All Intensive Purposes

Excellent synopsis by at Belgravia Dispatch of the Lebanon conflict. Depressing, but excellent. The bottom line:

The reality is that Lebanese hearts and minds, certainly Shi'a ones, are going to support Nasrallah even more now, not to mention the many in Cairo and Baghdad and points beyond hailing Nasrallah as a new Nasser. Hezbollah is far further from 'eradication', however absurdly unrealistic a goal that was regardless (particularly given the U.S. and Israeli approaches), than before. What we've just witnessed is a (tragi)comedy of errors, really, featuring incompetence (the bungled Israeli military campaign), fake showmanship (Bush and Olmert finally talking four weeks into the war with Olmert thanking the American President for his help with the UN Resolution, in a butt-covering, farcical coup de theatre par excellence!), historical innocence mixed with hubris (that because Israel unilaterally pulled out of Gaza and south Lebanon, in her self-interest more than anything else, this would mean no attacks from either quarter--in the absence of an overarching settlement--so that any attack would demand a hugely asymetrical response, the better so as to discipline the recently liberated ingrates), another low ebb for America's repute in the region (the disasterous Rome Conference where the world judged, correctly, that only the U.S., and perhaps Tony Blair, to the ire of his government colleagues and people, were willing to give Israel's ill-fated campaign additional time), and more. One that occured, to boot, in the midst of an Iraq debacle that grows worse by the day, where Iranian influence is increasing in lockstep with America's mushrooming impotence there. The entire sad spectacle must look almost amusing from Teheran.