Barone deserves another long careful gander:

"Just as you're not as likely to favor responding forcibly to attacks on civilized nations and their people. Surely, this kind of thinking goes, there's some way to compromise, some things to negotiate, some concessions to be made. Surely, it's just too crude, too unsophisticated, too unnuanced, to respond with military force. That attitude is, of course, familiar to those who have read the history of the 1930s. I've been reading Donald Cameron Watt's pointillist history of the diplomacy between the Munich agreement of September 1938 and the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, How War Came: The Immediate Origins of World War II.

How people then yearned to avoid war! And for good reasons: War is indeed terrible, and the war that broke out in September 1939 was far more terrible than what we seem currently to face. But then how do you deal with Hitler? And how do you deal with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly said that Israel must cease to exist? Negotiation, as Neville Chamberlain realized after Hitler tore up the Munich agreement and occupied Czechoslovakia, was not enough. Diplomacy--the construction of alliances to deter Hitler--proved not to be enough either, especially after the Soviet Union made its nonaggression pact with Germany on Aug. 23, 1939, one of the most evil dates in history.

Cameron Watt's 1938-39 is not today, but like today it was a period of shifting alliances, slippery negotiation partners, evil dictators intent on the destruction of decent societies--and a period of no easy choices for the forces of good. Today we see the forces of democracy struggling in Iraq against terrorists and insurgents who may be no more than young males bent on mayhem; we see the Arab nations at least temporarily more troubled by Hezbollah and Hamas than by Israel; we see those who urged Israel to give up land for peace having to confront the fact that Israel gave up land and the people there sent rockets back to Israel. In that setting, it's important for those who care deeply about Israel to remember which American party's constituency shares their views and which American party's constituency, increasingly, doesn't."