The United States is speeding the delivery of precision munitions to Israel. Condi Rice says she has no interest in a cease fire if it only restores the situation prior to the war. As a result, no Arab country will host Condi on her trip to the Middle East. The scheduled meeting in Cairo has been moved to Rome.

Steven D warned us all year that the administration was going to do something rash in the leadup to the midterms. His focus has been on Iran. Perhaps we will get Syria instead.

The neo-conservatives that are driving U.S.-Israeli policy right now have a different kind of morality.

“The bombing on February 22 of the Askariya shrine in Samarra, Iraq, was a tragedy, but it was not an American or a coalition tragedy. Iraq’s plight is neither a coalition responsibility nor a particular danger to the West. Fixing Iraq is neither the coalition’s responsibility, nor its burden. When Sunni terrorists target Shi’ites and vice versa, non-Muslims are less likely to be hurt. Civil war in Iraq, in short, would be a humanitarian tragedy, but not a strategic one.”

Daniel Pipes doesn’t mind the carnage in Iraq and he probably welcomes the carnage in Lebanon. It fits into a larger plan. Phase one of the plan was only partially realized, as it originally envisioned placing a Hashemite king on a throne in Baghdad. The actual action items were:

Syria

Publicly question Syrian legitimacy, assume treaties with Damascus are in bad faith
Contain Syria, strike select targets
Reject “land for peace” concept on the Golan Heights

Iraq

Install a Hashemite monarchy in Iraq
Isolate and surround Syria with a friendly regime in Iraq

Lebanon

Engage Syria, Iran and Iraq in Lebanon
“Wean” Lebanese Shiites from Iraq toward Jordan

I’m not sure what that last action means, but I am sure it is important, and is unfolding as we speak. We have to remember the origin of the term, reality-based community, because this site is certainly not a proud member.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

I’m looking a little deeper than this administration’s “created” reality. I can leave that to Wolf Blitzer, who is an expert in the field. From the neo-conservatives’ perspective, Iraq is a partial success and a partial defeat. It’s successful because Iraq no longer poses any kind of threat to its neighbors (our allies) Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or Israel. It’s a failure because we did not set up a Hashemite king friendly to Israel, but a Iran-influenced Shi’a government, hostile to Israel and lukewarm to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Strengthening Iran was not part of the plan.

This has made the “Syrian phase” of the plan all that much more important. The neo-cons do not want to leave office with the status quo, as the Democrats cannot be relied upon to countenence the actions we are seeing Israel take now.

The right-wing reacts with pavlovian certainty to the catch words: Arab, muslim, kidnap, hostage, rocket barrage, self-defense. The Syrian Phase is justified by a relatively minor incident, involving a controversial cross-border raid and kidnapping. This is the new Maine, the new Tonkin Gulf incident. Even if it happened as reported, it is nothing but a pretext for a pre-planned summer conflagration. The immediate end-goal appears to be the rekindling of civil war in Lebanon because “[w]hen Sunni terrorists [and Druze and Christians] target Shi’ites and vice versa, non-Muslims are less likely to be hurt”.

Setting aside, for the moment, whether such an assertion is true, my question is: is it moral to implement such a policy? I can think of no moral thinker that would answer affirmatively. It is clearly an immoral policy to foster civil war among Muslims in the hope that it will make non-Muslims safer.

And where is the evidence that it works? Where is the evidence that is affordable? How is it sustainable?

We can’t run these neo-conservatives out of Washington soon enough to prevent this catastrophe. Instead, we are left, not to study what they do, but to pick up the pieces and see if Humpty Dumpty can be put back together again. In many respects, I think we will find that task impossible.