Regional War in the Mideast: Our Role?

On yesterday’s news that Israel has entered Lebanon and has now bombed the airport in Beirut and laid out a naval blockade, we are wondering (and so is everyone else) whether we’re looking at another regional war. As Israel made cautious peace with its neighbors over the last twenty-five years, it seemed — to the American observer, at least — that Israel had only one remaining intractable problem, the one with the Palestinians in its midst.

But are we returning, through the proxies of Hamas and Hezbollah, to the pan-Arab wars of the sixties? There are a lot of questions here, but we’re wondering where the US is in all of this. Do we have options? Can we make this better? Do we have the leverage and credibility to step in? Are we ready to? Do we want to?

Extra Credit Reading

Moussa Bachir, Lebanon: The Current Israeli Aggression, Global Voices, July 13, 2006

Allison Kaplan Sommer, Hitting Them Hard, an unsealed room, July 13, 2006

Jeremy Bowen, Acts of war raise risk to region, BBC News, July 13, 2006