Crikey, John, not the dreaded “Neville Chamberlain” analogy. Fightin’ words! At the risk of stating the obvious, you win a war, by winning. Nothing more, nothing less. Callous though it may sound, the day-by-day death toll is irrelevant if the strategy makes no sense. By way of illustration, I’ll trump your “Chamberlain” with a “Pearl Harbor”. On December 7th, 1941, the Japanese struck a devastating blow against the US. They killed all the Americans they could find that day. Less than four years later, their cities were in ruins and their country had been occupied. They lost.

So we if abandon the historical analogies, and return to the awful Yassin, what do we get? If we assume (and I think that is the assumption) that in recent years he had little “operational” significance, all that has happened is that a living “spiritual leader” has become a dead “spiritual leader.” I suspect that his capacity to inspire evil is undiminished, and may have even increased. I hope I’m wrong, but if I’m not, where’s the victory? Last time I checked, ‘Ayatollah’ Khomeini was still causing trouble, and that bastard has been dead for fifteen years.