So the tentative truce between Hezbollah and the Israelis marches on, much to my own surprise. Rightly so, Hezbollah has begun cash compensation for Lebanese who had their homes destroyed. They ought to foot the bill for all the damaged infrastructure like bridges, roads, power plants, etc,..

The Israelis should help out too, but a cold day in hell before anything like that will ever happen. The Israelis ought to learn how to respond to terror with a little less force and a little more tact. Us Americans ought to learn the same. The old days of standing armies are gone, and the sooner people begin to realize that, the better for everybody in the world.

So let’s go somewhere else. We haven’t visited Iraq, primarily because it happens to be a sore spot for me. We are losing about 500 soldiers per year there, which seems like a lot until you compare it to 500 or so per week that the Iraqi civilians are suffering. The place is completely insane. The violence seems to be primarily focused between the Sunni and Shiite sects, with the Bin Laden group practicing the only thing they know, death and chaos and instability and yes, the T-word, terror to the extreme.

It’s hard to imagine such widespread lawlessness in a place that is supposed to be civilized. Kidnappings that serve no political purpose whatsoever. Anybody suspected of having any money is subject to being snatched and ransomed for cash. The bombings tend to be more political, striving to send the country into a full-fledged lines-drawn civil war. And all the murders, some for revenge, others for political reasons. Essentially nobody is safe there. For whatever reason, everybody is a potential target, and everybody is a potential victim.

I think the Bin Laden clan ought to re-think their plans there. They seem to be somewhat short-sighted, their goals appearing to be simply to create mass chaos in order to make the foreign invaders look impotent and incompetent. They should realize that starting a civil war with the Shiites is in essence starting a war with Iran. They will not win if they wind up in a war with the Iranians. The Iranians know how to fight fire with fire, and they are a lot better funded, better trained, and better equipped. If the Iranians chose to go after Bin Laden for whatever reason, I have little doubt that they would make quick business of it.

I listened to the 60 Minutes interview with the Iranian president last week. If you listen to the Bushites in Washington, you get a picture of a raving lunatic with nuclear aspirations, much like Kim in Korea. But I didn’t get that impression of the man at all. Extreme, perhaps, but certainly not crazy, and as far as I was able to discern, he was not necessarily interested in destabilizing any of his neighbors, in fact seemed more concerned about all the existing instability around, and the root causes of such, which happen to point mostly all the way back to Washington.

So we don’t ask ourselves why so many millions of people in the Middle East hate us so, instead blaming it all on bad publicity and religious extremism. But the Israelis made an excellent example of why when they trashed Lebanon over the kidnapping of two soldiers, which I might add, haven’t been returned home yet unless I missed the news about it somewhere. This heavy-handed approach is effective when it comes to toppling regimes, but serves no long or short term benefit in a limited exchange as was the case in Lebanon. The only thing that it served was to foster more hatred toward the Israelis and indirectly, us Americans.

Ask the Bushites and you get the answer that we are fighting against an ideology. But if it is our intention to force our ideas on the people over there, be it with bombs or diplomats, then the Arabs are fighting against the same thing. It is really nothing more than a clash of cultures. Our behavior over the past several decades has created what we are dealing with now. You can grant that terror is not right in any case, but when bombs fall indiscriminately from Israeli planes over Lebanon, you can hardly say that the Lebanese civilian population was not terrorized. So what’s the difference?