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American Necrophilia

Why do we wonder about the lack of US leadership in quelling the new violence in the Middle East? US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said yesterday that she is "considering traveling to the Middle East," after six days of fighting? What—the Busheviks think this is a Katrina hurricane happening over there? It's bad enough that our pig-eating president can't stop acting like he's at a beer blast, but he also shows himself to be incompetent and ignorant as a head of American foreign policy, in private as well as in public, as in this candid caught-on-air interchange with Tony Blair: He beckons Blair with "Yo, Blair" and then proceeds to solve the Israel-Lebanon humanitarian debacle with "what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over." Give that Texan his beer and a hot dog and he's ready to tell his peeps just what "they" need to do to fix the shit over there. Then he'll head over and grope the female Chancellor of Germany.

I think this behavior helps to put into perspective Nir Rosen's June 27 story on "The Occupation of Iraqi Hearts and Minds." All Americans are complicit in this:

There's much more to Rosen's heartbreaking story, but we learn at least that US leadership in the Middle East is nothing less than moribund, springing from an administration obsessed with a culture of terror and death, if it can be bothered to care at all.

War is always about ordinary people

In Haaretz today is a poignant, human story about the border community of Moshav Margaliot, the Galilee panhandle.