From the Techncrat/Insider's gabfest (everyone who's anyone... etc.) The Nelson Report, courtesy of JMM:

"[T]he Lebanon situation has exposed, once again, that US policy, under Bush, is largely whatever the Israeli government says it wants. So the long term effect of this on US-Arab relations generally, and the US ability to be constructively involved in any serious peace process, is once again under debate.

In any particular flare-up in this unhappy region, debating who shot first is a distraction, since the conflict has been going on for generations. The question is, or should be, does the US have a policy with a realistic chance of success, and is the US involved in a process to further that policy...in this case, to resolve the flare-up of the moment? "

EDB would put it differently:

What [the Israeli public] does buy, is that there's a consensus in the west that Israeli lives are worth more than Arab ones. In fact, two living Israeli soldiers and a few dead ones, are worth hundreds of Lebanese lives. They don't need John Bolton to spell it out in these terms: "There's no moral equivalence between the civilian casualties from the Israeli raids in Lebanon and those killed in Israel from malicious terrorist acts.

At the heart of this lies the fact that, the state or nation-state-- the entity that was sloppily and haphazardly forced upon this region, by those same Europeans (and now Americans) who now condone a ratio of 1:10 in Israeli-to-Arab "casualties"-- is deemed to hold a moral monopoly on violence. If you have a flag and an international airport, then you can kill people.

Both Emily Dische-Becker, on the ground in Beirut, and Nelson, in his office at Samuels International would agree on the likely result of this absurdity, but I prefer EDB. She's also a lot funnier. Read the whole thing and laugh.