I’ve been blogging about the Bush Administration for just over four years. During that time it’s rare that a day has gone by without some fresh outrage or revelation to write about. But now the calamities are coming so fast my head is spinning. Several major, and dangerous, developments are happening all at once. It’s hard to keep up.

For the past few days I’ve not been following the latest developments on President Bush’s dismantling of the Constitution. I haven’t blogged about the situation in Iraq, which continues to deteriorate. (And the tours of duty by already overstressed troops have been extended, because President Weenie lacks the moral courage to call for a draft to fight his war. I’ve got a really good rant in me on that point.) I haven’t written much about the California heat wave (get used to it, folks). And then there’s the energy crisis, the shrinking middle class, and a host of other big red flags I have barely acknowledged recently.

Instead, I’ve been focused on Lebanon, with despair.

Here’s something I didn’t know. Simon Tisdall posts at The Guardian web site (emphasis added):

In the week preceding Hizbullah’s July 12 cross-border raid into Israel that sparked the Lebanon war, the UN security council was wrestling with a draft resolution on Gaza. Sponsored by Arab countries, it called for the unconditional release of an Israeli soldier captured by Palestinian militants on June 25, an end to the firing of rockets from Gaza into Israel, and a halt to Israel’s “disproportionate” military response that was killing and injuring dozens of Palestinian civilians.

In the event, the US vetoed the Gaza resolution on the grounds that it was “unbalanced” and, ironically in the light of subsequent events, would have exacerbated regional tensions. John Bolton, the US ambassador, said the draft “places demands on one side of the Middle East conflict but not the other”. In a taste of things to come, Britain abstained from voting.

The security council’s failure during the period beginning June 25 to offer even a statement of concern about events in Gaza is one possible reason why Hizbullah took the incendiary action it did on July 12, capturing two more Israeli soldiers and killing several others. The Lebanese Shia militia doubtless had other motives, too. But it appeared determined to stand up for the Palestinians when the international community was evidently unwilling or unable to do so.

The council’s subsequent record as the Lebanon war has unfolded in all its unchecked barbarity has been even less edifying. It has been effectively sidelined as the US has repeatedly disrupted collective attempts to achieve an immediate halt to the violence. Efforts by the French council presidency to gather support for a ceasefire resolution have made scant progress in the face of ongoing US obstruction.

In writing about the Lebanon crisis many of us, me included, feel obligated to attempt balance: “Israel has a right to defend itself, but …”; “Hezbollah provoked this aggression, but. …” I was in high school during the Six Day War, and I remember when Jerusalem was united under Israeli control, and like most Americans I thought this was grand. I was a senior at the University of Missouri when Palestinian terrorists murdered the Israeli Olympic wrestling team in Munich, and like most Americans I was heartbroken and angry. (I remember a large part of the student body showed up at the Hillel Center for a memorial service; I went with my two roommates, who were Catholic and Southern Baptist.) Before that time I was barely aware of the Palestinians; they did not make a good first impression. The next year Egypt and Syria attacked Israel, touching off the Yom Kippur War. Like most Americans I was angry with the Muslim nations determined to destroy Israel. Like most Americans I admired Prime Minister Golda Meir.

In those days more of my attention was given to Vietnam and Watergate, of course, plus the usual messiness of my so-called life. By the time Ronald Reagan sent Marines to Lebanon I had a handful of a baby girl to deal with and wasn’t paying attention to international affairs. And until very recently I had not blogged much at all about Israel and the Palestinians. As I wrote a few days ago, “I don’t pay as much attention to the Israeli-Palestinian situation as I should; after all these years, it’s become background noise to me, I’m sorry to say.”

I wasn’t paying attention this year, when this happened:

Less than a year after its disengagement from Gaza, Israel has become deeply re-engaged, in a sharp escalation of fighting that could ignite a third intifada. The proximate cause was a Palestinian guerrilla attack against an Israeli army base, in which two soldiers were killed and one was taken prisoner. In response Israel launched a furious assault on the entire population of Gaza, destroying its only energy plant, which left 700,000 people without power, and seizing more than two dozen Hamas elected officials. Israel’s leading liberal daily, Ha’aretz, warned that “the government is losing its reason…arresting people to use as bargaining chips is the act of a gang, not of a state.” Amnesty International condemned the attacks against civilian infrastructure as a war crime, and the UN’s Relief and Works Agency warned that Gaza is “on the brink of a public health disaster.”

In an exercise of selective memory, Under Secretary of State Nicholas Burns defended Israel, saying, “Let’s remember who started this. It was the outrageous actions of Hamas in violating Israel’s sovereignty, in taking the soldier hostage.” In fact, the current cycle of violence was set off by weeks of Israeli shellings that culminated in the killing of eight Palestinian civilians on a Gaza beach. On a deeper level, the violence arises from the Israeli strategy of unilateralism, in which even the pretense of negotiations is abandoned and Israel alone decides its final borders, while maintaining control over the territories through closures, military assaults and assassination. After Hamas came to power in January in the Arab world’s most democratic elections, Israel and the United States tried to provoke the government’s collapse by cutting off aid and tax revenues, even though Hamas maintained its yearlong cease-fire and its officials repeatedly declared it could accept a two-state solution or at least a long-term truce. Far from leading to Hamas’s demise, the economic strangulation infuriated Palestinians, convincing many that the United States and Israel care nothing about democracy. After the beach killings, popular outrage finally led Hamas’s military wing to call off its cease-fire. [“Lawless in Gaza,” The Nation, July 31, 2006]

I read the editorial quoted above a couple of weeks ago, and yet I still feel obligated to add the qualifiers — “Israel has a right to defend itself, but …”; “Hezbollah provoked this aggression, but. …”

Yesterday Billmon wrote,

I’ve felt many emotions about the Israelis before. I’ve admired them for their accomplishments — building a flourishing state out of almost nothing. I’ve hated them for their systematic dispossession of the Palestinians — even as they smugly congratulated themselves for being the Middle East’s only “democracy.” I’ve pitied them for the cruel fate history inflicted on the Jewish diaspora, respected them for their boldness and daring, honored them for their cultural and intellectual achievements. But the one thing I’ve never felt, at least up until now, is contempt.

But that is what I’m feeling now. The military and political leaders of the Jewish state are doing and saying things that go way beyond the blustering arrogance of a powerful nation at war. Not to put too fine a point on it, but they are behaving like a gang of militaristic thugs — whose reply to any criticism or reproach is an expletive deleted and the smash of an iron fist.

Billmon goes on to make a good case for feeling contempt for Israel. I cannot say I feel contempt for Israel, however. Not yet, anyway, and not the way I felt contempt for the PLO after the Munich Olympics. For Israel, more than anything else, I am terribly sad. I’m sad because Israel has chosen a path that I think could lead to its own destruction. What Israel is doing to Lebanon now will be regretted by many generations of Israelis, if there are many more generations of Israelis.

In RightieWorld, one either supports Israel’s every cough or one hopes for Israel’s destruction. It’s beyond their comprehension that a person could support Israel’s right to exist in peace and yet condemn its current actions. This rightie thinks Howard Dean is inconsistent because he said, in 2003, that the United States should not take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — “Israel has always been a longtime ally with a special relationship with the United States, but if we are going to bargain by being in the middle of the negotiations then we are going to have to take an evenhanded role.” But in 2006 he said of the government of Iraq — “We don’t need to spend $200 and $300 and $500 billion bringing democracy to Iraq to turn it over to people who believe that Israel doesn’t have a right to defend itself and who refuse to condemn Hezbollah.”

But of course there is no inconsistency at all. To say that one should not favor one side over another doesn’t mean one cannot criticize aggression against Israel, nor does it mean one doesn’t support Israel’s right to exist. Instead, it means supporting right actions and condemning wrong actions, no matter who does them.

Right now, I’m saving my contempt for the Bush Administration. It’s knee-jerk support for Israel, no matter what, is shaming all of us and forcing the rest of the world to take sides against us. Christopher Dickey writes,

The bottom line: Hizbullah is winning. That’s the hideous truth about the direction this war is taking, not in spite of the way the Israelis have waged their counterattack, but precisely because of it. As my source Mr. Frankly put it, “Hizbullah is eating their lunch.”

The United States, following Israel’s lead, does not want an immediate ceasefire precisely because that would hand Hizbullah a classic guerrilla-style victory: it started this fight against a much greater military force—and it’s still standing. In the context of a region where vast Arab armies have been defeated in days, for a militia to hold out one week, two weeks and more, is seen as heroic. Hizbullah is the aggressor, the underdog and the noble survivor, all at once. “It’s that deadly combination of the expectation game, which Hizbullah have won, and the victim game, which they’ve also won,” as my straight-talking friend put it.

Neither U.S. nor Israeli policymakers have taken this dynamic into account. If they had, they’d understand that with each passing day, no matter how many casualties it takes, Hizbullah’s political power grows. Several of my worldly Lebanese and Arab friends here in Rome today—people who loathe Hizbullah—understand this problem well. Privately they say that’s one of the main reasons they are so horrified at the direction this war has taken: they fear not only that Lebanon will be destroyed, but that Hizbullah will wind up planting its banner atop the mountain of rubble.

Note, dear righties: Some of us oppose Israel’s actions not because we support Hezbollah, but because we don’t.

When I heard Condi talking in pitiless academic pieties today about “strong and robust” mandates and “dedicated and urgent action,” I actually felt sorry for her, for our government, and for Israel. As in Iraq three years ago, the administration has been blinded to the political realities by shock-and-awe military firepower. Clinging to its faith in precision-guided munitions and cluster bombs, it has decided to let Lebanon bleed, as if that’s the way to build the future for peace and democracy.

I don’t feel sorry for Condi. I feel contempt for Condi, and Rummy, and Dick, and George, and the rest of the clueless wonders whose shameful policies are causing so much death and destruction, to no good purpose. I respect Israel, but I love America, and these people are shaming America.

Going back to Simon Tisdall, we read that “anger is growing” at the United States and its spoiling tactics. In the UN Security Council, the U.S. is obstructing cease-fire plans and tying the UN’s hands. Now even Tony Blair is trying to tell Bush that there must be a cease-fire, and the sooner the better for everybody.

At a White House meeting, the prime minister will express his concern that pro-western Arab governments are “getting squeezed” by the crisis and the longer it continues, the more squeezed they will be, giving militants a boost. The private view from No 10 is that the US is “prevaricating” over the resolution and allowing the conflict to run on too long.

But diplomatic sources in Washington suggest the US and Israel believe serious damage has been inflicted on Hizbullah, so the White House is ready to back a ceasefire resolution at the UN next week. Today Mr Bush and Mr Blair will discuss a version of the resolution that has been circulating in Washington and London.

I like the part about “serious damage” being inflicted on Hezbollah. Maybe Israel and the U.S. realize Hezbollah is winning, and Israel is preparing to declare victory and withdraw. Let’s hope so.

Also: If you want to do something, please check out this ceasefire campaign. I don’t know any more about this organization than what’s on their web site, but it appears to be legitimate.

Don’t miss:

Michael Hirsh, “How Bush Makes Enemies,” Newsweek (web exclusive)

Dan Froomkin, “Coincidence or Consequence?” Washingtonpost.com

Sidney Blumenthal, “The Neocon Resurgence,” Guardian Comment Is Free

Thus saith Digby:

I have said it before many times and I’ll say it again: the neocons have always been wrong about everything. This is just the latest in a decades long series of delusional miscalculations in which it is fantasized that if only the US would just get tough everything would fall into place. This is the simple essence of everything they believe in. And when they found themselves an empty brand name in a suit named George W. Bush they found the man whose infantile personality and outsized vanity could be manipulated perfectly to advance that belief.

Yeah, pretty much.

This is a very dangerous moment for the world. The US is showing over and over again that it is immmoral and incompetent. That is the kind of thing that leads ambitious, crazy or stupid people to miscalculate and set disasterous events in motion. The neocons have destroyed America’s carefully nurtured mystique by seeking to flex its muscles for the sake of flexing them. What a mistake. This country is much, much weaker today because of it and the world is paying the price. At some point I have to imagine that we are going to be paying it too. Big Time.

A few days ago Sen. John Kerry is reported to have said of the conflagration in Lebanon, “If I was president, this wouldn’t have happened.”

I doubt this is an accurate quote, if only because I think Kerry would have used present subjunctive correctly even in casual conversation — If I WERE president, this wouldn’t have happened. Further, the only reports I have found of this quote have come from right-wing columnists and blogs. I suspect some righties got hold of something Kerry said (in a bar, it’s reported), stripped it of context and tweaked the content, so that they could make fun of him for something he didn’t actually say.

But today on The Guardian web site Jonathan Freedland makes a pretty good case that had George W. Bush never become president (past perfect subjunctive, alas), this wouldn’t have happened (emphasis added):

Had one of the key players in the drama behaved differently, this entire mess could have been avoided.

I’m thinking of the United States. It’s fashionable to blame the US for all the world’s ills, but in this case the sins, both of omission and commission, of the Bush administration genuinely belong at the heart of the trouble.

Diplomacy has had a difficult task from the start, in part because the US is not seen as an honest broker, but as too closely aligned with Israel. Washington has long been pro-Israel, but under President Clinton and the first President Bush there was an effort to be seen as a plausible mediator. Not under George W. Far from keeping lines of communication open with Hizbullah’s two key patrons – Syria and Iran – they have been cast into outer darkness, branded as spokes, or satellites, of the axis of evil. As a result there has been no mechanism to restrain Hizbullah. Now, when the US needs Syria’s help, it may be too late. Damascus will extract a high price, no doubt demanding the right to re-enter, in some form, Lebanon. The White House can’t grant that – not when it considers Syria’s ejection from Lebanon in 2005 one of its few foreign-policy successes.

But the record of failure goes deeper than that. It began in the president’s first week, when Bush decided he would not repeat what he perceived as his predecessor’s mistake by allowing his presidency to be mired in the fruitless search for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Even though Clinton had got tantalisingly close, Bush decided to drop it. While Henry Kissinger once racked up 24,230 miles in just 34 days of shuttle diplomacy, Bush’s envoys have been sparing in their visits to the region.

The result is that the core conflict has been allowed to fester. Had it been solved, or even if there had been a serious effort to solve it, the current crisis would have been unimaginable. Instead, Bush’s animating idea has been that the peoples of the Middle East can be bombed into democracy and terrorised into moderation. It has proved one of the great lethal mistakes of his abominable presidency – and the peoples of Israel and Lebanon are paying the price.

Thomas Friedman (New York Times) goes into more detail (Note: We’re switching from Freedland to Friedman; emphasis added):

One wonders what planet Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice landed from, thinking she can build an international force to take charge in south Lebanon without going to Damascus and trying to bring the Syrians on board. …

… Can we get the Syrians on board? Can we split Damascus from Tehran? My conversations here suggest it would be very hard, but worth a shot. It is the most important strategic play we could make, because Syria is the bridge between Iran and Hezbollah. But it would take a high-level, rational dialogue.

And, as you know, Bushies don’t do high-level, rational dialogue. Bushies do strutting and saber rattling and tantrums.

Dr. Rice says we can deal with Syria through normal diplomatic channels. Really?

We’ve withdrawn our ambassador from Damascus, and the U.S. diplomats left here are allowed to meet only the Foreign Ministry’s director of protocol, whose main job is to ask how you like your Turkish coffee. Syria’s ambassador in Washington is similarly isolated.

Let’s review: What was it that President Bush said at the G8 summit while he chewed on his buttered roll?

“See the irony is that what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this (expletive) and it’s over,” Bush told Blair as he chewed on a buttered roll.

He told Blair he felt like telling U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who visited the gathered leaders, to get on the phone with Syrian President Bashar Assad to “make something happen.” He suggested Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice might visit the region soon.

Even the Child in Chief recognizes that Syria is critical to any resolution. But he won’t talk to Syria. Our State Department won’t talk to Syria. Instead, Kofi Annan is supposed to talk to Syria. Or maybe the Saudis, as Laura Rozen reported earlier this week.

Friedman argues that splitting Syria from Iran would be a big job but not an impossible job. Syria and Iran have reason not to trust each other. “Syria is a largely secular country, with a Sunni majority. Its leadership is not comfortable with Iranian Shiite ayatollahs,” Friedman says.

Friedman continues,

Is this Syrian regime brutal and ruthless? You bet it is. If the Bush team wants to go to war with Syria, I get that. But the U.S. boycott of Syria is not intimidating Damascus. (Its economy is still growing, thanks to high oil prices.) So we’re left with the worst of all worlds — a hostile Syria that is not afraid of us.

The Syrians are possibly a couple of shades brighter than American neocons. The Syrians must realize, even if William Kristol doesn’t, that our misadventure in Iraq limits our military options and makes us a whole lot less intimidating than we used to be. And since intimidation is the alpha and omega of the Bushies approach to diplomacy, the Bush White House has made itself impotent in the Middle East. Ironically, by over-relying on unilateral military power, both the U.S. and Israel have strengthened their enemies and weakened themselves. (See also “Syria Is Part of the Solution” by Faisal al Yafai.)

Friedman continues,

We need to get real on Lebanon. Hezbollah made a reckless mistake in provoking Israel. Shame on Hezbollah for bringing this disaster upon Lebanon by embedding its “heroic” forces amid civilians. I understand Israel’s vital need to degrade Hezbollah’s rocket network. But Hezbollah’s militia, which represents 40 percent of Lebanon, the Shiites, can’t be wiped out at a price that Israel, or America’s Arab allies, can sustain — if at all.

You can’t go into an office in the Arab world today without finding an Arab TV station featuring the daily carnage in Lebanon. It’s now the Muzak of the Arab world, and it is toxic for us and our Arab friends.

Bush’s foreign policy is going to hurt us for generations to come, I fear. Righties seem to think that those of us who don’t support their military “solutions” don’t appreciate how dangerous our enemies are. But that’s not true. I do not doubt that Hezbollah is very nasty and dangerous, indeed. I’m against Bush’s deranged “foreign policy” because it’s not working. Yesterday I quoted Dennis Prager saying that support for Israel’s war separates the “indecent” Left from the “decent” Left. I say it separates those with a measurable IQ from those without. Or maybe those who are living in the real world from those who aren’t.

Robert Scheer writes,

The Bush foreign policy, from coddling Pakistan’s nuclear bomb-making to cheerleading Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, is in a free fall of such alarming consequence that it may be difficult to grasp.

Certainly that is the case for President Bush, who has been reduced to helplessly hoping the United Nations can get Syria “to stop doing this s—,” and for U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who blithely announced Monday that we are just watching the “birth pangs of a new Middle East.”

By Rice’s logic, Hurricane Katrina was just the labor contractions of the new New Orleans. All the Mideast needs now, apparently, is a nice epidural and some ice chips to suck on.

Maureen Dowd describes a president who is utterly ineffectual but too deluded to know it:

The more things get complicated, the more W. feels vindicated in his own simplified vision. The more people try to tell him that it’s not easy, that this is a region of shifting alliances and interests, the less he seems inclined to develop an adroit policy to win people over to our side instead of trying to annihilate them.

Bill Clinton, the Mutable Man par excellence, evolved four times a day; he had a tactical and even recreational attitude toward personal change. But W. prides himself on his changelessness and regards his immutability as the surest sign of his virtue. Facing a map on fire, he sees any inkling of change as the slippery slope to failure.

That’s what’s so frustrating about watching him deal — or not deal — with Iraq and Lebanon. There’s almost nothing to watch.

It’s not even like watching paint dry, since that, too, is a passage from one state to another. It’s like watching dry paint.

Billmon has been on fire lately; I recommend you read his last several posts, if you haven’t already. Today he tells us:

My friend is an old Middle East hand who has some good sources on the Israeli side, mostly ex-military and ex-Mossad, plus some contacts among the Bush I realist crowd — although of course they’re not in government any more either.

He didn’t have any secret dope on what the next military or diplomatic moves will be — it seems to be purely day-to-day now — but he DID get a clear sense that the Americans and the Israelis both understand now that they are in serious danger of losing the war.

They’re freaking out about this, of course, because they’re deathly afraid that if Israel is seen to fail, and fail badly, against Hizbullah, everybody and their Palestinian uncle will get it into their heads that they can take a crack at the Zionist entity. (The tough guy realists see this as a disaster in its own right; the “cry and shoot” gang frets the IDF will have to pound the West Bank and Gaza even harder to re-establish the balance of terror. Either way, it’s an unacceptable outcome.)

Plan B, then, is to try to “make something happen” on the ground — although what, exactly, isn’t clear. Today it was killing a low-level Hizbullah leader (in a border village they supposedly secured three days ago) and pumping him up as a big catch (shades of Zarqawi’s 28,000 “lieutenants”.) Tomorrow it will be something else — maybe the capture of the “terror capital” of south Lebanon, beautiful downtown Bint Jbeil.

The Big Finale:

If all this sounds familiar — the half-baked war plan, the unexpected setbacks, the frantic search for foreign legions, the lack of an exit strategy, the rising tide of blood — it certainly should. We’ve already seen this movie, in fact we’re still sitting through the last reel. It’s a hell of a time to release the sequel.

Righties scorn Senator Kerry’s alleged claim that the Hezbollah-Israeli war wouldn’t be happening if he had been president. Maybe; maybe not. By the time Kerry would have taken charge of foreign policy in 2005 much damage already was done. Hezbollah might have gone ahead with the provocation that started the war. On the other hand, Kerry’s Secretary of State would not have been Condi Rice.

However, I believe sincerely that had Al Gore become President in 2001, the Middle East would not be in flames now.

Today’s surreality: A Moonie Times publication says that Condi has highjacked Bush’s foreign policy.

Conservative national security allies of President Bush are in revolt against Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, saying that she is incompetent and has reversed the administration’s national security and foreign policy agenda.

It’s like they think the President actually had a foreign policy plan that Condi didn’t put in his head. Wow.

The criticism of Miss Rice has been intense and comes from a range of Republican loyalists, including current and former aides in the Defense Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. They have warned that Iran has been exploiting Miss Rice’s inexperience and incompetence to accelerate its nuclear weapons program. They expect a collapse of her policy over the next few months.

Looks like the neocons see their policy coming apart and plan to pin the blame on Condi. She’s going to pay for their sins.

For any who are interested, David Ignatius explains what a rational policy might look like.

Last week on MSNBC’s “Hardball” David Ignatius said,

President Bush in that comment that was picked up by the microphone, talks as if diplomacy is a little spigot you can turn off and on. Let‘s send Condi. Let‘s pick up the phone and let‘s have Kofi do this. It doesn‘t work that way. It requires sustained engagement over time. And that‘s been missing. We‘re paying the price for it.

Bushies don’t do diplomacy. Or, as Laura Rozen writes in Salon (ad-free at True Blue Liberal) the Bush Administration’s foreign policy “experts” — Condi et al. — seem to think “diplomacy” means only talking to people you like.

Increasingly, some former U.S. policymakers and diplomats, including self-described conservatives, are losing patience with the Bush administration’s allergy to talking, and are challenging its underlying assumption. The rationale for not talking to rogue regimes and extremist groups is that it rewards or legitimates them, demonstrates appeasement, and therefore sets back U.S. security interests.

“In diplomacy, you do not negotiate peace with your friends,” says former Undersecretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Edward Djerejian, who served as ambassador to Syria and Lebanon during the George H.W. Bush administration. “You negotiate peace with your enemies and your adversaries. That is one of the highest tasks of diplomacy.

“In the Arab-Israeli equation, people often say we have to put pressure on the parties to make peace,” Djerejian continued. “There’s some truth to that. At the same time, you have to deal with all relevant parties in order to obtain the political buy-in and chart out the common ground to make necessary compromises to come to an agreement. For that, you need dialogue and muscular diplomacy.”

Condi, for example, will not talk to representatives from Hezbollah. Instead, she wants the Saudis to talk to Hezbollah. She’s trusting the Saudis to represent America’s interests, in other words.

The Right didn’t use to hate diplomacy. For example, President Reagan’s Secretary of State, George Shultz, persuaded Reagan that it was OK to talk to the PLO. However,

In fact, it was during the Reagan administration that the schism between neoconservatives and realists on the subject of diplomacy first became apparent. As Rick Perlstein, author of a book about Barry Goldwater and a forthcoming one on Richard Nixon (and a political liberal), points out, some on the right were calling Reagan unprincipled for negotiating arms control agreements with the Soviet Union and not providing more backing for the Polish Solidarity movement. “It’s a founding narrative of the modern right,” claims Perlstein. “It is built into the right-wing characterological DNA.” With the ascendancy of the neoconservatives in the Bush administration, the non-talkers seemed to have won the battle on the right.

What is it with neocons and reality? You can argue whether Reagan should get primary credit, but, in fact the Soviet Union did collapse and pass into history on just after his watch. This seems to me to be empirical evidence that Reagan’s approach vis-à-vis the Soviets was correct.

Neoconservatives like Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy see their approach as pragmatic, not ideological. “The problem with talking to rogue states is that we don’t get anywhere with them,” Clawson told me. “In particular, Syria’s Bashar al-Assad repeatedly lied to us. We go, get a promise, and then nothing happens. On [former Secretary of State] Colin Powell’s first trip to the Middle East, Assad directly lied to Powell about whether Iraqi oil products were flowing through Syria.” With “three big rogue states,” concludes Clawson, meaning Iran, Syria and North Korean, “it just doesn’t work.”

But talking can be OK, as long as it’s done with a baleful countenance, and the party across the table is suitably intimidated. “As for Syria, the question is, we want this crisis to end with a change in Lebanon, with Hezbollah under a different station than now,” says Joshua Muravchik, of the American Enterprise Institute, a neoconservative Washington think tank. “And I have always been categorically against appeasement or concessions to miscreants. But I don’t think talking to someone is per se appeasement or concession. If our attitude toward Syria is what I think it ought to be, more threatening than supplicating, then I am perfectly happy to talk with them.”

Does this strike you as being childish?

Yesterday Martin Woollacott posted an essay called “The New World Immaturity” on The Guardian web site. Woollacott argues that too many nations of the world, western and Muslim, are being governed by adolescents who neither accept constraint on their actions nor understand that actions have consequences. As an example of adolescent thinking he presents Newt Gingrich, “oddball theorist and burnt out American political comet,” who is certain that World War III has begun.

… we know from history that radical and terrorist movements can evolve into more normal political entities, with less extreme aims. This is what may have been in the process of happening to Hamas in the occupied territories. It is not out of the question that it could happen to Hizbullah. But not for Newt Gingrich, who has already cast them in the role of permanent adversaries, along with their Iranian masters.

Gingrich brings us back to the American branch of the unilateralist regression in its worst form. It can’t see difference, it can only see opposition. And, while it is drawn to the principle that the world’s leading nation has a duty to consider everybody’s interests, it is also dangerously attracted to the idea of flattening its enemies in some apocalyptic showdown. The science fiction addict Gingrich has read Robert A Heinlein’s Starship Troopers one too many times.

And Woollacott reminds us of what worked during the Cold War:

[George] Kennan’s main point was that containment was better than war. But it is equally important to recognise that different views and plans about the future of the world can’t be blasted out of existence but have to be lived and negotiated with until, as happens often enough, they change.

Gingrich, at least, isn’t running anything but his mouth these days. Instead, we’ve got the Juvenile-in-Chief George W. Bush, as described by Eugene Robinson:

Just my luck. I go away on vacation and it happens to be the week when George W. Bush’s strategic view of the current world situation is revealed: Russia big. China big, too. World leaders boring. Lady world leaders need neck rub. Terrorism bad. Elections good (when the right people get elected). Israel good. Time to go home yet?

Might as well have chosen a President by picking out the snottiest kid in Mrs. Jones’s tenth grade homeroom.

The role of any American president and secretary of state should have been to move quickly to bring hostilities to an end. Instead, Bush all but egged the Israelis on, and Condoleezza Rice went so far as to reject the idea of a cease-fire. Belatedly, she has flown to the region with no real credibility as an honest broker. Her words of concern about the “humanitarian crisis” in Lebanon ring hollow.

But this administration doesn’t want to be an honest broker in the Middle East. Bush and Rice have staked their Middle East policy on a single incontrovertible idea — that terrorism is bad — and it has led them to the mistaken notion that Israel can achieve long-term security by creating a kind of scorched-earth buffer zone in southern Lebanon. …

… Bush, Rice et al. refuse to see that their crusade against terrorism can never be won by military action alone, because a victory in the war of arms can also be a defeat in the war of ideas. Lebanon was moving — imperfectly but unmistakably — toward becoming the kind of society we paint as a model for the Arab world, a secular democracy with a modernizing economy. Now billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure are in ruins and the country’s most promising industry, tourism, has effectively been obliterated. It will be some time before Beirut is anyone’s first choice for a holiday of sun and fun.

Condi talks about a “sustainable” cease fire. But what’s not sustainable is the use of force as the sole means of enacting policy. As Iraq should be teaching us, military resources are finite. I say should be; neocons don’t seem to be learning. Last week leading neocons Michael Ledeen, David Horowitz, and William Kristol called for American intervention against Syria and Iran. With what, dears? Sticks and stones? Last month alone the war in Iraq ate nearly $10 billion taxpayer dollars. Senator Russ Feingold said last year,

Make no mistake, our military readiness is already suffering. According to a recent RAND study, the Army has been stretched so thin that active-duty soldiers are now spending one of every two years abroad, leaving little of the Army left in any appropriate condition to respond to crises that may emerge elsewhere in the world. In an era in which we confront a globally networked enemy, and at a time when nuclear weapons proliferation is an urgent threat, continuing on our present course is irresponsible at best.

We are not just wearing out the troops; we are also wearing out equipment much faster than it is being replaced or refurbished. Just days ago the Chief of the National Guard, General H Steven Blum, told a group of Senate staffers that the National Guard had approximately 75% of the equipment it needed on 9/11. Today, the National Guard has 34% of the equipment it needs. And the response to Hurricane Katrina exposed some of the dangerous gaps in the Guard’s communications systems.

What we are asking of the Army is not sustainable, and the burden is taking its toll on our military families. This cannot go on.

Neocons think of the U.S. military the way a spoiled rich juvenile thinks of Daddy’s money — it’s inexhaustible. No matter how much you waste, there’s always more. And no matter what kind of trouble you get into, Daddy’s money/use of force will get you out of it.

Like children, neocons gravitate toward simple, magic-bullet solutions that will perfectly solve problems. But as Nick Kristof said in today’s New York Times, “one of the oldest lessons in international affairs is that not every problem has a neat solution.” And children need to learn they won’t always win, and they can’t always get their way, no matter how big a tantrum they throw.

And then there’s the neocons’ absolute, childlike faith in their beliefs and in themselves. As Eugene Robinson says (emphasis added):

I felt better when I thought the Decider didn’t have a worldview, just a set of instincts about freedom and democracy. But even if you set aside the president’s embarrassing open-mike performance at the Group of Eight summit, which is hard to do, events of the past week show that this administration actually thinks it knows what it’s doing. Bush and his folks haven’t just blundered around and created this dangerous mess, they’ve done it on purpose. And they intend to make it worse.

Fred Kaplan writes,

It’s not so much the blithe arrogance that’s troubling—the belief among many top Bush aides that they can ignore history and culture, that they’ve hit upon the magic formula that has eluded countless others. (After all, every president deserves a shot at making “enduring peace” in the Middle East.) It’s the stunning confidence in this belief—held so deeply that they’re willing to push ahead with their vision even at great sacrifice of political stability and human life.

So far, have the Bushies gotten anything right?

H.D.S. Greenway writes in today’s Boston Globe,

Whenever I hear the Bush administration talk about a defining moment, I tremble. For it would appear that the neoconservative ideal that Middle East violence can somehow bring about a more favorable situation for the United States and Israel has not died in the wreckage of Iraq.

Greenway (and Kaplan, and Kristof, and Robinson, and others) explains why Bush’s and Israel’s policies will make the Middle East less stable and Israel less safe in the long run. Yet the children, who cannot see the world through adult eyes, assume that those of us who don’t support Israel’s attacks on Lebanon are just bad people. The persistently immature Dennis Prager writes,

Amos Oz and James Carroll are men of the Left who have been tested and passed the most clarifying moral litmus test of our time — Israel’s fight for existence against the primitives, fanatics and sadists in Hezbollah and Hamas and elsewhere in the Arab/Muslim world who wish to destroy it. Anyone on the Left who cannot see this is either bad, a useful idiot for Islamic terrorists, anti-Semitic or all three. There is no other explanation for morally condemning Israel’s war on Hezbollah.

He cannot grasp that some of us are opposed to Israel’s actions because we want what’s best for Israel. And Lebanon. And us, too, for that matter. Just as, before the invasion of Iraq, our concerns about what could go wrong for the U.S. as well as Iraq (all of which turned out to be accurate) were dismissed by the all-purpose explanation: “You must be a Saddam lover.”

You can’t talk to these people. Which explains why Bushies don’t do diplomacy.