And the beat goes on - on and on and on - It's all Just a little bit of History Repeating

Your choice: Jim Muir of the BBC in Tyre (title link), saying very much the same thing that I was two weeks back (below), or the Propellerheads and Miss Shirley Bassey

For other perspectives on the systematic destruction of one of the Middle East's emergent democracies, here's a piece from New York Magazine talking to people including Anthony Bourdain the media chef and author of Kitchen Confidential who was in Lebanon when, as he puts it, George Bush-style, "in a moment, it turned to shit." It also tells us that at this point a notice went up on the Time Out Beirut Website saying: "Beirut's favourite entertainment and listings magazine is now suspended. Lebanon is being, once again, used as a battleground for a war that neither its government nor its people want. They are killing our city."
Read the article: Life in Beirut Before Wartime -- New York Magazine

Also from New York Magazine, Kurt Andersen gives a slightly more nuanced take on the situation's 'insane duality' in What We Won't Talk About in the Israel-Lebanon Conflict including the following paragraph which manages both to accuse Newt Gingrich of being a Manichean dualist heretic (if subtly) and to point up the onanistic approach of Fox News to other people's war's as their newsreaders use Israel's incursions into Lebanon as a sort of Chris Morris-style psychic dildo, after such rhetorical fireworks Mr Andersen ends soberly by considering Austrian Archduke's in the Twentieth Century,

"So at this time of staggering new complexity comes a two-front Israeli war - which temporarily serves, like all wars, to make a complex situation seem simple. Some on the right are pleased because (like Islamist radicals) they are bloody-mindedly eager for a wider war. The Weekly Standard suggested last week that the U.S. should use "this act of Iranian aggression" - that is, Hezbollah's attacks on Israel - as a pretext for "a military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. Why wait?" "It's World War III," Newt Gingrich declared, a wishing-for-1914 mantra that half the Fox News stars masturbatorily repeated. And Gingrich, shrewd and frank, was clear about his rhetorical intentions in painting a stark, black-and-white, Manichaean picture. "The minute you use the language," he explained, the discussion becomes, "Okay, if we're in the Third World War, which side do you think should win?"

Andersen continues, "To insist wishfully that World War III has started - to try to recast a trope as a fact - is hideous. However, that such a proposition can be bandied about on network TV by a national politician (and former historian) gives even sober people the willies. Might the Israeli soldiers' capture turn out to be our century's assassination of an Austrian archduke...? "