe, because they are completely invested - ideologically, intellectually, emotionally, and partisanly - in that belief. To accept the reality of a moral and just war in which the other side is genuinely evil and America is genuinely good - like World War II is generally regarded - would be like forcing an evangelical Christian to concede the blasphemous claims of the Da Vinci Code. It would be, for EM'ers, akin to committing spiritual suicide. They just can't do it, and therefore they won't do it.

So, with apologies and sympathy to Hugh, it should come as no surprise that the "blame Bush" template for Hamas' triumph in Gaza was quickly placed into service:

But even former Bush Administration officials blame Washington for the region's latest woes. "The U.S. bears responsibility, both for things it's done, particularly in Iraq, but also for things it's not done, which is where the peace process comes in," [Richard] Haass said. "The President never developed his idea of a Palestinian state. He never used his leverage to help Egypt get launched on a trajectory of greater openness."

Ah, yes. If only Bush had invaded Israel instead, arrested the entire Israeli government, deported the Jewish populace to our shores for immediate American citizenship (provided they learned Spanish), and turned the Holy Land over to the Palestinians, he could have saved Hamas the trouble of actually having to conquer it one piece at a time.

This is an appeasement mentality of such size, power, and magnitude as to make Neville Chamberlain look like George Patton. If Hillary Clinton gets elected president next November, as I expect she will, America will come to embody the famous words of Chief Joseph:

"Hear me, my chiefs, I am tired. My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."

Pity the Iranian hydra won't recupricate. When they're done with us, 418,500 deaths will look like a bargain.