The Curmudgeon

YOU'LL COME FOR THE CURSES. YOU'LL STAY FOR THE MUDGEONRY.

Sunday, July 23, 2006

A Scathing Denunciation

A Foreign Office minister, Kim Howells, has said that he very much hopes the Americans understand what's happening to Lebanon, and has observed that the destruction of the infrastructure and the high Lebanese death toll indicate a certain lack of surgicality. Reporting this, the Observer shrills: "Britain dramatically broke ranks with George Bush last night over the Lebanon crisis, publicly criticising Israel's military tactics". Howells' remarks apparently place Britain "at odds with Washington's strong support".

Of course, support with a bit of weak quibbling from a departmental underling is not quite the same as strong support; but it hardly seems at odds with it. The Vicar of Downing Street himself apparently "voiced deep concern" to Ehud Olmert last week, but was informed that the Righteous State, as the Middle East's sole nuclear power, faced a dire threat from Hizbullah's rockets (in a recent holocaust, sixty-five Hizbullah rockets injured 0.1846154 of an Israeli each) and was determined to do everything necessary to defeat it. As always, this seems to have settled the matter: "Downing Street sources said last night that Blair still believed Israel had every right to respond to the missile threat, and held the Shia militia responsible for provoking the crisis by abducting two Israeli soldiers and firing rockets into Israel."

On the other hand, those same sources "had no quarrel with Howells' scathing denunciation of Israel's military tactics", possibly because Howells neither scathed nor denounced. A scathing denunciation would be something along the lines of: "Israel's attacks on Lebanon and Gaza are illegal, their pretext phoney, their tactics murderous and their policy in general irresponsible to the point of lunacy. The destruction of the infrastructure, the death of so many children and so many people may not be quite up to what we have achieved in Afghanistan and Iraq, but they're coming damn close." Howells' statement is a quibble; a mild expression of concern at someone's deplorable disregard for public relations. Howells is a New Labour minister; for him to "dramatically break ranks" with George W Bush would be to risk cerebral haemorrhage.

Back in the land of milk and honey, the Righteous Army's chief of staff has explained that Israel's onslaught will be "limited in scope", this time anyway. "We will fight terror wherever it is," he said. This certainly sounds limited. "We will also conduct limited ground operations," he said. How limited? Well, "as much as needed", naturally. The plan is a purely limited, purely restrained sanitary operation: "to clean a strip a mile from our border of Hizbullah bunkers and rocket-launching sites". Once the cleaning has been done, of course, they will leave, in the virtuous assurance that "the UN resolutions requiring [Hizbullah] to be disarmed are finally carried through". Peace will descend, birds will sing, lizards will frolic, and all will be jolly once more.

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