MICHAEL WALSH: Israelis Should Take the Lessons of War to Heart.

Part of fighting is the resolve to get the war over with as quickly and definitively as possible. “If you make war, wage it with energy and severity,” said Napoleon to one of his generals in 1799. “It is the only means of making it shorter and consequently less deplorable for mankind.”

This is a lesson the Israelis should take to heart if their country is to survive. “Never again” is the national motto, and it’s time an increasingly anti-Semitic world remembered that. As for the Americans—tied down for 20 years in perhaps the stupidest war in its history in Afghanistan, a place of no strategic interest to the nation—it’s time for us to recall that weakness is not strength and that guilt about the past is not conducive to a bright future.

When you have difficulty defeating a rabble of goatherds for lack of willpower—and your last total victory came in 1945—it’s time to sack your officer corps, empty out the Pentagon, get women off the front lines, bring back the male-only draft, train warriors and not guidance counselors, and elect an administration who understands the nature—and, more importantly, the purpose—of warfare.

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