The only draw­back to opt­ing out of the news, as I’ve just done for three weeks, is that drop­ping back in again has prompt­ed a wor­ry­ing sense of futil­i­ty about  my life-long obses­sion with it.

Forty-one years ago this month, in a dingy build­ing in Baal­bek, east­ern Lebanon, a scowl­ing man with a neat­ly trimmed beard and dark, fath­om­less eyes pulled a Beretta auto­mat­ic pis­tol from under his leather jack­et, placed it on the messy desk between us, and asked me what I want­ed to talk to him about.
His name was Hus­sein Mou­sawi. A day ear­li­er, the U.S. gov­ern­ment had named him as the mas­ter­mind behind what FBI foren­sic inves­ti­ga­tors lat­er deter­mined was the sin­gle-largest non-nuclear explo­sion on earth since World War II. It killed  two hun­dred and twen­ty Marines and twen­ty-one oth­er Amer­i­can ser­vice per­son­nel at Beirut Inter­na­tion­al airport.
Anoth­er sui­cide truck bomber killed 58 French para­troop­ers a short dis­tance away.
Mou­sawi tout­ed the attacks as a “nat­ur­al con­se­quence” of the pres­ence of for­eign troops on Lebanese soil. Amer­i­cans — with which he equat­ed Israelis —  he said, did not under­stand that Moslems were will­ing to die for their cause. “We are not afraid”,  he snapped. “We will even con­front their tanks with our daggers.”
Get­ting that inter­view (albeit not on cam­era) was one of the most nerve-wrack­ing expe­ri­ences of my career.
And I don’t think any­one who should have,  paid the slight­est atten­tion to it, which in a small way goes a con­sid­er­able way to explain­ing why the best sum­ma­tion of the Mid­dle East today is the French expres­sion “Plus ca change”, which in its full form trans­lates as: “The more things change,  the more they remain the same.”
The only excep­tion is that along with their “dag­gers” and fer­vour, Mousawi’s suc­ces­sors and their ilk  have metas­ta­sised with a malig­nan­cy only can­cer would envy.
“Experts” have summed up stages of the  lat­est round with vari­a­tions rang­ing from  “a chance to remake the Mid­dle East”, through “a poten­tial turn­ing point”, to  “a seri­ous risk of embroil­ing both Israel and the Unit­ed States in a cost­ly for­ev­er war,”
If those are  the best the ana­lysts and “experts” can come up with, maybe it’s time we gave AI a shot.  (For one thing, I’d love to know the dif­fer­ence in their cut-off point for  “for­ev­er”.)

               DITTO THE PERPS

The abil­i­ty of present day lead­ers on all sides to read and under­stand his­to­ry seems stuck at  “See Spot Run” level.
Israel is invad­ing Lebanon for the sixth (or is this the sev­enth) time in 50 years.
As a Wash­ing­ton Post edi­to­r­i­al not­ed:“Israel has a his­to­ry of short-run tac­ti­cal mil­i­tary tri­umphs that proved strate­gi­cal­ly ster­ile — or even laid the basis for new conflicts.”
Sound famil­iar? Think the U.S. inva­sion of Iraq.
In defi­ance of every­thing you’d think Hezbol­lah ought to have fig­ured out by now, most of an esti­mat­ed 190 mis­siles it fired in one day into Israel  from Lebanon “…were shot down or fell in open areas, accord­ing to the Israeli military.”
On an equal­ly point­less lev­el, the Israeli coali­tion of  far-right mes­sian­ic set­tler par­ties wants per­ma­nent con­trol all the ter­ri­to­ry from the Jor­dan Riv­er to the Mediter­ranean, with no bor­der lines in between. It’s worth not­ing it pret­ty much mir­rors a map that their polit­i­cal pup­pet, Prime Min­is­ter Binyamin Netanyahu, used as a prop at his UN speech this week.
Maybe it’s time for a new ver­sion of Pres­i­dent George W Bush’ s beloved  “Axis of Evil”. The Israeli zealots, Hezbol­lah, Hamas, the Houthis and Iran  meld per­fect­ly into an “Axis of Mind­less Fervour”.
But not to wor­ry, those “respon­si­ble” for the sit­u­a­tion are paying.
This week Israeli airstrikes on Gaza hit school build­ing, homes across Gaza and an orphan­age shel­ter­ing dis­placed civil­ians, accord­ing to local officials.
Debris from an inter­cept­ed Iran­ian mis­sile killed a Pales­tin­ian man on the West Bank.
In the cyn­i­cal cal­cu­lus of war, he was a bonus for all sides: the Islamists can claim him as a mar­tyr,  their Jew­ish coun­ter­parts can say he got what he deserved for being there in the first place, and the arms mer­chants fuelling the war can write his death off as “col­lat­er­al damage”.
“Point­less­ly killed” does not, of course, apply. The “score” in the lat­est round of the cir­cle game of stu­pid­i­ty and point­less waste is some 40,000 Gazans, 2,000 Lebanese and 1,000-plus West Bank Palestinians.
The Wash­ing­ton Post’s estimable David Ignatius wrote  that “…build­ing the Lebanese state behind a strong army — sup­port­ed by a pop­u­la­tion that is sick of Hezbollah’s vio­lent fan­ta­sy of resis­tance — is an achiev­able goal. It will require dis­ci­plined Amer­i­can effort and polit­i­cal will.”
That seems to me to fall with­in the para­me­ters of per­haps the only mem­o­rable line from Robert Browning’s poem  “Andrea del Sar­to,” Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heav­en for?”
Dili­gent­ly fol­low­ing the news cycle to see how, or if, cor­re­spond­ing efforts are made by the  oth­er play­ers in the region­al oleo of obscen­i­ty will be a reach of it own.

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