To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever

Thomas Friedman is sure there's a pony in all this shit:

On the morning after the morning after, Lebanese war refugees, who had real jobs and homes, will start streaming back by the hundreds of thousands, many of them Shiites. Tragically, they will find their homes or businesses badly damaged or obliterated. Yes, they will curse Israel. But they and other Arabs will also start asking Nasrallah publicly what many are already asking privately:

"What was this war all about? What did we get from this and at what price? Israel has some roofs to repair and some dead to bury. But its economy and state are fully intact, and it will recover quickly. We Lebanese have been set back by a decade. Our economy and our democracy lie in ruins, like our homes. For what? For a one-week boost in 'Arab honor?' So that Iran could distract the world's attention from its nuclear program? You did all this to us for another country?"

Somewhere in his diary, around the outbreak of World War II, George Orwell noted that liberals can never understand popular politics because they assume that once everybody has sufficient food, housing, luxury items, and birth control, they'll have nothing to get upset about. I can't think of a better demonstration of that mentality than this Friedman quote. This is a writer who built a career on having spent some time in Lebanon during the 1975-1990 war. Does he actually believe anybody in the south of Lebanon is going to blame the latest mess on the group that Friedman's own paper notes is leading whatever rebuilding effort is going to happen? Assume for the sake of argument that getting mad at Hezbollah for an Israeli rocket attack is the most reasonable response (and at some cosmic level, it may be). It still means that locals would have to put aside their ire at the foreigners who speak a different language, practice a different religion, live in a different culture, and delivered the actual bombs that destroyed their actual homes, in order to get angry at their own neighbors for enraging the foreigners. No matter how guilty your neighbor was, would you have that reaction? Would anybody?