Posted by
Soldier Dad on Wednesday, July 19, 2006 12:57:34 PM
One of the (many) luxuries of being able to watch a conflict from afar is the opportunity to play armchair strategist. For the people facing an ongoing barrage of explosives in the Middle East, there are much more important things to think about, like not ending up on the wrong end of a Katyusha rocket. But here in the United States, we can reflect on the Big Issues, like how this war will impact our household budget and the effect it could have on the November elections, while we leave the small stuff, like survival of family and friends, to somebody else.
And so there is a growing mountain of commentary on the Middle East conflict, as everybody has an opinion and the Internet gives all of them the opportunity to make it heard, if only to the 3 sleepless adolescents who stumble onto their blog in the middle of the night. And one of those strange things about the American response to Israel is that it is making for some pretty unusual allies.
First there are the liberals who find themselves in a rare moment of agreement with President Bush.
Bill Maher marvels at the sensation of being on the same side of any debate with Bush and applauds his refusal to make any moral equivalence between Israel and the non-state terrorist thugs on all of its borders. Then there are the old-fashioned isolationist conservatives like
Pat Buchanan who argue right alongside the bastions of "progressivism" that Israel's response is an unjust, illegal, and immoral assault upon Lebanese civilians and their democratically-elected government.
And we cannot forget all those other liberals who are not swayed into the hawkish camp by the sight of Israel under seige. Always looking out for the little guy, they're now standing by the solidly chauvinistic, relentlessly repressive, and undoubtedly anti-choice Hezbollah. Oh, well, wait a minute. Western liberals and non-Western totalitarian types on the same side? Maybe that's not such a strange combination after all.