Not much sooner did I set up my link to Michael Bérubé’s blog did I test it this morning to find that he’d plugged my earlier post about anti-semitism in some anti-war demonstrations. Can’t be sure, but I may have left him with the impression that I’m a British citizen.

Be that it may, he acknowledges my points and those of others, but also raises some interesting points about the difficulties of mainstream liberals who express criticism of Israel and some other engaging thoughts about the conflict, including the following points:

But there are two things I’d like to add. The first is that I did not expect Hezbollah’s resistance to be quite so . . . resilient. I thought this would be a political disaster for the region and a humanitarian disaster for Lebanon, but I did not imagine that it would also be a strategic disaster for Israel.The second is that I was probably wrong to say that there is no braking system in place. In one sense that’s true, because the U.S. has clearly green-lighted the “kill them all” option, and the wingnuts have begun to debate whether we made a mistake in not killing enough Sunni men between 15 and 35 in the course of our noble quest to liberate Iraq. A bunch of dead children, bombed in their sleep, and our government can’t even demand a cease-fire. (But let’s not overlook Condi Rice’s very first diplomatic triumph: getting Israel to announce a 48-hour suspension of air strikes. Oops, wait a sec . . . It turns out that “despite Israel’s announcement of 48-hour suspension of aerial strikes, bombs continued to fall across Lebanon, albeit at a slower pace and at more limited targets than earlier in the offensive.” Well, Secretary Rice, congratulations on that much.)

It’s his first post on the topic since the war broke out. He crammed a lot into one post (and you thought I was long winded), but it’s a worthwhile read.

About these ads