How many dead children does it take to make a Liberal Muscle flex?

At a sitting, (Titus Andronicus reference not wholly unintended), 34 apparently.

Colonel Blair was however quick to remind his supporters that, should the children killed be Iraqi children, rather than Lebanese, different multiples would apply...

Meanwhile, carrying a report from New York Times reporter Neil MacFarquhar in Damascus, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports on another of those apparently unintended consequences of this apparent attempt (or 'opportunity' in Condi-speak) to re-draw the map of the Middle East. MacFarquhar tells us that Arab leaders change tack as public supports Hezbollah - all bringing Mr Gingrich's Third World War that little bit closer [see references to Kurt Andersen's New York Magazine article in my posting last Friday, below]

Qana, as we all know, is famous for two things. It is supposedly the site of the miracle in which Jesus Christ turned water into wine (John 2:1-11) . It was also the site of a massacre of civilians sheltering in a UN Compound in 1996, during a previous war which Israel was fighting in Lebanon. It is unclear quite what miracle those who bombed Qana this weekend were trying to perpetrate, perhaps something to do with restoring the power of sight to the international community after the collective blindness of the last two weeks. George Bush and his Israeli friends may not be squinting in the new-found light but it appears that the muscular Mr Tony might just be about to blink.

Of course, as he talks NATO buffer forces, the families of military men across Britain will be pondering how many middle eastern wars we wish to be caught in the crossfire of at one time - and how many more of these we can start before they cease to be viewed as independent wars and become just one big war - not so much 'on Terror' as Of Terror.

In an article entitled Days of darkness Gideon Levey writing in the Israeli paper Haaretz states, "Lebanon, which has never fought Israel and has 40 daily newspapers, 42 colleges and universities and hundreds of different banks, is being destroyed by our planes and cannon and nobody is taking into account the amount of hatred we are sowing." He concludes, "Long before this war is decided, it can already be stated that its spiraling cost will include the moral blackout that is surrounding and covering us all, threatening our existence and image no less than Hezbollah's Katyushas."

Haaretz also reported, as early as the 23rd July, on an Anti-war Tel Aviv rally drawing a Jewish, [and] Israeli Arab crowd referring to this as 'the first cracks in the consensus', and reflecting that in the 1982 war with/in Lebanon such 'cracks' had taken ten days to emerge, against slightly less than a week in this case. The article also ponders the apparent start of an anti-American flavour in this incipient Israeli anti-war movement. That would indeed be a crack, or at any rate it might be if it ever amounted to more than the current coalition of the politically isolated.

It is disgusting to speculate about anything good coming out of Qana 2006 but it might just shine a bloodstained light into that crack.