And the winner is . . .

Bush is arguing that Israel defeated Hezbollah. But that's not what his former supporters think. Glenn Greenwald finds these quotes:

National Review Editors- In addition to winning in Lebanon, Iran has the upper hand both in Iraq and in the contest over whether it will be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. If current trends continue, the Bush administration’s project in the Middle East will require the same sort of expedient we have just seen in the Israel–Lebanon conflict: a papering over of what is essentially a failure.
Dan Riehl So, it turns out the lofty anti-terrorism rhetoric of Bush was little more than what some speech writer wrote to be read from a screen. . . . This will embolden the opposition in Iraq and could lead ultimately to the destruction of Israel. Our war President has turned out to be a disgrace.
Paul Mirgenoff, Powerline Blog Over at NRO's corner, John Podhoretz contends that this would mean the end of the Olmert government. I'm tempted to suggest that our government, having seemingly lost its will to oppose (or even to let others oppose) our deadliest enemies, deserves the same fate.
Michelle Malkin Israel and the West surrender to Hizballah.Terrorists and the U.N. win.
Peter Brookes, Senior Fellow, Heritage Foundation, NRO Symposium If there is a clear winner in this war, it’s Iran.
Soshana Bryen, NRO Symposium Thus far, the U.S. and Israel lose; Iran wins.
Anne Bayefsky, NRO Symposium Kofi Annan’s wide grin, as he stood side-by-side with Secretary Rice on Friday, said it all. He won. But America and freedom’s cause lost.
Jeff Goldstein Israel and the US have been defeated. Hizballah will grow emboldened. As will Iran.
Pamela "Atlas" Oshry, interviewer to John Bolton Bush Administration Betrays Israel and America
Daily Pundit [in a post recommended by Instapundit] . . . Bush's proud words of five years ago stand revealed as hollow and meaningless. What happened? What happened was one of the biggest failures of leadership in Presidential history. Bush supporters will claim that Bush was done in by a liberal media and the ferocious hatred of liberals and leftwingers, but that is one of the things true leadership is all about: Managing and overcoming opposition in order to achieve the necessary goals - in this case, the destruction of world Islamist terrorism and the regimes that support it.Bush turned out to be singularly ill-equipped for this task, both by skill and by temperament. His public relations management was curiously hesitant and badly timed, and, of course, his inabilty to speak effectively in public was a gigantic handicap. His temperament, it eventually became clear, was hesitant, overly calculating, timid, and "compassionate." Compassion has its place, but not in warfighting. The Bush we know would not have pulled the trigger on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He abdicated the hard decisions in favor of political maneuvering and meaningless gestures.

Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer both said this weekend on Fox that Hezbollah won and Iran has been strengthened.

Ouch! With friends like these...
Of course, these wingnuts want to see some warmonger like Cheney elected in 2008 -- someone who will gleefully "pull the trigger" on nuclear warfare just to kill a few hundred or thousand Arab teenagers and religious zealots who the American wingnuts have inflated into some kind of worse-than-the-Nazis-and-the-Cold-War- all-together threat to the very foundations of our civilization and to life as we know it, etc etc.
Actually, when I read these quotes, I was somewhat relieved that maybe, just maybe, Bush is NOT going to plunge the West into war with Iran. But likely I am living in a fool's paradise -- Seymour Hersch says the whole Israel-Hezbollah war was a dry run for a coming US-Iran war. Ths Israeli loss may delay this, but only if the Bush administration agrees that Israel actually did lose:

". . . the thought behind that plan was that Israel would defeat Hezbollah, not lose to it,” the consultant with close ties to Israel said. Some officials in Cheney’s office and at the N.S.C. had become convinced, on the basis of private talks, that [other Arab] nations would moderate their public criticism of Israel and blame Hezbollah for creating the crisis that led to war. Although they did so at first, they shifted their position in the wake of public protests in their countries about the Israeli bombing. The White House was clearly disappointed when, late last month, Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, came to Washington and, at a meeting with Bush, called for the President to intervene immediately to end the war . . . some officers serving with the Joint Chiefs of Staff remain deeply concerned that the Administration will have a far more positive assessment of the air campaign than they should, the former senior intelligence official said. “There is no way that Rumsfeld and Cheney will draw the right conclusion about this,” he said. “When the smoke clears, they’ll say it was a success, and they’ll draw reinforcement for their plan to attack Iran.”

And thus we come full circle, back to my first reference to Bush believing that Israel won.
So when will the rest of the world step up and declare that the US/British plan to attack Iran is both criminal and insane?