Israel is playing by "Chicago Rules"

72-hour ultimatum, via The Sandcrawler. Radio C-SPAN covered a press conference of the French ambassador to the U.N. where there was much discussion of "proportionality" and "restraint" applied, of course, to Israel. Lost in the all of the hand-wringing is a crucial fact of life in an army at war--every soldier fights with this as a given: your buddies will NOT leave you behind. If you get grabbed by the bad guys, whatever the circumstances and the consequences, your fellow soldiers will do whatever it takes to get you back and if that means invading neighboring countries, so be it. We lost sight of that in the Eighties when Marine Lt. Col. Rich Higgins was grabbed by Hezbollah and eventually executed--it was a U.N. peacekeeping operation, State Department had the lead, etc. We remembered it and took it to heart by 2003 which is why we used the assets we did to get Jessica Lynch back. All of this talk about proportionality and restraint is meaningless when it comes to soldiers in the hands of the enemy. Your response needs to be swift, massive, ugly, and very disproportionate so that the bad guys will think twice about about trying it again. Moral of the story: (as aptly put by a caller to one of the radio shows): Play by Chicago Rules: (as explained by Sean Connery in The Untouchables) "if they put one of yours in the hospital, you put one theirs in the morgue."