No Good News on the Israel-Lebanon-Hezbollah Front

Elsewhere, I posted about how the US is happily rushing more precision-guided missiles to Israel to "save" more civilians. But there's more as Israeli ground forces have moved into Lebanon to join the massive air strikes which have been hitting for more than eight days. Both sides - with civilians caught in the deadly middle - continue to trade fire.


First, a U.N. human rights official says the killing of civilians in Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza, as well as Israel may (may??) constitute war crimes.

Next, the Washington Post reports Lebanese Christians (and Christians constitute a good percentage of the population there) feel very torn in this fighting. WaPo also says Secretary of State Rice will meet with all leaders in the Middle East crisis but, of course, she goes to Israel first.

Finally, James Zogby offers an excellent perspective piece ("Willful Fantasies and Reality in Today's Middle East Conflict") on Huffington Post regarding Israel, Lebanon, and Hezbollah's role. Zogby is highly articulate anyway, and a widely respected Arab-American. Read it if you have time. As he writes, it's a tragic dance of death, indeed. A few snips:

While some conservatives and Democrats have learned lessons from past Israeli-Arab conflicts and from the recent US experiences in Iraq, the Administration and most members of Congress have fallen in line, uttering banalities like, "Israel has a right to defend itself" (even, if that means killing hundreds of civilians and destroying Lebanon in the process), or "let Israel finish the job it started" (as if the deaths and devastation resulting from this war will have no consequences in Lebanon and the broader Middle East).

A symptom of this warped mind-set is the now widely-shared and dangerous notion that has equated calls for ceasefire with weakness. In a rare display of agreement, both the White House and the Washington Post promoted this view last week. In response to a question from Helen Thomas as to why the President opposed calls for a ceasefire, White House spokesperson Tony Snow rudely thanked Ms. Thomas for what he characterized as her "Hezbollah view." Likewise, the Post editorialized that call for a ceasefire would only "reward the aggressors."

In this environment, it has been difficult to promote reasoned discourse and promote political solutions. Calls from the Maronite Catholic Patriarch to end the hostilities, or Lebanese Prime Minister Siniora who challenged the West to express outrage over the damage being done to Lebanon and the Lebanese, have fallen on deaf ears in Washington.

Even more tragic has been the total blackout of any news coming out of Gaza regarding the suffering of Palestinians now enduring their fifth week of Israeli assault.

As I have said before, no good will come of this. Absent international pressure to pursue a political solution within Lebanon and Palestine and between Lebanese, Palestinians, and Israelis, the devastation of the past month will, as in the aftermath of 1982, morph into a new and potentially more lethal extremism.

The prerequisite to beginning such a political process is, of course, a ceasefire. But with the US blocking such an effort, and still believing that good will come from Israel's "cleansing war," the tragic dance of death continues.