"Whats going on?"

Now - I don't pretend to understand anything about Middle Eastern politics or its deep roots in a tangled and bloody history .... and so I'm sure that my total bewilderment at how the current crisis has played out over the past fortnight and more .... is pretty common to most of us .... I just don't understand how the world seems to have stumbled into this unfolding hell ...

My particularly keen interest above and beyond my usual news-junkiness (aside from the obvious horror etc etc of course) is because Shashank was posted to the region with about 24 hours notice (on the very eve i might add of my visiting him in kenya .... and our big planned holiday with yatin to zanzibar .... dating a journalist is only for the very unflappable) ..... in his own words - he's been speeddating the airports of the middle east ..... egypt, cyprus, jordan, syria (it is amazing he has pages left in his passport) ... and now he's in beirut .... now i'm not going to scoop him a la yatin ... but save to say that he's bunkering down to be there for an indefinite while (this straight after 3 weeks in darfur) and he will certainly need to travel down to the south where the really scary action is ....

My take on this whole situation is obviously very naive ..... my experiences growing up in Saudi Arabia do not make me the most fervent supporter of arab causes .... but these sentiments at odds somewhat with my good Guardian-reader natural sympathies for palestine and lebanon ....

However irrespective of Israeli understandable fears and insecurities about its neighbours' intentions .... surely any normal average person must see that this full scale war against the people of Lebanon in an attempt to suppress Hizbollah cannot from any perspective or planet be seen as acceptable .... in the words of Fouad Sinoria the Lebanese PM - his country is being "cut to pieces ... and why should an Israeli tear be worth more than a drop of Lebanese blood?"

Poor Lebanon .... only just recovering from a horrendous civil war ... finally trying to extricate itself from the clutches of its own neighbours machinations .... and coming to terms with the assasination of Rafik Harriri - the main architect of its renaissance ..... is now shattered once again .... according to the Economist .... more than 800,000 Lebanese are now internally displaced .... and between 400 - 650 killed (several times as many as Israel with incalcubly more infrastructure damage) ..... in a war that their nation did not start. And lets not even start to get into the first front of this war in Gaza.

Now you could say that some blame lies with the Lebanese - Hizbollah is undoubtedly a threat to Israel ..... and so their politicians ought to severe their links with the Syrian/Iranian backed "Party of God" (18 MPs in Lebanon) and that if Sinoria maintains his friendship with Nasrallah (and certainly refuses to condemn his actions) - then Israel can legitmately view Lebanon as a threat .... and it seems reasonable that Israel had to respond to the provocation of Hezbollah kidnapping its soldiers and lobbing rockets over the border ..... but can this ever really be a justification for such a disproportionate reaction against a nation? I just don't get it ... I can't understand .... and someone clever needs to explain it to me.

However ..... my real vitriol now is reserved for our own governments .... the governments that stopped the Security Council from condemning the Israeli bombing that killed 4 UN Observers .... the governments that between them scuppered calls for an immediate ceasefire at the Rome summit even when it was supported by all other parties present including the UN .... the governments who claim that they want to build a "sustainable ceasefire" (read - give you more time to destroy Hizbollah) ... and are fast losing all credibility amongst not just arab nations to be involved in a any form of peace process (whilst the french - ha! imagine! - seem to be emerging smelling of roses ....)



And really - even if we knew we could expect no better from George Bush ..... I had hoped that Tony Blair at least would show a modicum of the decency for which we initially elected him ..... do any of us even remember the party who gave us hopes of an "ethical foreign policy" when they were first elected? .... and now the ignominy .... we let the yanks stop their weapon-delivery flights in our country en route to israel whilst condi talks of sustainable ceasefires! ..... truly this whole shoulder-to-shoulder performance of Tony Blair's is getting tired ... we're all over it ..... and you have to wonder just what it is that Dubya holds over him .... Sir Stephen Wall wrote a great editorial in the New Statesman and the Guardian this week - warning that we must not let the US set our moral compass .... and I agree .... we need to stop outsourcing our foreign policy to the yanks ... and soon.


PS 1 Interestingly - I just saw a clip on CNN showing how some evangelical groups in America are saying that this conflict was predicted in the Bible (Revelations) - and how this Holy War is the start of the return of Jesus Christ as King .... and thus Israel should be supported at all costs ... I'm speechless .... someone please explain ...

PS 2 Shashank's experiences there so far ... he says have made him realise just how much worse it is here in any African conflict than there in the Middle East .... he said the scenes in Cypus with all the evacuees were really just like any hotel lobby in Nigeria .... and Chad even in peacetime (let alone Darfur) was far more horrific than anything he's seen there so far ..... whereas - whilst he's been away .... here on the dark continent we have historic elections in DRC .... Somalia and Ethiopia appear to be approaching their own Holy War ..... Liberia's capital got water and street lights for the first time in 15 years ..... and millions have died from diseases that could have been prevented, cured or treated with the cash frittered away on bombs, rockets and the like .... and the poor readers of McClatchey/Knight Ridder newspapers won't have the chance to read about it all ....