Things Fall Apart


It's hard NOT to have a smidgen of schadenfreude watching Keystone Kondi fumble away the chance to broker a much needed diplomatic solution to the present crisis in THAT part of the Middle East...but I keep trying to consider what the hell life would be like for ME if someone decided that a solution to, oh, I don't know, let's say gang violence, required two weeks plus of more or less indiscriminate aerial bombardment, with the added bonus of that same someone BLAMING me for allowing the gangs to exist in the first place.

That's what Israel expects the Lebanese to do re: Hizbollah:

According to retired Israeli army Col. Gal Luft, the goal of the campaign is to "create a rift between the Lebanese population and Hezbollah supporters." The message to Lebanon's elite, he said, is this: "If you want your air conditioning to work and if you want to be able to fly to Paris for shopping, you must pull your head out of the sand and take action toward shutting down Hezbollah-land."

However, Israel is finding out that Hizbollah, regardless of your or their opinion of the organization, isn't exactly running scared from ANYONE right now. Instead, they're proving to be as difficult to impose a "Final Solution" upon wipe out as another insurgency, ahem, across what used to be called the Trans-Jordan (Iraq, for the history/geographic challenged).

Of course, knocking out a UN command post after being REPEATEDLY warned by that the bombs were getting awfully close adds to the sour feelings all around. After all, even IF the mission had been successful (right now it's proving to be singularly UN-successful), you'd need some sort of follow-up presence. But who'd want to "volunteer" after something like that?

Well, at any rate, I've been expecting a meltdown in the Middle East for quite some time, given the Monument Valley level of stupid in the Team Bush foreign policy...and, lo and behold, to paraphrase Dubya the Clown Prince, they done "brought it on." That said, I can't say I'm real HAPPY to see what they've wrought, given the inevitable: massive human suffering, the embitterment of large numbers of people (which will almost certainly result in some sort of reaction...a reaction Team Bush is woefully unprepared for), huge expenditures in what might well be a vain attempt to restore some form of what Condi yesterday called "the status quo ante" (Condi's use of two-dollar phraseology is inversely proportional to her evident diplomatic skills, as even her nominal allies will attest)...

Besides, watching the deliberate destruction of a region is pretty goddamned depressing...especially considering that, at least for me, I can personally witness plenty of non-deliberate (but criminally negligent) destruction no more than an hour's drive in EITHER direction from where I presently sit. Yet, this administration has chosen to throw THE UNITED STATES GULF COAST to the wolves while they've pissed away all the resources on foolishness overseas--foolishness resulting from an uglier-than-Ann-Coulter hubris, and abject refusal to acknowledge or even publicly recognize ANY failure, much less the Colossus-of-Rhodes scale failure that history will clearly see as their legacy.

A couple of days ago, as I'm sure most of y'all saw, William Buttfuckly freaking Buckley, for chrissakes, noted that if we had a Parliamentary-style democracy, Team Bush would already have stepped aside. And while I personally think most of the team ought to lock themselves in a room with a loaded revolver and a bottle of whiskey until they do the right thing, I'll settle for throwing as many of their Congressional cheering section out on their ear come November...and, if there really WAS a Fitzmas, some serious hearings come next spring.