I was just searching for a spot to chat on TPM about the current situation in Lebanon and it's all AP posts you can't comment on or offsite links, so I thought I'd try a little post here and see who else is interested and takes the discussion bait.  Perhaps this post will hit the TPM dustbin in no time, or perhaps it may live another day...

Anywho, I'm no expert on what's happening but I do have a news life outside of the daily political chatter and figured I might throw out some inflamatory stream of consciousness thoughts and see what others have to say.

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No big fan of Hezbollah (not so progressive on women's or gay issues, rather fundamentalist, to say the least) but I still feel like "good for them" in the sense that they are trying to stand up for themselves as a people in a land hostile to them.  People have a right to self-determine, even if you don't like them, and there should be a certain softening of demands made to historically oppressed groups. 

Hamas was democratically elected, and yeah, they are hostile to Israel, but Israel has the ovewhelming upper hand, and imprisoning Hamas' elected leaders and cutting off gas and otherwise negatively controlling the Palestinian economy doesn't help.  Inevitably it's gonna piss people off.  Hamas took Gaza, demonstrating their popular support.  Only Abbas really remains on the other side and I'm not sure how long the West Bank will tolerate his ineffectiveness in making strides towards true Palestinian self-determination.

I'm anti-US imperialism.  We've completely taken the torch from the British when they dominated the area and I think it's time we stopped trying to force our will.  Our motivations over there tend to be rather craven and we usually get it wrong (arming Bin Laden and the pre-Taliban, empowering and later arming Saddam, installing the Shah, cuddling with the House of Saud to this day, unconditional support of Israel, ad nauseum).  One of my favorite all-time books on the subject of US foreign meddling since WWII is Rise to Globalism.  First read it in high school in the mid-80s.  Changed my life -- it, along with other contemporaneous rebellious movements, opened my America-Is-Disneyland eyes.  The true patriot works to make the country better, internally and externally, and has little use for flag pins.

Speaking of which, you know Hamas loves Obama, right?

Recently, there was the debacle known as the 2006 Lebanon war.  Sure enough, that's boomeranged into some new upheaval.

There's simply current day-to-day news in Lebanon where the Shiites (Hezbollah) take a Sunni TV station and then the Lebanese government declares Shiite media illegal.

I really just hope we don't fuck it up worse.  But, then again, I'm not holding my breath.

Damn