Why Not Stop the Killing?

If a Global Good Neighbor Ethic is to have any value, it must help us understand and decide upon a course of action in foreign policy dilemmas like the current Middle East conflict.

Secretary of State Rice's visit to the region is a good example of foreign policy as practiced in the Bush White House. Hezbollah sits right on the Axis of Evil, so the narrative goes. Hamas isn't far off. As a result, any attack on such groups is to be applauded. All the better if we don't even have to do it ourselves. If over a thousand innocent Lebanese and a much smaller number of Israeli civilians need to die in the process, we can live with that.

Condi listened. If she plays the violin, she could have fiddled. Tyre burned. Then the Condi show shifted to Rome, where no breakthrough on a ceasefire was desired. To no one's surprise, no breakthrough came.

This sad tale does not show the limits of diplomacy: It shows the bankruptcy of the Bush foreign policy. A Good Neighbor would pull out all of the stops to arrange a ceasefire on all sides, and then use all diplomatic means to facilitate negotiations without preconditions on all fronts.

Noam Chomsky and friends circulated a letter yesterday reminding us how all of this actually started. This history has already been rewritten to someone's convenience. Since it is extremely concise and can be grasped in a single reading, we know that Noam probably didn't write the letter. It does, however, offer a perspective sadly missing in media treatments of the situation.