Lebanon event timeline, for those who have lost track.
BBC NEWS | Middle East | Day-by-day: Lebanon crisis - week seven (just up through 8/24/06 as of this posting).

Critics Decry "Destroy and Lend" Policy, by Emad Mekay (truthout.org, from IPS, 8/31/06). There are a variety of valid concerns about the practices that international lending and finance organizations engage in when a country is devastated. You may have already read about the IMF and World Bank, and how their policies often stagnate the development of the countries they are 'helping,' while turning those countries into profit centers for foreign investors.

There is some concern about how that sort of approach may play out in Lebanon.

Just like Iraq in 2003, a foreign country came in and destroyed the country's infrastructure, only to give foreign companies and institutions power in the subsequent reconstruction efforts, they said.

This sounds an awful lot like articles I once read in U.S. construction magazines about how great it was that U.S. companies were going to rebuild the parts of Bosnia that the U.S. had bombed, including schools and hospitals.

US Deaths in Iraq Surpass 9/11 Toll (truthout.org, originally from CNN, 9/03/06):

As the fifth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attack on the United States approaches, another somber benchmark has just been passed.

The announcement Sunday of four more U.S. military deaths in Iraq raises the death toll to 2,974 for U.S. military service members in Iraq and in what the Bush administration calls the war on terror.

News like this makes it even stranger that I know people who thought the war was over after Bush's "Mission Accomplished" press conference.

Where the war on terror has brought us.

While I've been relieved at the cessation of hostilities in Lebanon, the violence in Iraq, Palestine, Afghanistan, and countless other countries continues. Many of these conflicts are in demand for independence of one sort or another, but independence and a desire for self-determination aren't universally encouraged. As an American, it is awkward to read that independence is undesirable for some, and great for others. It is difficult to reconcile the ideal with the political partisanship that forms our current reality.

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I had a discussion with an acquaintance about the path to peace. He is an idealist, and suggested that just persuading children when they are young and impressionable that peace is best for everyone should eliminate conflict in a generation or two. It's a nice idea, but children already want peace. Children want to have healthy, happy lives, just like most adults do. However, it doesn't take long to see that the world isn't on their side in that regard. I'm sure kids in Beirut and Haifa love peace, but they have no say in the matter at the moment. Unjust experiences will shape their world view in the future. If they realize that not everyone gets a fair chance for a peaceful life, and they are treated unjustly, what then?

I believe that children shouldn't just be taught that peace is good for them: they should get to live it. Without a serious interest in preventing way by solving its underlying causes, peace will remain illusory. To teach peace to kids, we have to live it, and be sure it is available to everyone.

Currently, the U.S. is in 'sole superpower'-mode, and is trying to shape the world to its strategic advantage. This involves military occupations, providing weapons to allies, leading the world in the production of land mines, avoidance of the International Criminal Court, and other non-peaceful strategic goals. These actions deny opportunities for peace to exist in most of the world, resulting in violence which can then be used to justify more violence and state-sponsored or non-state-sponsored terrorism. Teaching kids peace can't make up for the increasing danger we put the world in for short-term gain.

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Five Years on: An Era of Constant Warfare by Tom Coghlan and Kim Sengupta (from the Independent UK, reposted at truthout.org, 9/04/06) discusses the kind of world kids are seeing now.

Five years ago this week, the Taliban's al-Qa'ida allies made final preparations to launch devastating attacks on America that would precipitate the 'war on terror,' the US led invasion of Afghanistan and the subsequent invasion of Iraq.

Far from ending terrorism, George Bush's tactics of using overwhelming military might to fight extremism appear to have rebounded, spawning an epidemic of global terrorism that has claimed an estimated 72,265 lives since 2001, most of them Iraqi civilians.

The rest, some 30,626, according to official US figures, have been killed in a combination of terror attacks and counter-insurgency actions by the US and its allies.

Iraqi casualties (civilian and military) are up 51%.

Today's paper is filled with news of death: violence in Iraq, violence in Afghanistan, violence in Palestine, violence in Dafur (news.bbc.co.uk)... CNN, while assuring us that what's happening in Iraq is NOT a civil war, has articles with titles like Cold-blooded carnage soaring in Iraq (cnn.com), which notes that 1,600+ people were executed in July in the current wave of "sectarian violence" - did we mention it's not a civil war? (With a civil war, they'd be uniforms, I guess, like with sports teams, so you could distinguish between the sides.) More than 100 people were killed on one day alone (August 28th) in Iraq (independent.co.uk, 8/29/06); 68 people were killed and 300 injured in the space of half an hour in Baghdad on September 1st (Baghdad attacks kill 68 in half an hour (news.independent.co.uk, 9/02/06)).

Not to state the obvious, but the tactics currently in use are not working.

No, let me rephrase that: they're not making the world a safer place. Making the world a safer place may not be the goal, however.

There are many people benefitting financially and politically from the current state of affairs. If peace is what we want, we need to make some big changes, including making the current state of affairs unprofitable.

Visit warprofiteers.com and give that some thought.