Despite this:
WASHINGTON -- For the first time, the United States Friday embraced plans for a "robust" international force in southern Lebanon to deal with Hezbollah guerrillas at the heart of the Mideast crisis....the United States still refuses to sit down with Israel, hold her hand and talk to her in an "Oprah"-kinda way about having proved a point and now backing down so that a peace process can start immediately.
And does anyone else here agree with me that a) Israel has made its point, and b) the United Nations countries would be far more likely to support sending in the blue-helmeted troops to keep the combatants at arm's length if the missiles would just stop being lobbed?
Israel rightly is concerned for its existence, an existence that one might say has been imperiled by the United States' wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the current face-off with Iran. No one denies that, as a state, Israel exists and should be allowed its sovereignty (many would argue about the existence of a religious state directly in conflict with the religion of the states around it, and that was an argument to be made during the creation of the state, I think).
History shows us that when Israel behaves in an antagonistic manner towards what it perceives as encroachments on that sovereignty, the antagonisms only increase. I'm not talking about all-out wars. I'm talking about the lobbing of shells by NGOs like Hizbollah and (formerly) Hamas. And when Israel has sat down after physically and emotionally exhausting itself, progress towards its existence has occured.
Churchill said, and it's still the best summary of the world I've ever seen, "To jaw-jaw is always better than to war-war!" Israel will not do that unless and until the US tells them to. I'm not sure what England is doing, except sucking up to the Bush administration. It's time we made the picture unanimous.
By the way, I found the headline of the article intriguing:
Rice headed for summitA little grooming ahead of the 2008 run for President?
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