Measured Response From Israel

Elegy for Beirut Thursday, 20 July, 2006 @ 8:06 PM By Robert Fisk, The Independent Elegant buildings lie in ruins. The heady scent of gardenias gives way to the acrid stench of bombed-out oil installations. And everywhere terrified people are scrambling to get out of a city that seems tragically doomed to chaos and destruction. As Beirut - 'the Paris of the East' - is defiled yet again. ......... I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000 of its people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of houses. Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost always ignore. They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite. But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis - in some of their cruellest attacks on this city and the surrounding countryside - tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water and electricity? We say that they started this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties - 240 in all of Lebanon by last night - with Israel's 24 dead, as if the figures are the same. Read More at Ya Libnan From Juan Cole at Informed Comment Saturday, July 22, 2006 US Isolated as Rift Grows with UK Even the British Foreign Office has now broken with the Washington consensus on the Israeli assault on Lebanon, which is basically that the Israelis should be able to destroy the whole country if they want to, over their two kidnapped soldiers. AFP reports: ' Britain's junior foreign minister Kim Howells, visiting Beirut, Saturday questioned Israel's military tactics and slammed its killing of "so many children and so many people". "These are not surgical strikes," he said of the air and artillery bombardments since July 12 that have killed more than 300 civilians in Lebanon. "If they are chasing Hezbollah, then go for Hezbollah. You don't go for the entire Lebanese nation," he told a media conference after meeting Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora. Howells's boss, Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett, echoed those concerns in an interview with the Financial Times and said a ground invasion that Israel appeared to be preparing would create "a very dangerous situation". ' Howell gets "the Understatement of the Year" award. Not surgical strikes, indeed.