What if Nixon had bombed the ghettoes in the name of law and order?

This analogy keeps coming to me: the urban ghettoes of the U.S. in the 60s and 70s. I've said it before but how different are lethal Hamas rocket attacks from black crime at that time? Second-class citizens, a sense of political disfranchisement and festering grievance–violence. Urban crime killed a lot more people than Hamas rockets, which have killed a handful of Israelis over several years. But in 1968, Richard Nixon ran on a law-and-order campaign. He got the support of some budding neocons, too, who didn't make bleeding-heart excuses for the urban underclass (as I did), but wanted toughness. And the American left despised Nixon on that issue.
I'm sure if Nixon had bombed the ghettoes, he would have had political support from some groups. But there would have been international outrage over the slaughter, and, in the American center, a feeling of demoralization. And on the left, a thorough delegitimization of the authority of the state and a campaign for impeachment.
Imagine if Nixon had killed 400+ children, then gone to an international forum. How would he have been greeted? Who would have walked out on him? And who would have cheered the protesters on? The American left.
Now here is my old friend Mark Green, the head of Air America radio,  holding a forum on progressive values in the Obama administration, and saying not a word about Gaza, nor about apartheid in the West Bank, nor about fairness for the Muslim world. As I said last week, I cannot discern a difference between Green, a flagship progressive, and Marty Peretz on these essential questions.
(Phil Weiss)