Pity George Mitchell's Homeland

If Israel has a right to exist, if its people have a right to exist, then does not Lebanon and the people of Lebanon? Is Lebanon not a sovereign country, a member of the UN, a country with an enormously long history and culture and a legacy of millions of Lebanese immigrants and their descendants now living in the USA? Not to mention former U.S. Senator George Mitchell of Maine, a Lebanese-American from right up the street from me in Waterville, Maine. The media's myopia on this particular issue is very disturbing, as if Lebanon simply does not exist, its people do not exist, and those who do are either Hezbollah, sympathizers or too poor, young or infirm to jump out of the path of a 6,000 pound bomb aimed at their house.

Has the phrase, "We're doing all we can to minimize civilian casualties", become the equivalent to the shouts of a barker at one of P.T. Barnum's side shows?

I thought Lebanese people and Lebanon were the "good guys and good women" of the Mideast whom "we" wanted to use as a symbol for the rest of the Mideast to become westernized, democratized etc. How can they when they are dead and/or much of their country is destroyed? How can Lebanese people be expected to "embrace the West" when the West has stood idly by during this bombing orgasm and has actually sold and shipped most of the bombs falling down on them? Will the West embark on a Marshall Plan to rebuild Lebanon when this conflagration ends? If not, how can the material, economic, emotional or spiritual seeds of "westernization" ever germinate and take root?

Sadly, it seems Bush & Co. have no clue what they intend to do or will do when and if the bombs finally stop dropping. Bombs now seem to be the end all and be all. From bombs, democracy will magically spring. Children will appear, limbs intact from the craters, waving flowers and ballots. Isn't this what Americans were told in 2003 would be happening in Iraq today, in 2006? Is it?