In war's wake

I've not been posting on my blog often of late...being away and internetless will do that to ya. So I thought it would be nice to link to a few wrapups of the Israeli/Lebanese conflict.

Kevin Sites is on the ground literally and figuratively between Lebanon and Israel. His is a rare evenhanded voice.

I've been giving Der Spiegel's English site a lot of love lately, so I'll link to Ilan Goren's wrapup of feelings inside Israel on the Spiegel site.

Finally, Yglesias sees the Incompetence dodge at work in Israel as well as in the U.S. after Iraq. By blaming Israel's failure to obtain its objectives on the incompetence of the execution, larger and more serious questions about the premise of the war are elided. I have to add "the incompetence dodge" to my list of short, snappy concept-summing terms along with "dolchstosslegende" and "nutpicking".

What of Lebanon's future? It seems that the Saudis and the Kuwaities are staunching the wound on a national level with a big influx of funds. Meanwhile, Hezbollah is busy splashing out cash from Iran to those whose lives and homes were destroyed, gaining prestige in the process. Meanwhile, the World Bank is lifting a rather meagre poisoned chalice to Lebanon's lips -- $40 mil. in loans with just a few strings attacked (they'd want to look over Lebanons expenditures for hospitals and schools, for instance...) The IMF, on the other hand, is still deciding how generous to be...depending on how open Lebanon is to the usual package of "politically difficult economic reforms", I suppose.

For what it's worth, my Dad is bullish on Lebanon -- "Good time to buy real estate in Beirut!"