Rather than look at the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict as a major disaster and a failure, Charles Krauthammer sees it -- correctly -- as a golden opportunity. In the Washington Post this morning, Krauthammer puts the conflict in its proper perspective, and shows why the US should not rush Israel into a cease-fire without having achieved its military objectives first:

Every important party in the region and in the world, except the radical Islamists in Tehran and their clients in Damascus, wants Hezbollah disarmed and removed from south Lebanon so that it is no longer able to destabilize the peace of both Lebanon and the broader Middle East. ...

Everyone agrees it must be done. But who to do it? No one. The Lebanese are too weak. The Europeans don't invade anyone. After its bitter experience of 20 years ago, the United States has a Lebanon allergy. And Israel could not act out of the blue because it would immediately have been branded the aggressor and forced to retreat.

Hence the golden, unprecedented opportunity. Hezbollah makes a fatal mistake. It crosses the U.N.-delineated international frontier to attack Israel, kill soldiers and take hostages. This aggression is so naked that even Russia joins in the Group of Eight summit communique blaming Hezbollah for the violence and calling for the restoration of Lebanese sovereignty in the south.

But only one country has the capacity to do the job. That is Israel, now recognized by the world as forced into this fight by Hezbollah's aggression.

Once again, we arrive back at the source of this opportunity: the disastrous miscalculation of Hezbollah and its sponsors. They believed that their action would either force Israel to capitulate and return hundreds of Palestinian prisoners or rally Arab nations into action against Israel. Neither resulted, and Hezbollah's terrorists have now gotten themselves stuck while their patrons sit on their hands.

We will have no better time or opportunity to deal Hezbollah a crushing defeat, and we need to remember that we are at war with precisely the same enemy. Hezbollah is one of the primary proxies for Iran and Syria in their attempt to spread terror and destruction against the West. Lebanon has proven themselves unable, although not necessarily unwilling, to disarm Hezbollah and force them away from the border, an inability that led to this act of war. If Israel does not contain and cripple Hezbollah, they will return to provoke another war at a later time.

America needs to see this as a unique opportunity to strike a blow against the two largest state supporters of terrorism. Israel doesn't even want our assistance in cleaning out the Hezbollah threat; they just want us to leave them alone so that they can complete the mission. Israel could even take on Syria without our explicit assistance, if Damascus gets as stupid as Hezbollah. Why should we step in to protect the same enemies that have sworn to destroy us?

We do not need another twenty years of UNIFIL solutions and Hezbollah provocations. We need to destroy Hezbollah and Hamas before they start tipping their missiles with chemical, biological, or nuclear warheads. If we do not seize this opportunity, we will regret it when we have to fight them ourselves later.

UPDATE: Zev Chafets writes on a similar theme from Tel Aviv in today's New York Times:

The Israeli government in 1991 was ordered by President George H. W. Bush to stay out of the fighting. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, a man of limited communications skills, complied without explaining his decision to the Israeli public. When Israelis realized they were unprotected, people panicked. Schools shut down, businesses closed and just about everyone fled to safety.

This reaction led Israel’s enemies to a simple conclusion: whatever the Israeli Army could accomplish on the battlefield could be neutralized by hitting the squeamish home front. Hezbollah (and the Palestinians and Syria) began laying in stocks of missiles. ...

What Mr. Olmert didn’t know when he gave the order [to attack] — what the Israeli public itself didn’t know — was that the rockets wouldn’t cause panic. Fear, yes. Caution, too, and some complaining (this is Israel, after all). But, amazingly, most people in even the most vulnerable areas have behaved with something like the sanguine good nature of the British during the Blitz.

What’s different this time? Leadership, in Jerusalem and in Washington.

For Israelis, fighting back made all the difference. We’ve taken Hezbollah’s best shot and we’re still standing.

We need that wartime leadership to continue. If Hezbollah's best doesn't cause Israelis to flinch, then it shouldn't cause us to flinch, either. Chafets summarizes by noting the poetic justice of having Bush fils restore the Israeli self-confidence that Bush pere discarded. Let's not revert back to 1991 all over again.

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