It appears that, foolishly, the Israelis are destroying as much of Lebanon as they can. Their own politicians say that one goal is to punish the Lebanese people for allowing Hizbollah into the government.

I call that immoral. And strategically, it is stupid. Israel benefits if there is a stable Lebanon with a solid middle-class that partly makes its income from trading with Israel. *In the long term*, it is those types of business and financial links that will bring Israel and its neighbors together, not peace treaties, which are only a prerequisite for true peace. And with respect to Lebanon, Israel has just moved out the date for a true peace by a generation.

There are *always* going to be extremists out to destroy Israel. And, for that matter, the United States. Their existence does *not* give the Israelis, or us, carte blanche to destroy everything and everyone under the sun.

Strategically, we need to bring the middle east together economically. Israel's biggest mistake has been to ignore economic links with its neighbors, which might actually lead to the general population of an Arab nation having positive thoughts towards the Israelis.

Strategically, our biggest mistake in the middle east has been to concentrate on military solutions, when the true problems in most Arab nations is that they are kleptocracies whose economies produce nothing useful to the outside world except oil. We should never have attacked Iraq: by doing so, we destroyed the large Baath component of their middle class, and set Iraq's entry into the modern world *back* by decades. And furthermore, having attacked Iraq, we should never have concentrated on privatizing their wealth, which does nothing to create an Iraqi middle class; we should have doled out Iraqi oil revenue *bottom up*, giving control of each village's share of the money to locally elected groups, who could eventually have enough credibility to elect a national government. But that would have taken time, and Cheney wanted privatize Iraqi oil *fast*, before the French, Russians, and others, figured a way to get in on the bidding again. So, greed and shortsightedness led to fatal tactical mistakes in Iraq, as well.

Al Qaeda showed that they understood the importance of international trade, at least symbolically, when they attacked the World Trade Centers. Perhaps some day our own leaders will recognize that our economic power is the true source of influence on the world, as well. Until that day, far off with our current leaders, be prepared to watch further losses by the West.