The Middle East is America's neighborhood now - and things aren't looking so great

Jim Lobe writes in Bush Faces Major Choice Amid Escalation Inter Press Service 07/12/06:

The sudden opening Wednesday by Lebanon's Hezbollah militia of a second front in Israel's ongoing campaign against Hamas militants in Gaza presents the administration of U.S. President George W. Bush with an escalating crisis that, until now, it has preferred to ignore.

The immediate question it faces is whether to maintain its strong backing for military action by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or to engage in active diplomacy to prevent any further escalation and end the violence.

That the stakes are extraordinarily high was made clear not only by Olmert's decision to send the Israeli Defence Force (IDF) into Lebanon for the first time since Israel's withdrawal in 2000, but also by a White House statement issued Wednesday afternoon that promised to hold Syria and Iran "responsible for (the Hezbollah) attack and the ensuing violence."

"This is potentially very dangerous," Bassel Saloukh, a political scientist at the Lebanese American University in Beirut, told IPS in a telephone interview. "If the Americans take this to legitimate a strike against Iran or Syria, then I think it will escalate with devastating consequences."

Meanwhile, Bush's Christian Right base is going ecstatic, because every war in the Middle East means to them that Jesus Is Coming Soon.

Meanwhile, here in the real existing world: Israeli aircraft rocket Beirut airport runways by Nadim Ladki, Reuters 07/13/06; Israeli woman killed in Katyusha attack on Nahariya; IAF attacks Beirut airport, Hezbollah TV station by Jack Khoury, Amos Harel, Aluf Benn and Gideon Alon Ha'aretz 07/13/06.

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