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.

The Associated Press reports —

President Bush has ordered helicopters and ships to Lebanon to provide humanitarian aid, but he still opposes an immediate cease-fire that could give relief from a 13-day-old Israeli bombing campaign.

There was talk on cable news that Condi Rice had offered U.S. aid for rebuilding Lebanon. I agree we have a moral obligation to help rebuild Lebanon, but somebody might want to ask the Bushies about rebuilding New Orleans.

Condi Rice made a surprise visit to Lebanon this morning and met with Lebanon’s prime minister. She’s talking about a “sustainable” cease fire —

“We believe that a cease-fire is urgent,” Rice told reporters on a flight from Washington to a refueling stop in Ireland. “It is important, however, to have conditions that will make it sustainable.” …

… “The really important thing here is that whatever we do has to contribute to Lebanon’s regaining sovereignty over all its territory,” said Rice.

“It’s just very important that we work urgently, but that we also work in a way that is going to push this forward, not backwards.”

It’s a brilliant position; she can pretend to be against war while cheering war forward. Maureen Dowd:

The more W. and his tough, by-any-means-necessary superbabe have tried to tame the Middle East, the more inflamed the Middle East has become. Now the secretary of state is leaving, reluctantly and belatedly, to do some shuttle diplomacy that entails little diplomacy and no shuttling. It’s more like air-guitar diplomacy.

Condi doesn’t want to talk to Hezbollah or its sponsors, Syria and Iran — “Syria knows what it needs to do,’’ she says with asperity — and she doesn’t want a cease-fire. She wants “a sustainable cease-fire,’’ which means she wants to give the Israelis more time to decimate Hezbollah bunkers with the precision-guided bombs that the Bush administration is racing to deliver.

“I could have gotten on a plane and rushed over and started shuttling, and it wouldn’t have been clear what I was shuttling to do,” she said.

Keep more civilians from being killed? Or at least keep America from being even more despised in the Middle East and around the globe?

Nedra Pickler of the Associated Press reports that President Bush is opposed to an immediate cease fire.

White House officials said President Bush remains opposed to an immediate cease-fire to stop violence in the Middle East, despite personal pleas from ally Saudi Arabia that he help stop the bloodshed.

Saudi King Abdullah beseeched Bush to intervene in Israel’s military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, where the death toll is approaching 400 after less than two weeks of bombing. Abdullah’s request was hand-delivered to Bush by Saudi officials who requested a meeting Sunday at the White House.

“We requested a cease-fire to allow for a cessation of hostilities,” Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal told reporters as he departed the West Wing.

To which the White House replied:

“Our position on an immediate cease-fire is well known and has not changed,” said White House national security spokesman Frederick Jones.

That position is that before there’s a cease fire, the terrorist threat from Hezbollah must be “addressed.” Exactly what that means isn’t clear. The Sauds want Bush to persuade Israel to stand down, because the U.S. is the only nation on the planet with any clout with Israel.

Seems to me there are a number of diplomatic opportunities here. Will Condi, finally, get something right for the first time in her sorry-ass career? Don’t hold your breath.

Right now Israel is in a position to demand terms. In a few more days of fighting that might be less true. Billmon writes,

Twelve days in, and even Ralph Peters thinks the Israelis are losing:

Israel is losing this war. For a lifelong Israel supporter, that’s a painful thing to write. But it’s true. And the situation’s worsening each day.

Now Ralph is the guy who spent a few days back in March riding around the safer parts of Baghdad (when such places still existed) and then came back and told his fellow true believers that the war in Iraq was as good as won. So if he now says the Israelis are losing, I would ordinarily expect the IDF to be accepting Hizbollah’s unconditional surrender some time tomorrow morning.

But it’s clear from many other sources that things aren’t going so well with Operation Midwife:

The Israeli Army — which dashed across the Sinai in two days in 1967, and surrounded an entire Egyptian army in 1973, has spent the past three days trying to secure Maroun al-Ras, a village about 500 meters inside Lebanon.

Securing that modest objective (and it may not be secure even yet) has cost the Israelis at least 20 soldiers KIA.

The number of rockets falling on northern Israel has been reduced only minimally, if at all, and Israeli civilians are still dying, despite 11 days of bombing and round-the-clock Israeli air cover over southern Lebanon.

U.S. military sources say that IDF claims to have destroyed a significant percentage of Hizbollah’s missiles are significantly “overstated.”

Jane’s Weekly reports that Hizbollah has emulated the Viet Cong and honeycombed the border area with underground tunnels and command posts that are virtually impervious to artillery fire and the Israeli Air Force’s existing stock of bombs. (It looks like those “precision” munitions the Pentagon is rushing to the front may be bunker busters.)

At least so far, it appears the Israelis have set extremely limited objectives for their ground forces. (This is one of Peters’ big gripes.) According to the Washington Post, the goal of the current operation is to secure four villages and a strip of territory six miles wide and 2.5 miles deep along the border. The significance of those villages and that particular piece of land is not stated. Nor is it explained how clearing them, and only them, will prevent Hizbollah from continuing to rain rockets on Israeli towns and cities — much less force the organization to disarm.

Those glorious little wars just ain’t what they used to be.

Righties, in their simple little binary way, assume that everyone critical of Israel’s recent actions must favor Hezbollah over Israel. So for the record — if it were up to me to choose one and discard the other, certainly I would keep Israel and pitch Hezbollah. The problem is that Israel, like the Bush Administration, puts far too much faith in war to solve its problems. Just as the invasion in Iraq has far weakened our nation and made us more vulnerable to attacks, Israel’s military aggression will likely sock Israel with more cost than benefit.

Larry Johnson writes,

Israel’s latest offensive to root out and destroy Hezbollah probably will fail and in the process will ignite a new round of international terrorist attacks that will put the United State squarely in the crosshairs. It is as if we are watching a plane crash in slow motion. We see the plane hurtling towards the earth, our mouths agape in a silent scream. We know it will explode on impact and can do nothing but watch. (Please check out Pat Lang’s take on the latest developments).

Israel’s last invasion of Lebanon did not vanquish Hezbollah. This time around Israel faces a Hezbollah that is bigger, better armed, and well entrenched in highly fortified areas. Air power cannot extract Hezbollah from their bunkered retreats and caves. That will be the hard work of infantry. And as the Israeli Army tries to clear the caves, thousands of fighters on both sides will likely die.

Condi Rice still holds the crazy belief that Lebanon’s Army, which is 50% Shia, will magically deploy and confront Hezbollah. She also deluded herself into believing that the radical groups, like Hezbollah and the insurgents in Iraq, are stirring up trouble because the US mission of spreading democracy is actually working. Maybe Condi also believes that the Tooth Fairy passes out coins for lost teeth, but believing in fantasies does not make fantasies come true.

Further,

If the United States is perceived (emphasis on perceived) as encouraging or directing the Israeli response, the odds increase that Hezbollah will ratchet things up another notch by playing the terrorist card.

We should not confuse Hezbollah with Al Qaeda. Unlike Al Qaeda, Hezbollah has a real and substantial international network. Unlike Al Qaeda, Hezbollah has a real and substantial international political and financial network. They have personnel and supporters scattered in countries around the world who have the training and resources to mount attacks. Hezbollah has no qualms about using terrorist attacks as part of a broader strategy to achieve its objectives. The last major Hezbollah attack against the United States was the June 1996 attack on the U.S. military apartment complex in Dharan, Saudi Arabia. Hezbollah also organized the attacks on the Israeli Embassy in Argentina in 1992 and Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1994. But they also have exercised restraint when they felt they could achieve their objectives through political means. The ten year hiatus in major mass casualty attacks could come to a shattering end in the coming months, and American citizens are likely to pay some of that price with their own blood.

For the past several days Michelle Malkin et al. have been screaming about Hezbollah sleeper cells in the U.S. and urging support for Israel’s war, as if a war to secure four villages and a strip of territory six miles wide and 2.5 miles deep along the Israel-Lebanon border will, somehow, make the terrorist cells in America evaporate. Again, as I argued in the last post, with righties you always need to separate reasons from motivations. And as in the last post, I think righties’ motivation is to punish — as in kill, maim, destroy — Muslims. Keeping America safe from terrorism — which their actions, IMO, are not doing — is just the excuse.

Righties continue to believe war is the answer. Maybe they need to re-think the question.

Anatol Lieven writes in today’s Los Angeles Times,

Remember the argument for the Iraq war — that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would lead to a stable, democratic Iraq and bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians? Remember the argument that the key problem in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was lack of Palestinian democracy? Remember Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s promise that the U.S. would “support the new Lebanon”?

In truth, reliance on democratization was always not so much a strategy as an excuse for the lack of one. It provided a flimsy cover for the Bush administration’s inability or unwillingness to address the key challenges and opportunities of the region. These failures included walking away from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and refusing to consider deals with Iran and Syria when, in the wake of 9/11, these regimes were extremely eager for compromise. As investigative reporter Seymour Hersh and Mideast scholar Flynt Leverett, among others, have argued, Bush forfeited the chance to recruit these two states as allies in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Sunni extremist world, which the Syrian and Iranian regimes have their own good reasons to hate.

Is there any part of the Bush Administration’s foreign policy that isn’t an unmitigated disaster?

The neoconservatives who shaped Bush’s “strategy” toward the Middle East always embodied a quite Orwellian contradiction. On the one hand, they professed to believe that early democracy is possible for the Middle East and that it would solve the region’s problems, including the Israeli-Arab dispute. On the other hand, many made no secret of their belief that, as neocon scholar Michael Ledeen has written (quoting Machiavelli), “it is better to be feared than loved.” Raphael Patai, whose book “The Arab Mind” influenced neoconservative thinking, argues that Arabs chiefly respond to the language of force.

To a large extend, IMO, the whole problem with right-wing foreign policy is that reasons and motivations are poles apart. If you could dig through the hardened sediment of a neocon’s psyche I’m sure you’d find that the real motivation is American control. Beneath the calls for benevolent hegemony is a desire to make scary foreign places more docile, and more like America, so that they won’t be so scary and so foreign. And, of course, if American corporations can have full use of the resources and markets of those foreign places, so much the better.

Neocons speak of spreading democracy, but it never seems to occur to them that a sovereign foreign people, once democratized, might not make the policy choices the neocons want them to make. This tells me neocons are not being honest with themselves about their own motivations.

You can say the same thing about Iraq. Righties might talk about bringing democracy to Iraq, but IMO their real motivation regarding Iraq was to punish Muslims for September 11. Iraq is a proxy war, standing in for the war of retribution against stateless terrorism that many of desire but can’t have. Because motivations and reasons don’t match, actions and policies work at cross-purposes. While we (meaning Americans, collectively) say we want Iraq to be peaceful and pro-American, our actions — at Abu Gharab and Fallujah, for example — say that we want to kick ass. We say we want Iraq to “stand up” (so that we can stand down) but we’ve exhibited a terrible reluctance to let go.

Robert Kuttner wrote in yesterday’s Boston Globe,

The Iraq war was going to display American power, promote democracy, strengthen moderates, and secure Israel. Instead, the quagmire has demonstrated the humiliating limits of US military power, fomented anarchy, recruited Islamist extremists, and strengthened a more radicalized Iran.

Palestinian moderates have been marginalized, leaving nobody for Israeli moderates to negotiate with. Hamas and Hezbollah have more support among Arabs than ever. Israel finds itself more vulnerable militarily, prone to excess, and dangerously isolated from world opinion. As for democracy, our few allies in the region are dictators and kings. Democratic Lebanon is a shambles. The democratically elected government in Iraq has just denounced Israel, and a democratic Palestinian election empowered Hamas.

Bush said you couldn’t negotiate with bad guys. In Iraq, where Saddam turned out to be telling the truth about nuclear weapons and Bush turned out to be lying, diplomacy was forsaken for war. Syria, which gave the US genuine intelligence help after 9/11, was deemed a nation not worth diplomatic engagement. As former National Security Council official Flynt Leverett documented, an overture by the then-moderate Iranian government in 2002 was blown off by the United States.

Bush insisted that we go it alone. Now, having rejected diplomacy, an isolated Bush administration is more dependent than ever on the European Union, the Russians, and the UN. In Bush’s four minutes of open-mike fame at the G-8 summit, he plaintively told Britain’s Tony Blair, “I felt like telling Kofi to call, to get on the phone to [Syrian President] Assad and make something happen.”

But when UN General Secretary Kofi Annan told the Security Council Thursday that we need an immediate cease-fire and expanded multilateral peacekeeping, America’s UN ambassador, John Bolton, rejected the idea. Bolton and the other radicals in the administration want Israel to keep pummeling Lebanon a while longer. The Bush policy has produced a codependency of the most extreme elements on all sides — the party of mutual Armageddon. This is the war party of Hamas, Hezbollah, the Israeli right, the Iranian ultras, Rumsfeld, and Cheney. Right-wing strategists like William Kristol, who often reflect the thinking of Cheney, are now openly calling for war with Iran.

Kristol was a chief proponent of “benevolent hegemony,” note.

Iran is the source of those Hezbollah missiles, the spawning ground of Islamist militancy, the greatest threat to Israel. So let’s just have it out. Not a ground war or an Iraq-style regime change — we blew that option– but a war on the cheap, of missile strikes (with a risk of mass civilian casualties). That would sure make Iran think twice about supporting Hezbollah, promote democracy, and respect America.

Can these people be serious?

Yes, they are serious. Delusional, but serious.

You’ll like this — Joe Conason writes in Salon that the neocons see the war in Lebanon as a chance for vindication.

Whatever the neoconservatives may lack in prudence they more than compensate for with persistence. Their policies are failing spectacularly in Iraq, where civil war and insurgency threaten to destroy the unstable unity government. Their policies are failing more quietly in Afghanistan, where resurgent Taliban rebels imperil the fledgling democracy. But rather than reckon with the damage and reconsider their actions, they have seized on the confrontation between Israel and Lebanon to renew their old ambitions.

William Kristol, the Weekly Standard editor who bears as much guilt for the Iraq debacle as anyone outside government, suggests military strikes against Iran and perhaps Syria. Newt Gingrich, the old chicken hawk, is eagerly anticipating World War III. Michael Ledeen demands “hot pursuit” across the borders of Iraq into Syria and Iran as the prelude to World War IV.

What are their motivations? Forget benevolence; as Conason says, this is “bloodthirsty irresponsibility, not to say insanity.” And how can these people remain so arrogant when they clearly have so little to be arrogant about?

This should scare the stuffing out of you, assuming you’ve still got stuffing — Richard Wolffe writes at Newsweek.com about President Bush at the G8 Conference:

Over the next several days, Bush huddles with presidents and prime ministers, showing how far he has traveled since 9/11—and also how little he has changed. Bush thinks the new war vindicates his early vision of the region’s struggle: of good versus evil, civilization versus terrorism, freedom versus Islamic fascism. He still believes that when it comes to war and terror, leaders need to decide whose side they are on.

Kinda takes your breath away, huh?

I’ve long believed that the President’s underlying motivations have to do with unresolved issues with his parents. He’s still acting out adolescent rebellion; letting the world know he doesn’t need the grown-ups to tell him what to do. But for the Right in general, I think it’s all about backlash. They’re fighting modernity, science, multiculturalism (and the swiftly shrinking planet), us, each other, and ultimately themselves. And it appears to be a fight to the death.