There’s lots of killing being done in Lebanon, and lots of killing still to do before all the dust settles. Many of us in the reality-based world can’t quite understand how destroying homes and killing people in Lebanon can possibly be part of a purely military plan to attrit Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. Likewise, some of us can’t quite understand how bombing entire cities and villages in Iraq will cause the occupation resistance to lay down its arms. The Israelis have an excellent answer.

“We’re destroying Beirut because we’re punishing the Lebanese for not throwing Hezbollah out of the country. They have an 80,000 man army. They should have chased off Hezbollah years ago. Check with our attorney, Alan Dershowitz. He’ll explain the whole thing.”

Mr Dershowitz, a lawyer/teacher at Harvard, has a great reputation on television as a guy who has an opinion on everything. To explain Israel’s war crimes, he’s pioneered new ground in the legal concept of “contributory negligence.”

here is a vast difference — both moral and legal — between a 2-year-old who is killed by an enemy rocket and a 30-year-old civilian who has allowed his house to be used to store Katyusha rockets. Both are technically civilians, but the former is far more innocent than the latter. There is also a difference between a civilian who merely favors or even votes for a terrorist group and one who provides financial or other material support for terrorism.

Got that? If an Israeli bomb levels your house and kills your two year old baby that’s an “ooops” moment. But if some hard guys with AKs came around and showed you their guns and politely asked if they could possibly store some B-40 rockets and anti-tank weapons in your back bedroom – the one Auntie Naftala used to live in before she was gathered to her eternal reward – and you say it’s all right, then it’s all on you, buddy. Your bad decision is responsible for the death of your two-year-old.

I guess we will some day judge war crimes the same way we are advised to judge contributory negligence. If you greased some children with your F-16, or shot the hell out of a marked ambulance, you’re a bad boy and need to go directly to jail. But if you’re – oh… say, a frickin publicity-mad lawyer in some other country who makes up whacked-out shit to justify anything the homeland of your religion does in the name of its version of the deity to people who use a different name for their deity then there’s (maybe) slightly less negligence and guilt. Although there might be an argument for bad lawyering in there somewhere.

But, anyway, Mr Bu$h seems to have finally gotten it through his (reportedly) drug- and alcohol-shattered synapses that we getting some bad press here. Our proxies, the “Spartans of the Middle East” haven’t been ferocious enough, nor aggressive enough. Mr Bu$h does love him lots of death and destruction, and the Israeli’s just haven’t done well enough. He wants Israel to continue to grind down Hezbollah, and strategically, from the US point of view, that’s a prudent decision.

Hezbollah are bad guys. The fact that they have created a mini-state-within-a-state in Southern Lebanon, and have aided the poor and powerless in that part of the country is good, but maintaining hospitals and infirmaries, running soup kitchens and schools to feed and educate the poor only goes so far when you’re dedicated either to destroying Israel, or militant Zionism, or forcing Israel to withdraw to its 1967 borders, whichever theory of motivation you prefer. I suppose it would be one thing if Hezbollah did all that with protest marches, prayer fests, and hunger strikes. But Hezbollah doesn’t do it that way. They’ve chosen the gun, and whether that was caused by hatred or desperation is immaterial, because the result is international condemnation.

Israel seems to presently be determined to create a repeat of their 18 year old buffer zone that existed prior to their withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000. That would be a good idea, except for the questions “where do the surviving Hezbollah go?” and “would it be a better idea for a multi-national force to occupy this buffer zone?”

Israel’s answer to the first question seems to be “to their maker.” The second answer might be decided somewhere other than in Tel Aviv. A strong, logical argument for the multi-national force demands NATO participation. The problem is, of course, that the strongest NATO members are presently busy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Germany demurs, politely, to be put in a position where the world might see some Landsers shooting at Israelis, in reactive combat. France has no great desire to revisit the Levant as a policeman, having spent some momentous years there as an imperial power, and I think the Lebanese agree.

As for the rest of NATO, well… I mean, they've done so well in Iraq, haven't they?

Meanwhile, Israel continues to punish the helpless bystander, Beirut and northern Lebanon.

Special note to the three nimrods from Oklahoma, Kansas and Alabama. I am not an anti-Semite. In fact, I am a Mosaic Jew, since my mother was a Cohain. Stop it now or I’ll start posting offensive articles about rattlesnake kissing and charismatic clogging at Sunday morning services. The religion you three pretend to represent does not have an admirable reputation in the Levant.