dupelomacy

Manichaean ideas of good and evil lose their clarity when confronted with the world of screams that is Southern Lebanon but there is Condoleezza Rice assuring everybody that it IS terrorists who are completely responsible for the carnage in Lebanon and Israel and the terrorists are called Hizbullah, therefore efforts to immediately halt the deaths of Lebanese citizens who are innocent of anything other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time aren't necessary.

What she was doing in Beirut is not exactly clear but I can guess a few things based on the previous acts of this administration. First, nothing is as important as to create the appearance of confronting the problem. Second, don't confront the problem, use the problem as an opportunity to assert a matter of policy that will allow the problem you appear to confront to become a larger problem left unconfronted. Third, thumb your nose at everybody that says your wrong, and when you're wrong, talk about how you're dealing with terrorists while everybody else is ignoring the problem you are so bravely confronting by not confronting the problem but instead, actually encouraging the spread of that problem so that you can claim to confront it even more. It sounds like the Marx Brothers but it lacks the panache.

She thanked the Lebanese Government for being brave, which is actually surreal, and then headed down to Israel where she stood by and looked resolute while Prime Minister Olmert pledged to continue on the attacks, Rice added that before the violence can stop there has to be a groundwork for lasting peace.

This is the kind of absurdity that Brendan Behan wrote about, this is the kind of absurdity that buries the child before the parent.

There are millions of Arabs who do not want an Israel, every bomb made in the U.S.A., dropped by an Israeli fighter jet and exploded in a Lebanese neighborhood makes them more fervant. It doesn't matter what the cause is and it doesn't matter if Hizbullah is disbanded, once upon a time Hizbullah was Fatah. Making "lasting" peace a condition for peace talks only further jeopardizes them, for the Arabs who don't want an Israel it makes it easy to figure out what to do next.

In the New York Times Sunday Book Section a book was reviewed detailing the pogroms against Polish Jews returning home after the Holocaust, those pogroms were as bad as the pogroms that consumed the Russian Pale in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Jews who had survived the trains to Dachau and Auschwitz were thrown off the trains that promised to take them home, and now, for many Jews, the spectre of pogrom once again finds expression in the random rockets of Hizbullah and the random suicide bombers who walk into the light of a Sbarro or a shopping mall and rearrange the worlds of the victims.

For the people of Lebanon is this something else? Do they perceive it as something else?

One thing they do perceive, one Lebanese government official categorized Rice's visit as "not encouraging". Is it ever encouraging to talk to the chronically obtuse?