**UPDATE**: You know an update is serious when I post it at the top of the post... I post this update for the benefit of clarity because I know that patriotism can lead otherwise sensible people to insensible conclusions. My beef with Frum, in case it is not obvious, is the fact that he acts like a petulant child when it comes to what happens to the United States when it uses its armed forces abroad. He seems to have a hard time accepting the fact that one way or another it is natural that our troops will be targeted when they are ordered to go abroad and get anywhere near an area filled with conflict and war--which Lebanon was in spades when these events happened. Regardless of how you feel about the situation, the fact remains that Hezbollah only did what it did on Lebanese soil, not American soil. You can make a good case for why we should have responded with harsh military force against Hezbollah, something I would have agreed with, but the fact remains that these were armed attacks against us when we stuck our noses into a very bloody civil war. You simply cannot do that and act surprised. Regardless of how you feel about Hezbollah, Americans probably would have responded as harshly to European intervention in our own civil war that was perceived as being allied to one side or another, as Hezbollah did in its own small capacity to the United States.
They whine about armed groups killing our troops abroad as though it were not a natural part of war, and are unable to distinguish between a group that kills Americans on their home turf, and ones that kill Americas on our soil:
Terror denial: In his column of December 26, 2002, Robert Novak attacked Condoleezza Rice for citing Hezbollah, instead of al-Qaeda, as the world's most dangerous terrorist organization: "In truth, Hezbollah is the world's most dangerous terrorist organization from Israel's standpoint. While viciously anti-American in rhetoric, the Lebanon-based Hezbollah is focused on the destruction of Israel. 'Outside this fight [against Israel], we have done nothing,' Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the organization's secretary-general, said in a recent New York Times interview." The sheik did not say, and Novak did not bother to add, that Hezbollah twice bombed the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, murdering more than 60 people, and drove a suicide bomb into a Marine barracks in October 1983, killing 241 servicemen.
It may be part of modern international law that embassies are the sovereign territory of their respective states, but as a matter of practicality in a time of war, they are nothing more than targets of opportunity connected to the regime in power. This is simply part of the danger of having an embassy abroad. I don't like the bombing of America targets anymore than the next American, but it requires a serious intellectual dishonesty to conflate bombings that happen abroad, when our government is involved with a regime fighting a civil war, with bombings on American soil. Even the bombing of the Marine barracks was simply another facet of the danger that is inherent to any foreign power that intervenes militarily into a civil war.
These things, even taken together, do not demonstrate a willingness by Hezbollah to come to real American soil, such as our territories or one of the fifty states, and carry out acts of armed aggression against us. The last thing that Hezbollah would want would be to drag the United States into the ongoing strife in Lebanon, pinning it between American troops in Lebanon, and the IDF along the southern border.
As a sovereign military power, the United States had every right to carry out reasonable, swift and deadly retaliations against Hezbollah in response to those attacks. The United States did not choose to go down this route, in part because the Reagan Administration wisely understood that these losses did not amount to even a sucker punch to the United States, and that there was little good that could come to the United States from getting more involved by carrying out reprisal attacks against Hezbollah.
If Frum had any grasp of history or conservative philosophy, he would know how ludicrous his argument sounds.
I'm confused. Hezbollah killed lots of Americans intentionally. They are vehemently anti-American, and have been so for a long time.
That they are more of a danger to Israel's existence than America's existance is true and certain. However, not every beast in a jungle is a lion - some are just tigers - and they don't have to be lions to be dangerous.
They did kill a lot of Americans intentionally, but those Americans were on Lebanese soil, during the time when Hezbollah was a faction in the civil war. That is very different from Hezbollah coming to the United States and attacking us here, or attacking our troops outside of Lebanon. Those American deaths were the result of us participating in a war zone, not acts of sheer terrorism. As I said, we had every right to retaliate, but Reagan did not go that route, I think in part because he realized that there was nothing to be gained out of getting in deeper.
To my knowledge, Hezbollah has never attacked the United States outside of Lebanon. That means that we can safely ignore them until things change. One of the things that we just have to accept is that if we send troops to Lebanon, they will become targets of Hezbollah. We can do two things about that: accept the reality and confront it, or whine like a petulant schoolgirl like Frum about how our troops shouldn't be targeted by hostile groups when stationed in other countries.