It’s ominous to hear prominent American neoconservatives speak of Israel’s war as our own and the conflagration in the region as the commencement of WWIII. “What’s under attack,” writes William Kristol, “is liberal democratic civilization.”

It’s ominous but not surprising. Hyping a war as a symbolic war gives it momentum—and facilitates its expansion beyond regional confines.

Iran and Syria’s involvement in instigating the recent aggression against Israel is, moreover, hard to ascertain. We know only that both countries are “paymasters” to Hezbollah and Hamas; we have no way of knowing they ordered the attacks, which were, incidentally, the culmination of ongoing and incessant aggression against Israel.

Even if Iran and Syria ordered the hostilities, it by no means warrants an American intervention on Israel’s behalf. It falls to that presumably sovereign country to defend herself, as she is quite capable of doing.

Israelis, as I’ve contended for a while, are stupid and rudderless. To their great credit, this idiocy is because they are no longer a pioneer nation, but a modern people. They want to get on with the productive business of making money and having fun. They would rather head for the beach than the battlefront. Conversely, too many Arabs are still stuck in that pre-modern destructive phase, which accounts for their zeal, savagery, and affinity for terror as a way of life.

(Classical liberal economist Ludwig von Mises didn’t go as far as to say that the “Mohammedan countries” were barbaric, but he did genteelly point out that there was a reason the East—far and near—had not contributed anything to “the intellectual effort of mankind” for centuries. You cannot force the culture of freedom and individual rights where it never arose, and where the legal framework that would protect private wealth and guard against confiscation by the rulers is missing.)

In their stupidity, Israelis have conflated America’s unlimited worldwide war on terror with their narrowly delimited battle for survival, conducted since the inception of the Jewish State. Kristol, in particular, argues that Israel’s battle has morphed from an “Arab-Israeli conflict” to an “Islamist-Israeli war.” Maybe so, but it’s still the same struggle for survival—one that is diminished and tainted by the Israeli leadership’s insistence on hitching their cause to the American crusade.

Of course, Kristol’s formulation lends itself nicely to the notion that we must help Israelis in their war. A coherent recognition that Israel is engaged in a just war against war lords that seek her demise is one thing—it has moral clarity. The same moral suasion ought to ensure we avoid mistaking Hamas and Hezbollah’s relative military weakness for moral innocence. The policy prescriptions that we ought to follow are another matter entirely.

Neoconservatives tend to make artificial ideological distinctions, such as Israel’s “old” war with the Arabs vs. her “new” war with “Islamofascists.” These distinctions appear to help conflate our own interests with Israel’s. As far as I can see, Palestinians and their leaders have always channeled Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazi Mufti of Jerusalem. Al-Husseini, Arafat’s hero, “supported the Nazis, and especially their program for the mass murder of the Jews. He visited numerous death camps and encouraged Hitler to extend the ‘Final Solution’ to the Jews of North Africa and Palestine.” How Hamas and Hezbollah’s enterprise differs from his quest, bequeathed to Arafat, is unclear to me.

What I am clear on is the imperative not to be swept up with the neoconservative’s total-war talk.