Friday, July 14, 2006

Ha'aretz has the details on the overnight attacks in Lebanon. Things were extremely tense yesterday. The newspapers all had "WAR" as their headline in massive block letters along with pictures of the dead and kidnapped soldiers. News kept trickling in all day about more attacks in the north, culminating in the rockets that hit Haifa, which is a major escalation on the part of our friends across the border. The worst part was waiting to see what our response would be, so now that its happened things may calm down a bit. I don't think the Lebanese government has the power or the will to stop Hezbollah on its own, so Nasrallah would seem to have overplayed his hand. He doesn't seem to realize that the possibility of the Lebanese army de-escalating the situation was his only chance to get out of this moderately intact. Big Pharaoh has some very interesting commentary from our fellow anti-Chomskyites in the Arab world. I wouldn't be shocked to see major Israeli ground incursions into southern Lebanon over the next few days. Oddly enough, the silent majority of Lebanese who don't support Hezbollah may not be too unhappy with this. I await the "international community"'s inevitable condemnation.