To Answer Brutality With Brutality...

...is to admit one's moral and intellectual bankruptcy, and it can only start a vicious circle.  On it goes:

Hezbollah guerrillas unleashed their deadliest rocket attack on northern Israel on Sunday, killing 12 reserve soldiers with a single missile at this kibbutz and killing at least three people and wounding dozens more with a barrage that battered Haifa.

Israeli warplanes and artillery also pounded Lebanon, causing at least 13 deaths as fighting intensified despite a draft U.N. cease-fire resolution. Loud explosions echoed across Lebanon's capital, Beirut, when Israeli jets fired missiles into its southern suburbs in the afternoon.

Who needs nukes for Mutually Assured Destruction?

Probably one of the most quoted bits of Eisenhower's famous Chance for Peace speech is this:

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.

But this part seems more germane to me for some reason:

This is one of those times in the affairs of nations when the gravest choices must be made, if there is to be a turning toward a just and lasting peace.

It is a moment that calls upon the governments of the world to speak their intentions with simplicity and with honesty.

It calls upon them to answer the questions that stirs the hearts of all sane men: is there no other way the world may live?

There is another way, but there are none so blind as those whose vision extends no further than an eye for an eye...

ntodd