Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, elected just months ago on a promise to ease Israel's grip on the occupied Palestinian territories, now is fighting a two-front war on battlefields the Jewish state has occupied and abandoned before in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon. The outcome will determine not only the fate of three captured Israeli soldiers and the northern Israeli towns under rocket fire, but also his own goal of defining Israel's permanent borders. (my emphasis).Does anyone think it's still possible to save the lives of those hapless captured soldiers? The poor guys have set off a full-blown war?
If you want to understand this latest round of surgical disproportionality, you have to understand Israel's aggressiveness in light of its desire not merely to "eliminate the terrorists," but to establish its own territory. Even discussing Israel's and the US' disproportionate valuation of the comparable worth of Lebanese or Palestinian lives and Israeli lives misses the point that the ongoing assault is coldly proportionate to more ambitious Israeli goals.
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