Okay, as Americans we have been conditioned to disregard anything any Palestinian has to say - such people have their own agenda, the destruction of Israel and the Jews and all that, so we scoff at ideas coming from that corner. It's a mirror of how our government has come to operate in the last four and half years, and particularly since some months ago they abused the vote we graciously allowed them and elected Hamas to run things for them. We have noting to say to Hamas and we don't much care what they say, and are certainly not interested in what they think. We stopped all aid and severed diplomatic relations. They made their choice. They have to live it. Whatever they have to say, we don't want to hear it.

That is why you'll find an item from Marwan Bishara, the Palestinian writer and editorialist, in the International Herald Tribune, published in Paris, not in its parent publication, the New York Times. Of course there Bishara is a local - a lecturer at the American University of Paris and the author of Palestine/Israel: Peace or Apartheid (written in French but available translated into English).

The item, Three Conflicts, Two Mind-Sets, One Solution, hit the Paris paper on Monday, August 7, and it is rather clear-headed. And the Times can always run it later, if the folks in midtown Manhattan decide it's not too parochial, not just a Paris thing.

The thing about it is that it gets to some obvious core issues of the mess we're in and lays them out logically -

Behind the fighting in Lebanon, as in Palestine and Iraq, there is a fundamental conflict of views. America sees each as a clash between freedom and terrorism, while the Arabs think in terms of freedom versus military occupation and unjust wars. Unless the two opposing approaches are reconciled politically and diplomatically, the Middle East will sink into perpetual war and chaos.

And that's broken out getting down to the real basics -

The Bush administration charges Islamist fundamentalists and their sponsors in Tehran and Damascus with spreading an authoritarian ideology of hate against the will of the Arab majority. Washington believes that there is an American-style freedom-lover inside every Muslim, and that its mission is to drag it out by hook or crook. After all, the cause of liberty in America, according to the new Bush doctrine, is dependent on the cause of freedom abroad.

The Arabs, for their part, blame U.S. and Israeli wars and occupations for turning citizens into freedom fighters and providing terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda with fresh recruits and ideological alibis. They hold America and Israel responsible for death, destruction and surging extremism, in pursuit of narrow geopolitical interests rather than of universal values.

And the twain shall never meet, which may be, as Bishara notes, because of the myths and images that come with the opposing sets of beliefs. We and our allies (the UK, Israel and someone else, although it's hard to tell who these days) love to remind ourselves of 9/11, the Madrid bombings, the London Underground attacks, Bali, Casablanca and all the rest - they hate us for our freedoms and want to kill us all. The Arabs harp on the invasions and occupations of 1967, 1982 and Iraq 2003 - and on Abu Ghraib, which is old news and hardly worth a shrug over here, and on Guantánamo, a topic which bores most Americans (none of us is in there, after all) - and then there all the hundreds of "massacres," from Der Yassin in 1948 to last month's Qana bombing in southern Lebanon. We can say they're being picky and dwelling on the past, and they can say we're whining about events perpetrated by a few crazies that in the big scheme of things just aren't that very significant - bad stuff, but it's not Hiroshima or the Holocaust or anything.

One suspects the idea is that we should go and get the bad guys, the crazies, and give up on the idea of regime change to fix everything, where we invade, toss out the government and occupy this place or that until things settle down. That makes things worse, and it's only logical -

Under occupation, frustrated and angry people who see themselves as having nothing to lose turn to acts of terrorism, which in turn are exploited by the occupiers to justify continuing their domination. The fact that violent terrorist acts perpetrated by resisting groups are illegal and criminal should not overshadow their root cause - military occupations that cause mass suffering, humiliation and hatred. Occupation provides a permanent state of provocation.

No kidding. It might be wise then to decouple the 9/11 attacks (and their sister acts of terrorism) from the current Middle East conflicts. They may not have anything much to do with each other.

And Bishara makes the claim that "an overwhelming majority of Arabs do not recognize their religion in the image of Islam projected by Al Qaeda. And in the region there is little identification with the Taliban, except in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia."

American readers may scoff at that claim, but heck, even the president keeps saying Islam is a religion of peace, even if all policy decisions in the region and the public justifications for the policies say the opposite. (People are either confused by this contradiction, exasperated, or feel they're "in" on the sly joke.)

What if the wars in the Middle East really don't have much to do with 9/11 and the rising threat of mad Muslims?

We are told that cannot be so. The official position of our government is that all of this, really, is one big struggle - the global war on terrorism. Israel is, when you think about it, fighting back to avenge the fall of the World Trade Center in lower Manhattan and the 757 punching through the wall of the Pentagon - it only seems to be about Hezbollah grabbing two of their soldiers and habitually lobbing rockets into the north of Israel. And of course taking care of Gaza, arresting forty percent of the government they elected, the targeted assassinations and all, isn't really about keeping buses and coffee shops in Tel-Aviv from being blown up by suicide bombers - it's about they Axis of Evil and all that. Palestine is no different than Iran or North Korea or whatever. And of course we're fighting "them" in Iraq so we don't have to fight here - even if there's still no evidence "they" want anything but to have a working country of some sort and have us good and gone, and we're the problem in the first place. But this is considered deep thinking these days - seeing everything as all the same thing. It elegantly simplifies matters, even if it's quite wrong.

So the asymmetrical wars in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq rage on. And it's gotten religious, and hopeless -

Washington's strategy of "constructive chaos" - which is also Al Qaeda's and Tehran's - needs to be seen against a backdrop of mounting religious fundamentalism. In claiming to answer a higher calling, the likes of President George W. Bush and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran are theologizing what were colonial and imperial conflicts, recasting them in terms of jihad versus crusade.

If the 20th century is any guide, it is evident who will be the eventual loser in these conflagrations. America and its allies might possess far more advanced and destructive firepower, but they are far less committed than their opponents and far more prone to losing momentum.

Highly trained and highly equipped American, Israeli and British soldiers strive to stay alive as they fight low-tech volunteer militants who are more than ready to sacrifice themselves and die as martyrs. As America mourns its deaths, resisting Islamist and secular groups celebrate theirs. Military interventions have generated a huge reservoir of pent-up violence among Arabs, while hardly shaking Palestinian, Iraqi and Lebanese resolve against foreign domination.

So time is not on our side, and we're not quite as frantically religious as our foes - we still do pay lip service to separating matters of state from religious matters, where everyone must believe one same thing, although the president does say, repeatedly, that God want everyone to live in some sort of western-style democracy. He just knows that, or rather, that is, he says, what he truly believes, and what all Americans should believe. Isn't it pretty to think so? Maybe, though, God just doesn't care about such stuff. And of course military occupation plays right into the hands of religious fundamentalists, and discredits all the "freedom talk."

What does God want, really?

That depends on whether He's speaking to Ahmadinejad or Bush. There is a chance He's not spoken to either of them and they're imagining things.

Until that's straightened out - and the clouds part, He speaks, and chooses sides - Bishara suggests trying UN Security Council Resolution 1559 - that one calls for complete withdrawal of foreign troops and the disarming of local groups. That means United States and Israeli withdrawal from Iraq and Palestine as well as Lebanese and Syrian lands, and then you have the disarming of all "armed groups" and freeing prisoners there.

That's just not going to happen. We need to avenge 9/11 and fight evil and spread democracy. The other side doesn't much like being humiliated and living in a war zone occupied by foreigners, and all the death and chaos, even if we say they'll like the freedom and the Wal-Mart down the street, later.

Bishara may be logical, but doesn't understand we're making the world better. This, logic, is what you'd expect from a Palestinian teaching at a university in Paris. Didn't the Enlightenment - that big change in the eighteenth century that ushered in the Age of Reason and the idea you should examine reality and think things through - pretty much start there? Our president operates from a deeper level than logic - he operates from belief. So does Ahmadinejad.

And it is all beyond logic now as Glenn Greenwald points out here -

In his radio address last weekend, George W. Bush defined the goals of our Middle East policies, including our occupation of Iraq, this way:

"The lack of freedom in [the Middle East] created conditions where anger and resentment grew, radicalism thrived, and terrorists found willing recruits. We saw the consequences on September the 11th, 2001, when terrorists brought death and destruction to our country, killing nearly 3,000 innocent Americans ...

"The experience of September the 11th made it clear that we could no longer tolerate the status quo in the Middle East. We saw that when an entire region simmers in violence, that violence will eventually reach our shores and spread across the entire world."

According to the president, American security is threatened when anti-US resentment grows in the Middle East and the region is awash in violence. Our goal, then, is to bring about a new Middle East where the US is viewed as a force for good and peace and freedom can take hold. That is the essence of the neoconservative worldview.

The problem might be this -

That is the inescapable incoherence that lies at the core of neoconservatism. It claims as its goal the transformation of "hearts and minds" but the only instruments it knows are air raids and ground invasions. This approach is no different than trying to extinguish a fire with gasoline, and unsurprisingly, the flames that for decades were simmering are now raging, with no limits and no end in sight.

Yeah, well, "inescapable incoherence" doesn't bother these guys. That's for those who chop logic - a term used long ago to mock the thinkers of the Enlightenment.

But this writer (echidne) finds the initial Bush quote the most interesting thing here -

Note how many sweeping simplifications he manages to squash into one short statement: Lack of freedom is what caused resentment and terrorism and 911, and we need to fix this lack of freedom.

"Freedom" is never defined. What are the nations of the Middle East supposed to be freed from or freed to? As George Lakoff points out in his new book Whose Freedom?, we can't be sure that we know what this term might mean to George Bush.

And then there is the lumping of all types of resentments and terrorisms into one amorphous seething mass. No attempt to distinguish Sunnis from Shias or Wahhabis, for example. No attempt to tie the storyline to the actual historical events in the various nations of this geographical area.

Of course not. That's for those stuck way back in the Age of Reason. This is the twenty-first century now, and if not exactly the Age of Belief again, although that seems to be a good name for the age, it certainly is the age of gut instinct (historians can capitalize it later).

As for one subset of this all, Bill Montgomery has been following things by reading the news there from the Center for Democracy and the Rule of Law (CDRL) - an independent, non-profit first established in July, 1994 as Campaign for Good Governance in Lebanon. And they find good quotes, like this from Israeli General Halutz saying this will escalate -

However, the officer said, "we are now in a process of renewed escalation. We will continue hitting everything that moves in Hezbollah - but we will also hit strategic civilian infrastructure…. "It could be that at the end of the story, Lebanon will be dark for a few years," said one [officer].

Is this helpful? Montgomery says that is unlikely -

The Israelis must not believe their own propaganda rhetoric about what a brutal, ruthless terrorist Sheikh Nasrallah is, or they would certainly understand that such threats will move him not at all. Hezbollah isn't going to cry uncle because of a little terror bombing - no more than Uncle Ho (the original, not Horowitz) was willing to submit to a fleet of American B-52s over Hanoi. By talking such crazy talk, Halutz only demonstrates what a weak hand the Israelis are now holding, which strengthens Sheikh Nasrallah's hand immeasurably. Halutz really should check himself back into the hospital, and stay there.

… I don't know how much the Israelis have contributed to their own bad bargaining position by flexing their jawbones so much, but there's no question we've seen an amazing turnabout over the past three or four days. Now it's the dimwitted sheriff and his clown posse who are looking for a way to get out of the showdown while Hezbollah, the bad hombre in the black hat (or turban, as the case may be) is coolly standing in the middle of the street outside the saloon saying "take your best shot, pardner."

Whether this is because Sheikh Nasrallah thinks his hand is so strong he can bluff the Israelis back across the border, or whether it's because he believes a long, drawn-out war of attrition with the IDF actually suits his interests even better than a ceasefire (and to hell with the agony and death it will inflict on the Lebanese people) I don't know. I'm also not willing to venture a guess.

… But I have to say, the spectacle of Israel's political and military establishment dancing anxiously on the diplomatic sidelines, hoping the UN Security Council will step in with a timely ceasefire, while their Arab enemy impassively declares his willingness to keep on fighting, is a sight I truly never expected to see.

To call it the world turned upside down doesn't do it justice by half.

But there you have it. Logic is not at play here. Logic is in a closet in some back street in Paris, a closet that hasn't been opened since 1751 or so. Diderot's closet (with the draft notes of the Encyclopédie).

But things in Iraq get just as puzzling, as most Americans just won't get this, and just resent how ungrateful these people are -

Iraq 's prime minister sharply criticized a U.S.-Iraqi attack Monday on a Shiite militia stronghold in Baghdad, breaking with his American partners on security tactics as the United States launches a major operation to secure the capital.

… Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's criticism followed a pre-dawn air and ground attack on an area of Sadr City, stronghold of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army militia.

Police said three people, including a woman and a child, were killed in the raid, which the U.S. command said was aimed at "individuals involved in punishment and torture cell activities."

One U.S. soldier was wounded, the U.S. said.

Al-Maliki, a Shiite, said he was "very angered and pained" by the operation, warning that it could undermine his efforts toward national reconciliation.

"Reconciliation cannot go hand in hand with operations that violate the rights of citizens this way," al-Maliki said in a statement on government television. "This operation used weapons that are unreasonable to detain someone - like using planes."

He apologized to the Iraqi people for the operation and said "this won't happen again."

It won't? One imagines Dick Cheney is the shadows of his darkened office muttering what must be on his mind - "Who does he think he is?"
After all, hours earlier the president had said -

My attitude is that a young democracy has been born quite quickly. And I think the Iraqi government has shown remarkable progress on the political front. And that is that they developed a modern constitution that was ratified by the people and then 12 million people voted for a government.

Which gives me confidence about the future in Iraq, by the way. You know, I hear people say, well, civil war this, civil war that. The Iraqi people decided against civil war when they went to the ballot box. And a unity government is working to respond to the will of the people. And, frankly, it's quite a remarkable achievement on the political front.

You can watch the video of that here - he displays his attitude, and his confidence, and no matter what his generals said, there just is no civil war over there, really, and things are as they should be. The facts on the ground? What about those? "Say, do you notice how confident I am, and my attitude - don't they matter more?" Well, that's the gamble he's taken, that they do matter more. That may wear thin, finally. Or not. Americans like to be hopeful.

And as for the cease-fire in Lebanon, late Monday, August 7, this -

The Lebanese prime minister rejected a UN cease-fire plan backed by President Bush, demanding on Monday that Israel immediately pull out from southern Lebanon even before a peacekeeping force arrives to act as a buffer between Hezbollah and the Jewish state.

Prime Minister Fuad Saniora's stand, delivered in a tearful speech to Arab foreign ministers, came on a day in which 49 Lebanese were killed - one of the deadliest days for Lebanese in nearly four weeks of fighting.

His Cabinet, which includes two Hezbollah ministers, voted unanimously to send 15,000 troops to stand between Israel and Hezbollah should a cease-fire take hold and Israeli forces withdraw south of the border. The move was an attempt to show that Lebanon has the will and ability to assert control over its south, which is run by Hezbollah, the powerful Shiite Muslim militia backed by Syria and Iran.

In Texas, Bush said any cease-fire must prevent Hezbollah from strengthening its grip in southern Lebanon, asserting "it's time to address root causes of problems." He urged the United Nations to work quickly to approve a US-French draft resolution to stop the hostilities.