Cease fire? Forget it.

If there were a cease-fire in Lebanon, Hezbollah would have won this war. They will still have their missiles and infrastructure. But of vastly greater importance, they will have shown themselves to be the only Arab fighting force in history capable of fighting the Israelis to a draw. This will increase their status exponentially, and show that militant Islamic fundamentalism is the hope of the future for the Arab world. A popular pan-Arab revolution could easily result in the overthrow of one or more moderate Arab regimes. And Israel would be in deadly peril, having been proved mortal.

What's happening now in Lebanon is horrible. But it's not the worst thing. And it is entirely the fault of Hezbollah. Israel must fight on, and the United States must support her. Because no one else will.

By the way, I hope you didn't miss this story from the NYT on Saturday, in which fleeing Lebanese Christians blamed Hezbollah for their misery, saying that Hezbollah was hiding among them firing missiles at the Israelis. Check out this passage from British journalist William Dalrymple's "From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East," in which he interviews an elderly priest of the Suriani people, an Arab Christian sect living in southern Turkey. The old priest fought as a boy in Ein Wardo, where his people had holed up to resist mass murder during World War I at the hands of the Muslims:

"After the war, when I was a young man," said Abouna Shabo, "we were friends. But then we were in the majority, so they could give us no trouble. Now the Muslims have all the power and it is different. My son is right."

"They give us very bad trouble," said Bedros [the son]. "In the last three years ten Christians have been killed in the villages around Ein Wardo. We cannot be friends like this."

..."These days feel just like those before 1914," said the old priest, pulling himself slowly out of his chair and making his way, bent-backed, across the room. "It feels like before a storm. You can see the black clouds, and the first drops are already falling."

The book was published in 1997. Earlier on this journey, Dalrymple stopped at a monastery in the area, where a monk told him that Hezbollah had gotten active there, in Turkey. The Turkish authorities, the monk reasoned, considered Hezbollah an effective counterweight against the PKK, the Kurdish revolutionists. Said the monk:

"Sometimes the Hezbollah kidnap Christian girls from remote farms and villages and force them to marry Muslims. They say they are saving their souls; it happened to four girls last year. Another Hezbollah unit has taken over Mar Bobo a Christian village near here: about ten or fifteen gunmen live there now. They've seized the roof of the church as their strongpoint, and they make the Christian owmen wear veils. They say we should go back to Europe where Christians come from, as if we were all French or German, as if our ancestors weren't here for centuries before the first Muslims settled here. Now our people live in fear. Anything can happen to them."

If you think the infidels of Europe don't have it coming to them when Hezbollah and its allies get finished with Israel, you're dreaming.