What to do?

A simple question for everyone choking on their oatmeal over Israel's incursion into Lebanon: what would you have them do?

The question was raised on TPM today - and it's a good one. If you think Israel is being 'disproportionate' or in some other sense going farther than provocation would lead, or that they're deliberately targeting civilians, the question is to you: what should they do?

Any decent world citizen knows that Hezbollah is a terror organization. Nobody denies that they kill Israelis, citizen and soldier alike. We know that their mission is to remove Israel from the map in the most permanent and bloody way possible.

So how long is Israel supposed to sit still and catch rockets? Right.

Or, if you think they were justified in a military response - but are killing innocent people - the question remains: what can they do?

The terrorists use the population as human shields. That is an indisputed fact. They store weapons in civilian apartment buildings and houses. Also indisputed.

So when you say Israel can't go after the hiding places of people and weapons because they are behind a human shield, what are you asking of Israel? That they do not attack at all?

But that brings us back to square one. Israel can't act to stop deadly attacks from Hezbullah because Hezbullah hides behind a human shield.

So how long is Israel supposed to sit and catch rockets?

They've been dropping pamphlets before hitting residential areas. What do you say to people ho won't leave when they know the bombers are coming?

Israel does not want to shed innocent blood - even if you don't believe in their altruism, you can at least believe their self-interest. It hurts their interests when civilians die, and helps Hezbullah's claims against them.

The real villain here is, as usual, the Junta. Their Middle East policy has been non-existent. I do not think they should be blamed for the war (not his one, anyway), but for having wasted America's diplomatic capital to uselessly that now nobody will listen to them on anything.

By waging an unjust and ill-conceived war in Iraq, America has become just another sliver of interest among many. By allowing the neocons to lead us in selfish self-aggrandizement, nobody in the world thinks if us as anything but purely self-interested.

So now, under Georgie and Condo and Bolton, when the US wants something, everyone else says "what's the angle?" we've not honest brokers anymore because we're not honest.

Like the huckster war profiteers that they support, the administration is just in it for a buck. 'Peace' as a concept holds no value to them. Everything is dealt or stolen - nothing is given.

Which leads back to the fundamental truth behind the headlines: if you want to destroy a national entity utterly, just let conservatives run it for a few years.