More From Kristof: "In Lebanon, Echoes of Iraq?"

From Kristof's column yesterday:

The U.S. position on the fighting in the Middle East is essentially: "Stop the killing. But not yet."

Washington is resisting an immediate cease-fire so as to give Israeli forces more of a chance to destroy Hezbollah. But more time isn't likely to accomplish much militarily, while every day of grisly photos on Arab television strengthens hard-liners ‹ and Iranian and Shiite influence ‹ throughout the region.

The Israeli offensive and the American support for it seem to reflect the same misguided thinking that led to our Iraq war. It's a utopian notion that every outrage must have a solution, and that armed intervention is a useful way to reshuffle the Arab political stage.

Israelis are brimming with moral clarity, as we Americans were after 9/11. And they're right: the Hezbollah attacks on Israel were particularly contemptible because they followed Israeli withdrawals from both Lebanon and Gaza. Israel should have been rewarded for those withdrawals, not subjected to rocket attacks and cross-border incursions.

But one of the oldest lessons in international affairs is that not every problem has a neat solution. The first rule in foreign policy, as in medicine, should be "Do no harm." Unfortunately, the legacy of today's Lebanese adventure, like the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and our invasion of Iraq, may be plenty of strategic damage.

Oh, I believe there are an extremely large number of parallels between the Bush-led invasion and occupation of Iraq and how Israel, under both Sharon and now Olmert, have gone after Palestinians in Gaza and elsewhere as well as the current war mounted in Lebanon against Hezbollah.

Just a few of these parallels include:

• misguided notion that pummeling a civilian population to wipe out terrorists will somehow work
• huge cost, bad results
• public is deceived into offering nearly unanimous support, complete with children writing messages on missile shells
• willing to use the U.N. when it advances the agenda while happy to attack them verbally and militarily
• actions violate Geneva conventions while the leaders simply don't care that it does
• conflict seems apt to create more terrorists than it will reduce them
• World opinion is extremely opposed to the actions
• lies are used to justify the conflict
• high death tolls despite the happy, pappy rhetoric (yesterday, an Israeli official on TV said something like, "Really, we are trying to be Lebanon's savior") - if the Israeli military is Lebanon's savior, they might do better with their enemies)