I was sitting in the sun yesterday and feeling kind of low from a bout of reading the news. It feels like we're in the midst of a collective global slide, and the People In Charge are doing all they can to grease the path on the way down. It's a deeply powerless feeling, and I don't like it.

With regard to the Israel/Palestine/Lebanon war (which is what Israeli leaders are calling it and they're the ones who get to decide) the situation seems impervious to outside influence. These people are going to kill one another until there's a collective decision to stop, which doesn't seem to have come just yet. It's a shit-sandwitch all around, and it's still escalating.

My real concern though is that this bloodshed is going to be used as a means to snowball some momentum to attack Iran, which I think will have really bad consequences for us. It has some of the same feeling as the run up to the Iraq invasion, though the axis of Bush is clearly not flying as high. At the same time, all they wanna do is drop some bombs, so the bar to clear in the public mind is probably lower.

I feel like someone should be organizing something to counter this momentum. "Someone should be organizing something" usually means that I need to start to do it. Fuckers.

I'm off to SF for a few days, a little business to transact. Also meeting with the Zacker and Duke Lauter and maybe a pre-bar Girth. Will bring my camera.

Evil minds that plot destruction. Glenn Greenwald quoting Bill Kristol, who's a very very influential person among the Cheney/Rumsfeld cohort:

The war against radical Islamism is likely to be a long one. Radical Islamism isn't going away anytime soon. But it will make a big difference how strong the state sponsors, harborers, and financiers of radical Islamism are. Thus, our focus should be less on Hamas and Hezbollah, and more on their paymasters and real commanders--Syria and Iran. And our focus should be not only on the regional war in the Middle East, but also on the global struggle against radical Islamism.

For while Syria and Iran are enemies of Israel, they are also enemies of the United States. We have done a poor job of standing up to them and weakening them. They are now testing us more boldly than one would have thought possible a few years ago. Weakness is provocative. We have been too weak, and have allowed ourselves to be perceived as weak...

Yes. They are actively seeking to fight in a clash of civilizations, to enter into a Holy War which will last generations, and which the US cannot win in any military sense. This is such a bad idea, it's very hard to express.

Bill Kristol: sorcerer of death's construction.

Atrios and Matt Yglesias have a good effing question of commentary about the Mid-East turmoil. "'Both attacks were green-lighted by Iran.; Who in Iran? By what process? By whose authority? When? Who told you?"

Matt:

It all looks to me like a story we've seen before. If you've been paying attention, a lot of people have been agitating for the United States to commence more active efforts to overthrow the Syrian and Iranian governments for some time now. Then some stuff happened and -- miraculously and without real evidence -- that stuff's occurence is suddenly the reason we need to implement the very same policy that was being pushed for previously. I'd like to see some proof.

We'll see. While people would clearly be up in arms if any sort of ground war were proposed, I'm pessimistic that regular Americans care enough to exert the necessary political pressure to prevent Bush from bombin Iran. I'm also pessimistic that the Fourth Estate will act as any sort of check here, either by creating a "Conventional Wisdom" that works against such plans, or by fanning popular sentiment to generate the afformentiond pressure.

Let's bomb Iran, says The New Republic, because a teenager was kidnapped and some rockets were launched. That article is scary on a number of levels.