Even the British Foreign Office has now broken with the Washington consensus on the Israeli assault on Lebanon, which is basically that the Israelis should be able to destroy the whole country if they want to, over their two kidnapped soldiers. AFP reports:

' Britain's junior foreign minister Kim Howells, visiting Beirut, Saturday questioned Israel's military tactics and slammed its killing of "so many children and so many people".

"These are not surgical strikes," he said of the air and artillery bombardments since July 12 that have killed more than 300 civilians in Lebanon.

"If they are chasing Hezbollah, then go for Hezbollah. You don't go for the entire Lebanese nation," he told a media conference after meeting Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora.

Howells's boss, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, echoed those concerns in an interview with the Financial Times and said a ground invasion that Israel appeared to be preparing would create "a very dangerous situation". '

Howell gets "the Understatement of the Year" award. Not surgical strikes, indeed.

Over at Starbucks the liberals debate.

Go read Juan Cole and make up your own mind.

Fucking genius:
link
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No. This is genius:

Soon Lebanon will resemble the weather report after the climate apocalypse: And here, the conveyor belt has broken down, the Gulf stream has ceased to flow sending northwestern Europe into the iceage, the east coast of the western hemisphere has been flooded in a gigantic tsunami wave and the glacier icecaps have all melted. Mother Nature released a statement saying that she had not intentionally targeted the glaciers, but that weather reporters were hiding there and using it to launch long-range attacks against the moon. A spokesperson for God said that Mother Nature has a right to defend herself and her allies, the moon and the sun, and described the end of the world as "unfortunate".

From TPM Cafe
Fun on a saturday morning

I understood Zionism from childhood as the argument that my father, Robert I Edenbaum, born in the Bronx and the grandson of immigrants from Eastern Europe, had more rights to land in Israel than someone whose family had lived there for 20 generations. No one I have met has ever countered that definition, and the logic then as now could only be defined as racist.
The same people who defend my father's right of return to a place he never left also make demographic arguments for denying the approximately three million Palestinian refugees the right to return to their Israeli land: arguments predicated on the need to maintain the racial integrity of the Jewish State and reminiscent of the rantings of various reactionary movements around the globe, with the difference that this example is defended as moral even by liberals who fight against the implementation of such policies on their own soil.

The simplicity and clarity of the above points and my impatience with those who see them as anything other than clear place me to my chagrin in the company of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky does not understand psychology -though he might say that he simply has no interest in it- while consciousness is, of course, defined by neurosis. For that reason alone I suppose I should be more willing to accept the arguments of those to whom zionism was fed with mothers' milk: not to accept them as abstract logic- as truth- but as the result of the logic of their lives. Perhaps I should be more forgiving, but I'm not. Maybe I'm just a Jewish exceptionalist.

Still, I'm not surprised by arguments over the meaning of excessive or comparable force, even though comparable force would mean the destruction of entire sections of Tel Aviv, hundreds of thousands of refugees forced from their homes over a matter of days, billions of dollars in losses and threats to bomb Israel back to the stone age made by those actually able to do it.
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On another more abstract note, it's a peculiarly American desire to turn everything into a question of "community,' as if somehow the opposite of a daily group hug is anarchy. I'm not particularly interested in most of the posters here, though the ramblings of the rank and file are consistently more interesting than those of the Poobahs. I'm not out to offend anyone but I'm not out to make friends either. As long as no one gets kicked in the teeth I prefer to let community take care of itself, and the concern for policing social niceties seems little more than another oddity of Americana.

Joe Lieberman in an act of rhetorical slight-of-hand and self-delusion has turned the American respect for courtesy into one for authority and from that into the defense of his own unctious self-importance. Chomsky and the rest of the liberal intellectual elite may all have no interest in psychology (though Chomsky is the only pundit who gives the defense of intellectual objectivity any weight) but that does nothing to deny what psychology brings to politics and daily life.
The people say Lieberman is a creep, and sometimes the people are right.

Scroll down to Scott Martens' comment.

For all the dreams of logic in the anglo-american academy, it will fall flat -if you have an imagination- when you come to understand how much time is spent in the left explaining niggers' anger to white people. But only niggers understand the implications, as only women -even rich ones- understand sexism, and the poor, the facts of economic life. But we can't rely on any of them because their minds are fogged with anger (unlike ours). Of course some men are proud of their 'sincere' radicalism. But my memories of meeting Catharine MacKinnon are pretty basic: she struck me as a woman utterly terrified by a desire to be tied up and fucked deep in the ass. (See Foucault, below). Some people are fogged by their anger. Life's complex in other countries.
[America: The debate between Puritans and Drunks. Vol. XII]

Here's Glenn Greenwald on how it's OK to like Juan Cole; here's The Nation on why the Israel was is "Too High a Price" For whom? Not for the niggers.
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Bullshit and Racism.

I had a a nice little exchange with Josh Marshall after being warned that I risked being thrown off TPM Starbucks for responding bitterly to one of his intellectual big guns, a racist idiot named, M.J. Rosenberg (see yesterday)

"Now I understand you Jew-haters out there prefer the term anti-Zionist. Yeah, yeah." And then there's Kenneth Baer.

A few four letter words and my response to this crap is called unreasonable. How is it that the politics of Haidar and Le Pen are acceptable in the liberal American punditocracy when it comes to the question of 3 million Russians and 3 million Palestinians? Where is the logic? The objectivity?

If Intellectualis Amercanus understood perceptual bias as a function of animal life -rather than a function of the lives of unnamed others- discussions of any sort would be much more interesting. But instead even in discussions of abstract principle we get such mindless stupidity as this.

[The Continuing Haussmannization of the World- Part 255 1/3
the Haussmannization of intellectual life]

so fucking obvious. so fucking simple. so fucking easy to understand.
somebody give me a job. I deserve to get paid for this shit.

An old acquaintance, now in Lebanon

Cheap fun with academics,
and racist hacks. "Anti Semitisim" [sic]

"Now I understand you Jew-haters out there prefer the term anti-Zionist. Yeah, yeah."

I'm amazed that the racialist politics of Jorg Haidar and Jean Marie Le Pen when deployed in the defense of a Jewish State, are considered acceptable in the liberal or even the "left-wing" American press. I wouldn't be surprised to find Cynthia Ozick on the pages of TPM Cafe or Tapped, if her views on economics were considered passable.

Electronic Lebanon

Go read Max

Back to the top, with a better image. I'm still figuring out how to use my digital camera.

Dennis Perrin

"On the other hand, the Irish Times report above says that Israeli officials reject a UN deployment and insist instead that the Lebanese army must be stationed along the border.
It is probably the Olmert government's hope that this posting will set the Lebanese army against Hizbullah, producing intra-Lebanese fighting that serves Israeli interests."

That seemed obvious from the beginning. And the Lebanese Army is not going to go against Hezbollah, thus giving Israel the right to defend itself by means of all out war.
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"mistakes were made"[?]
Candyass spreads his cheeks and blows.

Interesting how the commenters at TPMCafe are outflanking the 'official' writers.

Abu Aardvark:
Arabs watching helplessly

So, the whole blow-up is Syria's fault, for putting Hizbullah up to making mischief. No reference to Israeli actions in Gaza. No reference to, like, the wholesale destruction of Lebanon by the Israeli air force. And no blame for the Lebanese government of Fouad Siniora. And Bush thinks that Nasrullah of Hizbullah takes direct orders from Damascus. And he thinks that if Bashar al-Asad orders Hizbullah to stop firing its little katyushas and give back the two Israeli soldiers, everything will suddenly settle down.

It is an astonishingly simple-minded view of the situation, painted in black and white and making assumptions about who is who's puppet and what the Israeli motivations are. Israel doesn't appear as a protagonist. It is purely reactive. Stop provoking it, and it suddenly stops its war.

Since Israel is just being provoked and has no ambitions of its own, in this reading, it is useless to begin with a ceasefire. That treats the two sides as both provoking one another. Here, only Hizbullah matters, so you lean on Syria to lean on it, and, presto, peace breaks out.

It is a little window into the superficial, one-sided mind of the man, who has for six years been way out of his depth.

I come away from it shaken and trembling.

" No reference to, like, the wholesale destruction of Lebanon by the Israeli air force."

Rilly.

The point is this: The Bush administration relies on presumptions of superior morality and the illusion of control. The will to victory must result in victory because we must be right. Israel is now following the same line, and turning Lebanon into Cambodia as a result. As in Iraq, this is romance and revenge- and liberalism of a sort- not realism.

Bush went too far in Iraq, Israel went to far in Gaza, and it is going farther in Beirut. This was much less predictable than you pretend. The result of the Bush Neocon doctrine is disaster and death, the weakening of the US and of the Zionist state.

A little perspective, and a little realism, would be helpful if you would just stop moaning and think.
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All in all As'ad is right: The Nation is explaining niggers to white people
"Too High a Price" indeed.

Turning Lebanon into Cambodia.

"The far north of Lebanon is Sunni, as is the port of Tripoli, where the Israelis killed a Catholic Lebanese soldier. They also hit factories in north Beirut, not a Shiite area. They bombed a village near Zahle, a notorious center of Greek Orthodox, killing 3 civilians. The Israelis are either not very good shots, since they have murdered 140 civilians since Wednesday and only managed to kill about 17 Lebanese military personnel. Or they just don't give a damn."

It's stupid.

War and Piece.
Read the updates. However knowledgeable he is, what Mark Perry says here is silly. The Bush Administration has been so sloppy with its extremist rhetoric that the Israelis if pressed will not hesitate to throw it back at them.

"...the goal of the Israeli government is much more modest."
perhaps

update: Someone else agrees with me on this
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OUR WAR

On a related note, saw Close-Up last week in LA, in a quintuple bill with
Floating Weeds, Hana-bi, La Chamade and La Carne; and all without getting out of bed.
LA was fun. I got laid too.
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Kiarostami.
The Makhmalbafs are on my linklist on the left.
And Kristol is a fucking idiot.

Cole on Lebanon

Balkin: Breaking and Entering
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I could have guessed. (idiot)

been very very busy

JulioSpeak You Listen:

Enrique Krauze's op-ed in the New York Times ("Bringing Mexico Closer to God," June 28, 2006) about Andrés Manuel López Obrador, Mexico's leftist presidential candidate, reveals more about Krauze's conservative outlook than about the true prospects of a López Obrador administration. Lacking substantive facts, Krauze mixes a few casual remarks with his own personal impressions to project the ghost of "messianic populism" onto López Obrador's future presidency.

But the main threat to Mexico's fragile democracy is not a ghost. It is, instead, the brutal reality of the country's social inequality. Twelve years after NAFTA was implemented -- official sources attest -- almost fifty percent of Mexicans still live in poverty. Measures of wealth dispersion are dismal, comparable to those in Brazil, Haiti, and sub-Saharan Africa. Many Mexicans are under the impression that Felipe Calderón, the candidate of the right, "has failed to convey real concern for Mexico's poor," as Krauze puts it, because he has no actual concern for Mexico's poor.

reference: Ricas y Famosas