Against restraint

Victor Davis Hanson’s National Review Online column is “A real war.” It is discouraging that Hanson senses the need to elaborate on the obvious, and even more discouraging to measure how far his recommendations depart from current American foreign policy.
He urges “a radical reappraisal of our entire relationship with the Middle East. A Radio Free Europe, though valuable, nevertheless did not free Eastern Europe; nor did Voice of America. Containment and deterrence did. As long as governments in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and many Gulf states encourage hatred of the United States, we must quietly consider them de facto little different from a Libya, Syria, or Iran. For all the glitter and imported Western graphics, al Jazeera and its epigones are not that much different from Radio Berlin of the 1930s.”
He adds that “anytime we have showed restraint