Where is the blogsphere?
It’s bad enough that the Democrats are so often missing in action. Now, when it comes to Lebanon, a good chunk of the noisy progressive left is also missing.
I thank BillMon for the courage to talk about this. I've noticed the blanket of silent approval for Israel on Air America and Josh Marshall to name two. Josh in particular is hard to figure out because he recently posted approvingly a message about Iraq in the "to deal with terrorists with popular support you can't just bomb them" mode and then endorsed exactly that policy in regard to Lebanon. And listening to Al Franken desperately try to get Juan Cole to say something good about Israel’s policy was hilarious. It was as if Al just couldn’t grasp the concept that a government policy could be wrong when it came to Israel.
There is a big blind spot among liberals on Israel. The recent unanimous endorsement of the senate resolution that took Israel’s self-delusion at face value was depressing. So was the tone-deaf reaction from one of Washington’s senators when I wrote to complain about her vote.
To place pressure on Hamas and the Palestinian government to return the kidnapped soldier, Israel launched a military incursion into Gaza.
And how well did that work? Did anyone think that blowing up the electric plant was going to work?
This unprovoked attack by Hezbollah has resulted in a wave of continual artillery fire and air strikes on both sides of the border in northern Israel and southern Lebanon .
Notice the rhetorical move to invoke implicity the “caught in the crossfire” defense: implying that all that death in Lebanon was the result of some cosmic force, unidentifiable, and not Israel’s doing. And then, there is this most hilarious statement:
In addition, Hezbollah continues to ignore and fails to comply with United Nations Security Council Resolution 1559, which calls for disarming Hezbollah and for the Lebanese Army to take control throughout the entire country.
Oh, my, yes, why compliance with UN resolutions are just the thing Israel does, right? Talk about the black paint factory calling the kettle black.
Lebanon: Israel’s Vietnam. Or is it Israel’s Iraq? If Afghanistan was Russia’s Vietnam, then is Iraq America’s Russia? I get them all mixed up: it’s pretty amazing how a policy with exactly zero success over 40 years is still considered the “tough minded, manly, cold-eyed realistic” approach.
Billmon suspects, I think rightly, that having been totally silent in opposition to the Iraq war, that the Democrats will be totally silent again should we invade Iran.