EDITOR’S NOTE: “Window on The Week” acts as our weekly, quick-and-punchy, “between-the-issues” survey of some of the hot topics of the day. “Window on The Week” gives you a sense of what “The Week” — a popular feature that appears fortnightly in National Review — looks like. #-# John Kerry says the current fighting between Israel and Hezbollah wouldn’t have broken out if he were president. Al Gore thinks his election as president in 2000 would have held the earth’s temperature constant. If a Democrat wins the White House in 2008, will he put an end to death itself? #-# So that’s how Democratic-style multilateralism works? You insult and score cheap political points against an embattled ally when he is visiting the United States in the midst of trying to prevent his country from collapsing into chaos? At least that’s how some Democrats were practicing their foreign policy when Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki visited Washington and made comments so critical of Israel and exculpatory of Hezbollah that he could have been mistaken for the president of France. Democrats leapt to disinvite him to deliver a speech to a joint session of Congress, and Howard Dean denounced him as an anti-Semite. We would prefer Maliki to say different things about the Israeli–Hezbollah conflict, but, then again, we aren’t running a major Arab country and attempting to hold our Shia base while cracking down on Shia death squads. Maliki has to do both as he struggles to secure Baghdad. He is now moving to “Plan B,” since his first effort, announced six weeks ago, has proved an abject failure. More American and Iraqi troops are headed to the capital, but probably not in enough numbers to make a major difference. We fear that the chances of soon ending the sectarian bloodletting there are diminishing by the day. #-#The Bush administration, correctly, considers the Israeli-Hezbollah war a strategic opportunity. Rather than mindlessly echo the international calls for an immediate ceasefire, it is giving Israel time to pound Hezbollah. Israel can’t destroy Hezbollah, but it can punish it severely and push it back from Israel’s northern border. That could create the conditions for a meaningful international force to help patrol southern Lebanon in a settlement that would be seen as a defeat for Hezbollah (now riding high on its perceived ability to withstand the Israeli assault over the last two weeks). Hezbollah’s diminishment, in turn, would be a blow to Iran, which counts on the terror group as a deterrent against Israeli or American military action to stop its nuclear program. But this is all predicated on Israel’s inflicting pain on Hezbollah. It won’t be able to do this adequately without continued stalwart American diplomatic support, even as the pressure grows on it to quit prematurely. #-# As Israel continues its campaign against the terrorists of Hezbollah, reporters go out of their way to emphasize Lebanon’s civilian death toll, sometimes suggesting that Israel is engaging in “collective punishment” of its neighbor. Kofi Annan was more disgraceful by an order of magnitude, claiming that Israel “apparently deliberately” targeted United Nations. peacekeepers. In fact, Israel has taken painstaking precautions to avoid harming innocents, even as Hezbollah’s thugs hide among Lebanon’s population centers and rain rockets on Israeli neighborhoods. The fog of war ensures that there will be civilian casualties in even the most restrained and precise of military campaigns, and the media are quick to seize on this sad reality as a way of denouncing Israel. But the crucial distinction remains: This is a conflict between those who target civilians, and those who go out of their way to save them. The global elites aligned against Israel have indicted nothing but their own character. #-# We think the Supreme Court’s Hamdan ruling is wrong: Wrong in holding that a provision of the Geneva Conventions applies to Qaeda terrorists, and wrong in holding that the president lacks constitutional authority to try terrorists by military commission. The one ray of sunshine in Hamdan is that it appears to allow commissions if Congress authorizes them. Accordingly, the White House is finalizing a proposal for authorization legislation. What has been leaked to the press is encouraging. The legislation would allow terrorists to be held until the cessation of hostilities. It would let military judges bar them from trial proceedings if their presence would endanger national security by allowing them to hear classified evidence. (Their lawyers would still be present to represent them on such occasions.) It would permit the admission of hearsay evidence as long as it was not deemed “unreliable” — an important recognition that conventional law enforcement cannot investigate the overseas activities of terrorists, and that a lower evidentiary standard is therefore appropriate. And it would state that the Geneva Conventions “are not a source of judicially enforceable individual rights,” meaning that detainees could not sue the government on the grounds that their Geneva protections had been violated. We would prefer the legislation to go a step farther and declare explicitly that the Geneva Conventions do not apply at all to the detainees — that is, that the Supreme Court was wrong — but this position may be politically untenable. The White House should work now to win over skeptical Republican lawmakers (several of whom have said they want detained terrorists to be tried by courts martial) and push to get the legislation passed by the November election.

#-# A hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday suggested that the NSA’s terrorist-surveillance program may be headed toward a richly deserved congressional authorization. Chairman Arlen Specter, who has been one of the program’s most ardent critics, has proposed legislation that would permit the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to determine whether the program is constitutional. The Bush administration, which has long opposed legislative attempts to enact judicial checks on the executive’s constitutional authority, strongly supports the Specter proposal. This surprising but generally positive development shows that the debate has moved from rhetoric to reality. Senator Specter has had to confront the need for broad executive surveillance authority in times of crisis. The administration has had to face the hard facts of the Supreme Court’s Hamdan decision, which, however misguided, signaled a preference for security measures determined jointly by the executive and the legislature. Left out in the cold are civil-liberties extremists, for whom no sensible measure is ever warranted. Not all compromises are perfect, but the emerging outlines of this one look promising.

#-# Democrats think that embryonic-stem-cell research is a great issue for them because most of the polls are on their side, and Republicans are divided. We are skeptical. All Republican candidates can say, honestly, that they favor stem-cell research. Some of them want only to withhold funding for one type of stem-cell research (the kind that kills human embryos) for moral reasons, and to ban one subcategory of research (the kind that clones and kills them). They distinguish, that is, between types of stem-cell research that should be funded, those that should be tolerated, and those that should be prohibited. In campaign debates, candidates with that position should be able to come across as thoughtful and reasonable, even to people who disagree with them. President Bush came across that way in 2004. How many voters have the kind of strong and detailed convictions that would move them to act against such candidates? We are willing to bet: not many. #-# On Tuesday, the Senate passed the Child Custody Protection Act, which would make it a federal crime to transport a minor across state lines in order to evade her home state’s parental-involvement laws on abortion. (Parents could still take their daughters across state lines for an abortion.) The measure has been passed by the House four times now, most recently over a year ago. Such commonsense restrictions on the ability of minors to access abortion are wildly popular. And yet, even after the Senate passed the bill with a supermajority this week, Democratic leaders have insisted on stalling the legislation — keeping it from a House-Senate conference to reconcile the two versions of the bill passed. The legislation is a sensible protection for girls and their parents and should already have been sent to the president.

#-#Andrea Yates systematically drowned her five children in the family bathtub after her husband left for work one morning five years ago. This week, in retrial, a jury declared her not guilty by reason of insanity. Her ex-husband, Rusty Yates, is delighted that this “loving” mother and her public image are on the road to recovery. While we have no doubt that Yates is a deeply disturbed woman, we will not join the parents in their declared happiness at the verdict. Over the past five years, the cult of victimology has been hard at work to soften Mrs. Yates’s image. We prefer to remember the real Yates family victims — Noah, John, Luke, Paul, and Mary, whose lives were brutally ended by their mother at ages 7, 5, 3, 2, and 6 months.

#-# The supreme court of Washington State has declined to rewrite marriage laws to accommodate same-sex couples. It is the latest in a string of court victories for defenders of traditional marriage. The case for a constitutional amendment to protect marriage was premised on a judicial campaign to redefine it; so in the wake of these court victories, the amendment seems less urgent. Yet we suspect that these decisions may reflect only a transitory change in judicial mood in response to political circumstances. The high court of Massachusetts, by imposing same-sex marriage on that state, aroused serious opposition. The demand for an amendment was the indispensable organizing cry of that opposition. The opposition has not succeeded in enacting the amendment. It has, however, succeeded in enacting state initiatives protecting marriage, in electing some pro-marriage politicians — and in making judges around the country wary of following the example of their Massachusetts colleagues. In other words: The campaign for a marriage amendment may be responsible for some of the courtroom triumphs that seem to make it less necessary. If that campaign lets up, don’t be surprised if the courts start to feel their penumbras. #-# Islamists just don’t know how to have fun. When they’re not banning kites or denouncing the World Cup — okay, we’re not entirely opposed to that one — they’re in a twit about beauty contests. Now they’re targeting Nadine Chandrawinata, Miss Indonesia. According to a lawyer for Islamic Defenders Front, an Indonesian Islamist group, Chandrawinata is guilty of “insulting” women and “Indonesian dignity.” The group has reported her “immoral behavior” to the police, hoping to use a law that bans participation in beauty contests on penalty of two to six years in the slammer (the law has been ignored since 1998). The idea that the lovely Miss Chandrawinata should be prosecuted is of course absurd. But if Indonesia insists, perhaps it could settle for deporting her our way. Hers is an “insult” we would be happy to accept.