There's little I can say about the Israeli attack on Lebanon. It's so monstrous, so cruel, and so deliberate that words do not come. Douglas Southall Freeman once wrote that the Confederacy was not simply a nation at war; the Confederacy was war. It is beginning to look as though the state of Israel is war and little else.

In my cynicism, I have always maintained that when a nation does something so counterproductive, so idiotic, and so evil that the mind boggles at the obvious stupidity, there is always the possibility that it is merely playing by a rulebook of which I am ignorant.

I cannot conceive of any rulebook that would justify Israel's brutal attack on Lebanon. There is no future in continually pissing off your neighbors. Even if you can keep it up for a long time, eventually it blows up in your face. The crusaders' kingdom lasted 200 years, but it eventually succumbed to geopolitical reality; will Israel last that long, given it's behavior? I wouldn't bet on it, even though Israel has nukes.

James Wolcott says it a lot better than I can. Read his column.

7/22/2006. Counterspin features an interview with Fawaz Gerges on Lebanon, Israel and the Media (MP3) (RealAudio) Gerges, an American citizen and a professor at Sarah Lawrence College, is trapped in Beirut while on sabbatical.