Jul 14, 2006 
Hassan M. Fattah and Steven Erlanger report for the New York Times that “President Bush rebuffed a Lebanese request that he push Israel for a cease-fire.”
In St. Petersburg, Russia, where President Bush arrived today for a weekend meeting of leaders of the Group of Eight major industrial nations, the White House spokesman Tony Snow told reporters that Mr. Bush had spoken with Lebanon’s prime minister, Fouad Siniora, but would not press Israel for a ceasefire.
Mr. Bush “believes the Israelis have the right to protect themselves, and that in doing so they should limit as much as possible so-called collateral damage, not only to facilities but also to human lives,’’ Mr. Snow said.
Right.
Asked specifically if Mr. Bush would call for a ceasefire, Mr. Snow said, “No. The president is not going to make military decisions for Israel.’’
Other world leaders condemned Israel’s actions. Prime Minister Jacques Chirac of France said that it Israel appeared to “wish to destroy’’ Lebanon. Russia’s president, Vladimir V. Putin, said that “all sides should immediately end their military actions’’ as a “starting point for resolving all other problems.’’
Since Bush won’t do it, I wonder if another world leader will emerge as the peace broker?
Update: What Billmon says:
There is something qualitatively different about the latest cycle of violence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, although I’m having trouble in my own mind hanging a label on it.
Maybe it’s the fact that the Israelis have more or less abandoned the pretense that they’re fighting specific “terrorist” groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and are openly waging war on the Palestinian people (and now the Lebanese people) as a whole.
Maybe it’s because the proximate triggers for the current fighting – the Palestinian raid on an Israeli outpost on the Gaza frontier and Hezbollah’s ambush of an Israeli patrol just inside the Israeli border — were both military attacks against legitimate military targets, instead of explicit acts of terrorism, like the 2000-2001 Palestinian suicide bomb offensive. This suggests a major change in both tactics and capabilities (although terrorism, in the form of rockets randomly shot into Israeli towns and cities, obviously remains a key part of the Hezbollah and Hamas arsenals)
Maybe it’s simply the speed and scale of the escalation, which has progressed from a limited incursion in the Gaza Strip to the wholesale dismantling of the Hamas government to a full-scale blockade of Lebanon in just two weeks. If the Israeli expectation was that an initial display of overwhelming force would send a message to the other side that there are red lines that must not be crossed, then the operation has already failed. Indeed, the other side has sent some surprising messages of its own – one of which landed yesterday in downtown Haifa.
If I had to pin it down, I would say the big difference between this crisis and similar past episodes is how completely off balance the Israelis seem to be – lurching from reaction to reaction without any clear plan or strategy. The Gaza incursion was thrown together, more or less on the fly, which led to some embarrassing public squabbling within the Israeli cabinet. The attempt to decapitate Hamas’s civilian leadership by arresting the entire Palestinian cabinet smacked of improvisation, and largely failed. Hezbollah’s intervention clearly took Jerusalem by surprise, which is probably why the response has been so disproportionate: the Israelis are rather desperately trying to regain the initiative.
There’s more at Whiskey Bar.
