Read the whole thing.
By Spengler
Civilian casualties are the currency of Middle East diplomacy. The military issue in the region has never been whether Israel had the power to crush its opponents, but whether it had permission to do so. Iran and Syria have supplied Hezbollah with 50,000 rockets, many capable of hitting any target in Israel with precision. Many are emplaced under homes, schools and hospitals. Thousands of civilians used as unwilling human shields would perish if Israel were to destroy the missiles.
Too much collateral damage will "stain the conscience of the world", as United States President Barack Obama intoned over
Libya. By this reckoning, Syria's President Bashar al-Assad and other Arab dictators have enhanced Israel's strategic position by cheapening Arab life.
Another 34 Syrians died in last Friday's protests, the largest to date, bringing the body count to 170 in the past three weeks.
Estimates of the dead in Libya's civil war, meanwhile, range from 1,000 to 10,000. No one paid much attention to the dozen and a half dead in Israel's latest retaliatory strike in Gaza. At the US State Department briefing April 7, spokesman Mark Toner condemned the latest rocket attacks on Israel "in the strongest possible terms", but said nothing about the Israeli response.
That is harbinger of things to come.
Technorati Tag: Middle Easts and Protests.
1 comment:
Yup.
The Arab regimes have shown Arab life is unimportant to them unless it can cynically be used as a weapon to divert attention from their repression at home.
What saves them is their anti-Israel stand was popular enough to make up for all the other unattractive features of their regimes.
Until now.
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