Maybe Benjamin Franklin had it right...insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Not that we would expect anyone in this administration to notice, but with each errant bomb that kills more Lebanese children, the U.S. position becomes less defensible and the Israeli position becomes more insane--and so does our own position. Why?
As Michael Hirsch of Newsweek magazine has noted
here "by walking in lockstep with the Israelis, we Americans make it impossible for Muslims
not to see us as an enemy."
The emphatic Israeli sympathisizers on this site might discount it, but they should know they do so by ignoring the United States own interests--and yes --light bulb!- they are not the same. Only the Neocon troglodytes who brought us the glories of the Iraqi war think otherwise. Why? Because they are idiots who have failed to learn the first lesson of war: know your enemy. You could add to that, know your friends. The neocons know and understand neither.
But every Muslim official knows, even if Bush does not, that Hizbullah is not identical with Iran but is a client of it, in a relationship not unlike that of the United States and Israel. By making Israel's war our own we ensure that the Lebanese group and the Tehran mullahs will be even closer allies in the future. We place the Muslims whom we need as allies, like Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, in an impossible position. Maliki, a Shiite, can no longer stand with Bush, as he showed during his tense visit to Washington this week.
And at cafes and around kitchen tables throughout the Arab world, good-hearted/moderate Muslims can no longer defend America against their more radical brethren. They have fallen silent; they have no arguments left. As Yeats put it, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."
Michael Hirsch describes one of the raids in Iraq that led him to such a conclusion ...(
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/...):
... On the ride back to base, I sat next to one detainee in a Bradley fighting vehicle. Blood was oozing from his nose, which appeared to be broken, but he could not wipe it away because his hands were tied. He was whimpering. Many like him ended up at Abu Ghraib prison. And there, even if they weren't insurgents before--most weren't--many became supporters of the insurgency. And Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, who was a Jordanian nobody at the start of the Iraq war, used this Iraqi anger to hide himself among the population, then rode it all the way to terrorist glory.
And Hirsch draws the natural parallel: Israel is doing the same counterproductive and ultimately self-destructive nonsense in Lebanon. How, exactly does this help the United States interests at all? Isn't this insane?
...we have found ourselves making enemies in the Islamic world faster than we could round them up or kill them.
We are now nearly five years into a war against a group that was said to contain no more then 500 to 1,000 terrorists at the start (in case anyone's counting, 1,776 days have now passed since 9/11; that is more than a full year longer than the time between Pearl Harbor and the surrender of Japan, which was 1,347 days). The war just grows and grows. ...
And now not just "Al Qaeda", but Iraq, Hezabolloh, and all of Lebanon, too, is apparently part of it.
Feel free to offer your own definition of insanity. But let me be clear, this is not a diary about Israel--Israel is a separate country with its own interests. This is a diary about the United States interests in the Levant. If you think unbridled support of the insanity of Israel's march is in the United State's best interest please explain how...If you think it's as insane as I think it is, just recommend the diary. And if you think we can somehow top what we're doing now for insanity, go ahead, give it a shout...