What to Do? US in a No-Win Situation?

Steve Sailer has excerpts from Gideon's Blog [get link from Steve's link] concerning the consequences of any settlement of the situation in South Lebanon. This is a Rubik's Cube:

The consequences for the United States could be more significant. In Iraq, Americans are fighting and dying for a Shiite-dominated government that supports Hezbollah verbally if not materially. Maintaining our position in Iraq's burgeoning sectarian conflict just got a whole lot harder; if we force Israel to stand down, we hand a victory to our enemies (not good for our position in Iraq); if we don't force Israel to stand down, we support their war against Lebanese Shiites (not good for our position in Iraq); and if we impose a "solution" in the form of an international force, then we "own" yet another crisis that can't actually *be* solved (which is incidentally also not good for our position in Iraq)....

There has been a lot of commentary about how tough the Hezbollah fighters have proved. Piffle. Hezbollah is proving hard to defeat not because they are great warriors but because guerillas who have the support of the populace are *always* hard to defeat. To defeat them, you have to be either willing to destroy the populace - Israel is not, nor should it be - or able to separate them from the populace - Israel is unable to. Ironically, an authority perceived as legitimate can get away with - and get positive results from - the kind of brutality that can cause an illegitimate authority to lose a war. Thus, France lost their war in Algeria against the FLN - but the far more inept and corrupt but more legitimate Algerian military regime, the FLN's heirs, basically won their war against the Algerian Islamists, employing more than comparable brutality against a fairly comparably popular insurgency (the Islamists did, after all, win a popular election; the FLN did not enjoy majority support in polls for most of the Algerian war of independence). Hafez al Assad, the current Syrian President's father, was able to destroy the Syrian arm of the Brotherhood in about a week, with 20,000 casualties, and his regime survived; Israel's much less sanguinary and longer-lasting effort against Hezbollah has so far made Hezbollah more popular. Israel's problem fighting Hezbollah - and Hamas - is not that Hezbollah and Hamas are so mighty or so clever but that they are legitimate and popular, and Israel cannot separate them from the populace the way another legitimate authority might.

Long ago, an Iranian friend who hates the mullahcracy told me that eventually we will have to use nuclear weapons to prevent the Iranian menace somewhere down the road. The US is too humane and weak-willed to protect itself, it appears, and will invite terrorists to attack us at home and abroad as a result of the evil-doers' perception of American humanity and ambivalence.

It's 1 AM and I hope this doesn't sound as hopeless tomorrow morning.