Hezbollah Rules--Not OK

Lebanon%u2019s Future: Bending Toward Hezbollah or Leaning to the West? - New York Times: Pro-Western Lebanese politicians have watched with dismay as Iranian influence has spread across the region, largely with the help, they say, of American foreign policy....There is an Iranian empire slowly but surely being erected, said Walid Jumblat, a weary, aging Druze warlord cloistered in his ancestral castle deep in the mountains of the Shuf region.Mr. Jumblat has emerged as Hezbollah's most vocal opponent among the American-backed pro-democracy movement that holds a slim majority in Parliament today.

What a bloody nightmare!

So this is our advertisement for Westernization: the US promotes "regime change" to install puppet dictators who will serve America's interests while Israel burns, bulldozes and carpet-bombs any country that won't cooperate. No wonder they hate us; no wonder they want no part of "freedom" and "democracy" American-style.

I just saw a short piece on the BBC news about Romanian orphanages, storage facilities during the Cescascu regime when the state encouraged people to have as many children as possible and abandon excess kids whom they couldn't support. Now that the euros are rolling in, the state is making an effort to reunite them with their birth families, find foster homes for them or put them into family-like group homes. But according to one social worker, it's still commonplace for women to abandon their babies at the hospital after giving birth because it's become a "habit." It's remarkable how quickly a habit like this, which overrides what must be a hardwired compulsion to see to it that one's children survive and contribute to the gene pool, can be established.

When do we get out of the Cold War habit of behaving as if we lived in a bipolar world where the only way to assure our safety (we thought) was by installing puppet regimes, where we assumed that any nation we couldn't dominate was a threat? Here we are, standing on top of this dung hill, whacking down anyone who tries to climb up because we're convinced that anyone who isn't prepared to eat our shit is out to get us.

Of course the pictures of bulldozed villages and dead children bother me. But it's a miserable world out there where life is nasty, brutal and short. Tribes are always beating up on one another; women are always beaten; children always die. What the US and Israel do is just more of the same--it hardly matters whether it's us killing, maiming, torturing and destroying property or the tribes doing it to one another. In the long run the real damage is the resistance to Westernization that our behavior promotes and perpetuation of the primitive, violent, tribal cultures in which most of the world's population is trapped.