Israel says, in retrospect, it wouldn’t have killed Hamas leader Sheik Salah Shehada with a precision-guided bomb had it known so many civilians would die in the attack. But Israel is confronted with such excruciating choices in the first place because terrorists, in violation of the rules of war, deliberately hide in areas where attacks on them will cause maximum collateral damage. That the likes of Salah Shehada don’t wear uniforms, or otherwise separate themselves from civilian populations, shows that their contempt for the lives of innocents extends beyond Israelis to fellow Palestinians as well.
Sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between the official Arab press and our own press. A recent editorial in the official Egyptian daily Al-Akhbar made a very familiar point about Colin Powell: “Matters are now in the hands of the most extreme Americans . . . The hawks in Bush’s administration, such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, managed to overpower [Powell]. This gang managed to coerce poor Powell to change his mind. It forced him to go against all the advice of the professionals working in the American State Department on American policy in the Middle East, and to adapt himself to the philosophy of Bush’s speech . . .” Two days before, AlAkhbar had referred to Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice as, yes: “the axis of evil.” And how about this, from Al-Akhbar’s July 5 editorial? “The Bush administration’s foreign policy . . . contradicts many of the principles of the American constitution such as liberty, justice, democracy, and human rights. … If it wants to be rid of world terror, the U.S. must fight it from the point of departure of acknowledging its error in renouncing the principles and values on which its constitution was based …” Funny, we were wondering what Tony Lewis has been doing in his retirement: apparently writing editorials for AlAkhbar.
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