Seven Days in July
From the Guardian:
Just one more week, kid!
And, as Chris Floyd points out, the indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon threatens not just Hezbollah, and not just Lebanese civilians--it threatens the lives of the 25,000 Americans in Lebanon. And rather than tell a close ally to stop threatening our citizens, we are arranging their evacuation instead (and doing a typically Bushian crappy job of it: "I can't believe the Americans," Danni Atiyeh, a 39-year-old civil engineer from Kansas City, Mo., said as he stood with his pregnant wife and sons Ali, 10, and Adrian, 6, while waiting for buses that were taking them to the ship. "Everybody else has gone home ... We're still here.") Floyd concludes:
The US is giving Israel a window of a week to inflict maximum damage on Hizbullah before weighing in behind international calls for a ceasefire in Lebanon, according to British, European and Israeli sources.
The Bush administration, backed by Britain, has blocked efforts for an immediate halt to the fighting initiated at the UN security council, the G8 summit in St Petersburg and the European foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels.
"It's clear the Americans have given the Israelis the green light. They [the Israeli attacks] will be allowed to go on longer, perhaps for another week," a senior European official said yesterday. Diplomatic sources said there was a clear time limit, partly dictated by fears that a prolonged conflict could spin out of control.
Just one more week, kid!
And, as Chris Floyd points out, the indiscriminate bombing of Lebanon threatens not just Hezbollah, and not just Lebanese civilians--it threatens the lives of the 25,000 Americans in Lebanon. And rather than tell a close ally to stop threatening our citizens, we are arranging their evacuation instead (and doing a typically Bushian crappy job of it: "I can't believe the Americans," Danni Atiyeh, a 39-year-old civil engineer from Kansas City, Mo., said as he stood with his pregnant wife and sons Ali, 10, and Adrian, 6, while waiting for buses that were taking them to the ship. "Everybody else has gone home ... We're still here.") Floyd concludes:
This is what the Bush Administration is saying--through deeds, not words--with this evacuation. It is a remarkable admission. Yet at the same time, the Bushists are sending $210 million worth of vital jet fuel supplies to Israel to help run the IDF war machine (which is already well-stoked by American largess) as it wages mass slaughter and threatens the lives of up to 25,000 Americans. Obviously, Bush doesn't really care how many civilians the Israelis kill, or where they might come from, either.
But we have certainly arrived at yet another surreal moment in the Bush Imperium: American taxpayers are paying millions of dollars to fuel a war machine that is menacing the lives of thousands of, er, American taxpayers. Here is a policy worthy of the Shakespearean epithet: "too cunning to be understood."
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