G-8 Leaders May As Well Stay Home Next Time

For those not paying attention, the U.S. president is now morphing the decades old Arab-Israeli conflict into his worldwide war on terrorism. Besides dehumanizing the enemy, making it more comfortable to take sides and tolerate civilian casualties, that ignores a lot of history as well as the awkward reality that terrorism is a tactic habitually — as well as almost universally — used in Middle East transitions from underdog to overlord. But politics is the art of never letting facts get in the way of a good yarn. So a disproportionate, regionally destabilizing response to a foolishly provocative, if hardly unusual, kidnapping and thankfully inept rocket attacks is being simplified and justified as part of the bracing struggle of good against evil. http://tinyurl.com/m5yq7 [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on August 4, 2006]

Note: http://tinyurl.com/m5yq7