preach it

This is why I love Juan Cole:

With al-Anbar province tense and US troops surrounding Najaf, one could not imagine a worse time for Bush to give a green light to Sharon for further provocations. One can only conclude that neither Ariel Sharon nor Bush and his Neocon advisers give a fig about the lives of US servicemen in Iraq. Otherwise, they’d stop with the theatrics. If the Israelis had wanted to arrest Rantisi, they could have. They pulled off Entebbe. This extra-judicial murder of political opponents is just showing off, and it is of course ethically despicable and a war crime for which one only wishes Sharon could be made to stand trial in the Hague. If Rantisi could have been proved to have committed an act of terrorism, he should have been arrested and tried in Gaza for murder.)

I feel like something of a fool for bothering to say this, since it is obvious that Sharon is behaving like a Mafia don, not a head of state. But the commentary I saw on US cable television was all about who could fall over themselves more quickly to praise this decisive action against terrorism. The state of public discourse in the US (and Israel) is deplorable when it is not even possible publicly to criticize extra-judicial killing in the mass media.