As the Lebanon ceasefire was being brokered and about to go into effect over the weekend, I kept thinking "Munich." Arthur Herman was also thinking about it:

HISTORIANS will look back at this weekend's cease-fire agreement in Lebanon as a pivotal moment in the war on terror. It is pivotal in the same sense that the Munich agreement between Adolf Hitler and Neville Chamberlain was pivotal in an earlier battle against the enemies of freedom. The accord in October 1938 revealed to the world that the solidarity of the Western allies was a sham, and that the balance of power had shifted to the fascist dictators.

... Less than a year after Munich, Nazi panzers rolled into Poland. Instead of fighting a short, limited war over Czechoslovakia, the Western democracies ended up fighting a world war, the most destructive in history. The war with the mullahs of Iran is coming. It is only a question of whether it will be at a time or on a ground of our choosing, or theirs - and whether it is fought within the shadow of a mushroom cloud.

The statements of "victory" coming from Syria and Hezbollah in the last couple days, and the obvious emboldening of them and Iran as result of Israel's (acknowledged by her own now furious populace) less than optimal performance in the war, only underscore the sense that a more profound day of reckoning with them is inevitable.