Prisoner exchanges are a terrible idea for an obvious reason: They provide an incentive for future kidnapping.  It’s even worse when you kid yourself, while engaging in this foolish strategy — the sort of thing you might do in order to try to compensate for, let’s say, launching a new war in Lebanon with the sole stated aim of recovering a prisoner, and not coming even close — that you are making “inroads” with “moderate elements.”

Lynn B. cuts right through the concept of “moderate Palestinians,” and that true rara avis, the “moderate Hamas” — a wild fantasy object of Israeli leaders who eat green eggs and ham on Yom Kippur and swear they are not men of superstition and boogety-boo:

It seems, according to one unidentified Israeli official, that there are now three separate elements fighting for control of Hamas: 1) the ones who want to pretend to think about conceding a few points re: Israel’s right to exist in order to appear moderate and thus gain concrete concessions of their own from Israel, the US and the EU; 2) the ones who want to stand firm on their “principles” and continue to reject every possibility of co-existence with Israel; and 3) the “most radical” ones, who were behind Cpl. Shalit’s kidnapping in the first place and have no intention of allowing any agenda other than their own to dictate his destiny.

Thus we can see how easily the veneer of a palestinian Arab “moderate” is concocted. That first group now looks pretty good in comparison to the second and third groups, although the distinction between the goals of the latter two is somewhat unclear. But what does this have to do with Shalit?

It’s what they are threatening to do to him that’s the problem, of course — and to the rest of us.  But perhaps what’s worse is what we do to ourselves in lying so profoundly about the reality of the world out there.

The conventional wisdom is coming around:

Wise people learn early on that, whether dealing with business rivals or flaky Middle Eastern regimes or merely with you own recalcitrant children, you should never utter threats you can’t enforce.Our prime minister forgot that elementary lesson. It was perfectly clear that there was nothing that London could do in military terms to chastise Tehran. Does even John Bolton think that the Black Watch regiment should have marched from Basra to Shiraz or that the Royal Air Force should have bombed Tehran? By taking the question to the U.N. Security Council and the European Union, Blair invited humiliation, which he duly received, and in the process he turned an incident into a crisis.

There have been other painful reminders of how diminished our authority is. While the pacifist left doesn’t think our forces should have been in the Persian Gulf in the first place, the patriotic right have been dismayed by the conduct of those talkative hostages, with their continual expressions of penitence for having done the wrong thing and of gratitude toward their captors. That culminated when one of these brave lads told Ahmadinejad yesterday, “We are very grateful for your forgiveness.”

Sad, indeed. The patriotic right — there is still such a thing in England? — is probably most dismayed of all that Blair had the nerve to put troops such as this in harms’ way in order to maintain the illusion of Britain as a world power, and in the process demonstrated very much the opposite.

As I said before, he probably deserves better. I’m not sure England does.

UPDATE:  Mickey Kaus says pooh-pooh — how much more of a climb-down could a hawk want here?  That’s post-facto thinking, Mickey.  It is humiliating, not not humiliating but yes humiliating, to have your military personnel captured without a fight, paraded before TV cameras and made to “apologize” on television.  Did Iran also get egg on its face?  Yes.  Is this a “victory” for the Anglophone Alliance?  Hardly.