A couple of objections to my column today via e-mail:

–With all do respect to Paul Johnson, few wars could be called senseless, especially the Thirty Year’s War. Phillip Bobbit in “The Shield of Achilles” has done a thorough job of explaining why these wars were fundamental in resolving, permanently, many outstanding problems in Europe. Bobbit’s salient point is that conflicts should be understood not as separate “small” wars being fought between states, but as “Long Wars” between ideologies. An example of this is the conflict that extended from 1914 to the 1990′s to decide whether Europe were to be controlled by either Communism, Facism or Democracy.
The same goes for the ME today; they continue their “Long War” that began with the independence movements, and has/is being fought between Democracy and Islamo-facism today. This dovetails well with your article. Today’s “Long War” seems to be going in favor of Islamo-facism, but we in the West and moderate Muslims must not allow that ideology to win in the end. To do so, our leaders, military and especially our citizenry will have accept that this “Long War” will likely continue for decades before it is resolved. As history has shown, choosing a middle ground of “co-existence” with Islamo-facism really means living in a de facto state of war anyway, so we have little option but to fight to win….
–Rich,
Abbas and his gang are every bit as bloodthirsty as Hamas, only much less effective lately. Abbas has too much baggage to be our hope or yours, even as a lesser evil. Abbas’ function lately is to collect American and European and Israeli money, materiel, and intelligence until Hamas comes to take it all away.

ME: On Abbas, a friend I showed a draft of my column yesterday joked that when I lumped him with other leaders I called “relatively decent,” that never did “decent” so need the qualifier of “relatively.” I don’t hold out great hopes for him, but we’re going to be in the lesser-evil business in the Middle East for a long time, even if we’d prefer that the evils were much lesser than they are.