Sunday Morning

Ah, what a pageant.

1. Suddenly, two wins over the White Sox have put the Yankees back on the pundits' good graces. Bob Ryan shouts, "The Yankees are coming! The Yankees are coming!" On The Sportswriters, and Mike Lupica, in his Sunday notes column, writes this:

Say it again, and remember it if the Yankees do win the American League East again:

This is the toughest group they've had since Mo and Jeter and O'Neill and Brosius and them.

Not as good.

Just as tough.

2. Israel. I keep thinking of my favorite scene in my favorite movie, Clemenza's gun scene with Michael Coreleone in The Godfather. I quote from memory:

Clemenza (showing gun): It's as cold as they come, impossible to trace, so you don't worry about prints, Mike. I put some special tape onna trigger anna butt.

(I always thought Richard Castellano spoke his line with slightly the wrong emphasis. As Mario Puzo explained in the novel, the special tape was designed not to hold prints, hence the line should have gone, So you don't worry about prints, Mike, I put some special tape onna trigger anna butt. In other words, Michael shouldn't worry about prints, not because the gun is cold (which makes no difference as to fingerprints), but because fingerprints won't adhere to the special tape. Anyway, small quibble.)

Later on in the scene, Clemenza tells Michael about the coming war. Everyone will line up against the Corleones, he says--not only Sollozo's regime and the Tattaglias, but also the rest of the five New York families: the Barzinis, the Cunios, the Straccis, and one other family that goes unmentioned. (Perhaps, though, the Corleones are one of the Five Families, and the four "other" families will line up against them. Probably.) Killing Sollozo seems foolhardy, on the face of it, but war seems inevitable, and Clemenza, the old warrior, is resigned to it: This has to happen every five years or so, ten years. Helps clean out all the bad blood. It's been ten years since the last one. You gotta stop these guys at the beginning, you know, like they shoulda stopped Hitler at Munich. They never shoulda let him get away with that. They was just asking for trouble.

In other words, if there be war, let it be now. Or, as Clemenza's pupil and successor, Frankie Five Angels, would say in Godfather, Part II, "We gotta hit 'em now, while we got the muscle!"

To a student neither of history nor of world politics, but of what I've read, this appears to be the moment at hand for Israel. Full-scale was is coming--not with its old rivals, the Egyptians, Jordanians and Saudis (the first two have treaties with Israel, the third apparently wants no part of this conflict)--but the same sort of Islamism that flew through the office window on 9/11. The Palestinians and Hamas (basically one and the same) ran true to form, using Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza not to build schools and hospitals but to burn the entire place to the ground and set up Kassam rocket sites. Hezbollah, backed by Iran's muscle (think of Sollozo and Tattaglia) has provided just enough provocation to justify Israel's incursion into Lenanon.

A sea change is taking place, a tipping point reached, and Israel has decided to deal with their enemies by killing them. This partially explains the almost bewildered response of the rest of the world: claims of "disproportionate" responses, as if the goal of warfare were not to attain disproportionate outcomes in lives and territory. Vladimir Putin called for Israel to be "balanced"--between what and what? How "balanced" has the Russian army been with the Chechnyan terrorists? How does "balance" fit in wartime?

Most gratifying has been President Bush's statement, not volunteering to negotiate or calling for a cease-fire, but saying, Yes, the fighting should stop: Hezbollah should lay down its weapons. A full-scale war between Israel and Iran seems in the making, if not, Israel will take on Iran's clients, all at once if it has to. Israel will hit them now--while they have the muscle.