Israel and Lebanon (especially Lebanon) will continue to burn as long as Hezbollah exists as a terror miltia freed from the leash of the state. The punishment for taking on Hezbollah is war. The punishment for not taking on Hezbollah is war. Lebanese were doomed to suffer war no matter what. Their liberal democratic project could not withstand the threat from within and the assaults from the east, and it could not stave off another assault from the south. War, as it turned out, was inevitable even if the actual shape of it wasn’t. Peace was not in the cards for Lebanon. Its democracy turned out to be neither a strength nor a weakness. It was irrelevant.
(If you think the Christians of Lebanon are united with the Shia in hating Israel unreservedly over what's happening, read this.) I contacted a Lebanese Christian cleric's office in the US last week, seeking an interview. The cleric's secretary told me that her boss was refusing all media calls, out of fear that if he said what was really on his mind, Hezbollah would refuse to let him return to visit his family in Lebanon, on pain of death. Keep in mind whenever you hear Christians in the Mideast speak publicly about such matters, that they might not be being entirely honest, because they can't. When I was covering the papal visit to the Holy Land in 2000, what some Palestinian Christians told me on the record was rather different from what they told me off the record. On the record, they hated Israel's guts. Off the record, they still hated Israel, but they hated and were more scared -- terrified, actually -- of Hamas and the Islamists among them.)
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I can boil this conflict down to two words-- asthma medicine . Right now there is some frantic mother in Lebanon, away from the war in the south, desperately trying to find her child their asthma medicine. She s praying that her kid doesn t die before they find it.
I am not making a statement about the opposing sides in the war, just trying to bring the reality of the effect to people s minds. The simple things that we take for granted like CVS being open 24X7 go away during these conflicts. Even the above example is too abstract for us who have never lived through a war to imagine.>
Call this "Why America Is Up a Certain Creek and Israel's Hope Lies in the Almighty and Herself Alone."
To wit, from The Associated Press:
WASHINGTON - President Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair said Friday they want an international force dispatched quickly to the Middle East but said any plan to end the fighting must address long-running regional disputes to be effective.
Uh . . . I think that Hezbollah's long-running regional beef is that Israel exists.
Will the international community mediate that dispute via a "fair" compromise? Say, killing or exiling a mere half of the Jews in Palestine?
How DOES one "address" the "long-running regional dispute" when one half is "I want to live!" and the other is "The hell you will!"?
Oy veh! And the Arabs' and other Europeans' stances on the conflict are even worse than Bingo and Bongo's, as we all know.
It's official: Our Western "leaders" are delusional lunatics, and we are (as Peggy Noonan puts it) in for a stretch of rough history.>
I think they--Messrs Bush, Blair, Howard, Mme Rice et al--are not so delusional as all that; rather, they are not courageous enough, and believe that they don't have sufficient political capital, to do what needs to be done. Who can blame them for the latter conviction? I look around me and see people who ought to know better calling terrorists 'freedom fighters' and tyrants 'democratically elected leaders'. A rough stretch of history, indeed.>
I have visions of Bush or Blair stepping off a plane waving a piece of paper and proclaiming, "Peace in our time" ...>
Ron,
Thanks for the blog links; they are very informative and solid.
Frankly, Israel aside, Lebanon and Iraq are the result of colonialism. Many, many years ago I read about Lebanon's founding and knew that ,Israel or not, it was only a matter of a few decades before it exploded. Perhaps the British and French should be forced to clean up their messes.
Rwanda massacres and fighting in Nigeria was also the result of colonialists forcing folks together who didn't like each other. There really should be a tribunal that forces former colonialists to take responsibility for wars ultimately caused by their greed and arrogance.
d>
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