Just to pile on Jim’s point for a second, it seems to me that we are witnessing the diplomatic equivalent of the legal catastrophe recently played out in the Hamdan case and the related debate over the extension of Geneva Convention protections to terrorists. To wit: the treatment as if it were a sovereign nation of a terrorist organization which exists outside the civilizing norms on which much of diplomacy (like much of international law) is premised.

Why should we assume that a diplomatic model that (at best, arguably) works for nation states should be applied to terrorist organizations?

Or, to borrow from Jim’s hypothetical, North Korea is a sovereign nation. Even those of us who might have objected to a “sustainable cease-fire” as a bad idea would have to acknowledge that there is a logic for it in principle. No one has any thought of doing away with North Korea, the sovereign country. Our diplomatic strategies are aimed at its regime; containing the regime — as opposed to toppling it or otherwise changing it — is a viable strategy because the country it represents is a fact of life.

That is not — or, at least, it shouldn’t be — our calculation with Hezbollah. We DO want Hezbollah destroyed.

Wouldn’t a “sustainable cease-fire” implicitly acknowledge Hezbollah’s right to continue existing as a terrorist organization (and, by definition, prevent “firing” on it, which is the only realistic way it can be destroyed)? Wouldn’t it, moreover, reward Hezbollah — by virtue of nothing other than its savagery — with the elevated status of a sovereign?

Is that how you defeat terrorism?