The Dead Left To Rot

European leaders reacted slowly to the Tyrant's guileless, cornball performance at the recent G8 summit, but after two days it can fairly be summed up: nausea and disgust. Partly that's personal politics—the Caligula act doesn't play well in Europe—and partly that's simply a normal reaction to the icy moral squalor of US-Israeli policy in Gaza and Lebanon. Even the supine bootlickers at the Washington Post published an anonymous quote by a European official, speaking of Lebanon, "The danger of allowing it to continue is that the US is more and more despised." You wouldn't, you couldn't, understand the relationships in play by reading the mainstream US press or watching the news, but European media have done a more creditable job of reporting attacks by the world's fifth most powerful military on a civilian population. And it hasn't been picked up here, either, yet, but the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise Arbour (the former prosecutor at the Hague) is warning that the Israeli killing spree could result in war crimes charges. Indeed. That's how such charges always get started, with a passing comment by a senior official in a position to make things happen...