Bush-Blair & Company in their unison support for a barbaric Israeli onslaught on Lebanon have managed to completely turn the proverbial political table around -- on themselves that is.  Their adoption of the absurd notion of Israel acting in self-defense and continued insistence that there would be no halt to the offensive unless Hezbollah fighters are driven from the border has not only strengthened Hezbollah but will prove a boon to the anti-Zionist resistance movement in Lebanon and beyond.

Nathan Gardels editor-in-chief of the journal of social and political thought published by Blackwell/Oxford, and Global Services of the Los Angeles Times Syndicate/Tribune in a recent interview [3] with Zbigniew Brzezinski posed this question to the former National Security Advisor to President Carter:  "Doesn't military superiority as a blunt instrument lead to eternal enmity, not security?"

Brzezinski responded: "These neocon prescriptions, of which Israel has its equivalents, are fatal for America and ultimately for Israel. They will totally turn the overwhelming majority of the Middle East's population against the United States. The lessons of Iraq speak for themselves. Eventually, if neo-con policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well".

He then asks: "Don't the deaths of so many innocent civilians in Qana in the south of Lebanon -- like the massacre in Haditha, Iraq, by American troops -- send a message to Arabs and Iranians that the "new Middle East" coming from the U.S. and Israel will amount to occupation, carnage and bloodshed?" to which Brzezinski replies: "This is precisely why neocon policies are recklessly dangerous both to America and Israel". He then continues to explain that "today it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the Israeli-Palestinian problem, the Iraq problem and Iran from each other. Neither the United States nor Israel has the capacity to impose a unilateral solution in the Middle East. There may be people who deceive themselves into believing that".

"Public opinion around the Arab world has reacted by strongly supporting Hezbollah and Lebanon" Rami Khouri wrote in a recent Beirut's Daily Star article [4]. "Washington is feeling the pain of its own self-inflicted diplomatic castration, as a consequence of siding with Israel".

Israel's ongoing and indiscriminate bombing of every village, road, bridge and other infrastructure, which has so far killed over 900 people, many of them children, and displaced another million has forged a remarkable unity among both politicians as well as the entire Lebanese population, whether Christian, Sunni or Shia.  Those who may have rejected Hezbollah at the outset of this crisis, are now unanimously behind it.