Anger--When All Else Fails

James Wolcott has two very angry columns today. And he makes some very good points and quotes some very poignant narrative from Beirut. To read click here and here.. And Kevin Drum has a very different take. Click here.

In my view there should be more anger over this Middle East savagery. There should in fact be blinding, foaming outrage at the level of barbarism that is meted out in the name of the United States and Israel and Hezbollah and Hamas. It was apparently not enough for Bush and his gang to drive Iraq into an insane and bloody civil war, but now they're urging Israel to rain destruction on Lebanon and perhaps Syria and Iran as well.

Whatever or whomever is nominated as "root cause" of this bloodshed, the delivery service is decidedly the US and Israel and their vicious counterparts Hamas and Hezbollah.

Yes, Hamas and Hezbollah are the original fomenters and the provocateurs. They are not nice people. They are as barbaric and as self-aggrandized a pack of criminals as have ever waltzed across the world stage. And their crimes are magnified by their dispersal among the civilian population of Lebanon. Yet the Israelis, knowing this, persist in killing all in the fashion of Arnold Amaury (Slay them all. God will know his own.)

In fact, it's hard to argue that the Likud (and succeeding) governments in Israel have played their cards very well over the years. While the Palestinians have been near impossible to deal with, Israel has still largely controlled the game. When one extremist group or the other committed an atrocity in Israel, the government made no distinction between the extremists and the rest of the population, but punished all as one, refusing to recognize that the Palestinians are a diverse people with all levels of political involvement from the extremists to the disengaged.

Israel's population is likewise stratified from the most conservative Likudniks and strident settlers to religious Hassidim and secular Russians. Israelis like Palestinians come in all flavors of political orientation. But the Palestinian extremists persisted in wantonly and randomly blowing themselves up in the middle of innocent Israeli crowds, prompting the population to support the most severe reaction.

So due to the actions of both sides, even the marginalized are now radicalized and the disengaged are now militant. It has been a noble achievement to go from the hopes of the Oslo accords to the despair of the intifada in a few brief years.

There are no victories in such an historic failure and few heroes. Both societies bear the guilt of their intransigence. The blood that is shed will linger over their history for generations and will spell hostility and damnation for their peoples for decades.

The Bush Administration's history of blunders and openly enabling Israeli's reactionaries to seize the initiative in the complex dance between the parties has effectively ceded the moment to the most extremist factions on both sides. One hears from all of the talking head "experts" that the situation is spinning out of control so completely and so rapidly that no one may be able stop it now. We may soon see the entire region go up in flames.

Anyone who happily embraces that legacy has sunk so far into barbarism that redemption is beyond all the powers of heaven and earth. God help us all.