Enablers

“Israeli officials said they regarded the failure of an international conference to reach agreement on a cease-fire plan as clearing the way for further assaults.”

That’s the subhead on the story at the upper left of the New York Times Online webpage at 7:22 a.m., California time. The headline reads: “Israel Debates Strategy Shift After Truce Talks Fail.”

Um, excuse me?

The first thing I thought upon reading that subhead was, “they’re like little boys who, while Mom and Dad fight over whether or not it was a good idea for Dad to give them that Bowie knife, go out and start practicing their magic knife-throwing act with the neighbor kid as the target.”

My second thought was, “is there some reason they can’t just, you know, stop firing bombs into Lebanon? And vice versa? So they won’t keep killing and maiming and displacing and destroying hundreds of innocent bystanders? People who aren’t part of the fight at all?”

This is distinctly female thinking, I know (Condi Rice excepted, obviously) but as a mother of some experience, I want to take bad boy Israel and the bad boy Hezbollah and stand them in separate corners.

And cheerleader Condi should be sent to bed without her supper.

Once they’ve figured out the kind of serious trouble they’re in, they ought to be forced to clean up the mess they made by a very stern and angry world. And pay for it out of their allowances.

“Later, she [Rice] defended the United States’ refusal to call for an immediate cease-fire, saying: “It doesn’t do anyone any good to raise false hopes about something that’s not going to happen. It’s not going to happen. I did say to the group, ‘When will we learn?’ The fields of the Middle East are littered with broken cease-fires.”

"The fields of the Middle East are littered with broken cease-fires."

A true statement, unfortunately. Yet surely, trying in good faith for an immediate cease-fire, with negotiations for a sustainable cease-fire following, is far better than the continued, wholesale slaughter of innocents.

This is a shameful fight. It will not solve Israel’s problems in the Middle East; indeed, it is only making them far, far worse. Of course, people like Codpiece and Condi are cheerleading Israel’s bloody-mindedness for reasons of their own. In their cracked minds, they see fanning the hungry flames of this conflict as bringing the world ever closer to that magical moment when Rapture comes.

Cretins. These violent, bloody, terrible deaths – the deaths of innocent children, of innocent men and women, young and old, who have no part in the fight – are on their hands.

And, sadly, on ours. We’ve enabled them.

In the meantime, the hell we’ve made of Iraq continues burning merrily, unchecked.