What's Our Role?

I've been inclined to believe that the events in Israel and Lebanon have been driven entirely by Hizbullah and Israel. But Josh Marshall writes:

As I said a couple days ago, the thing about this region is that things can always get worse, much worse.

And along those lines, I wanted to finish this post by flagging something ominous that keeps coming up in the Israeli press. There's a mix of public and private communications going on between Jerusalem and Damascus. Israel is trying to assure Damascus that they don't plan or want to expand the war to include Syria. Syria is clearly worried that they will and has their troops on full alert. Israel is also warning in no uncertain terms that Syria getting involved will spark massive retaliation.

But there are persistent signs that the US is egging Israel on to bring the war to Damascus.

Here's a clip from the end of an article today in the Jerusalem Post ...

[Israeli]Defense officials told the Post last week that they were receiving indications from the United States that the US would be interested in seeing Israel attack Syria.

Considering that things aren't going terribly well for the IDF right now, the possibility that we're promoting their belligerency is a major concern. In the past, Israel has benefitted from our ability to stand with Israeli moderates and provide backbone for negotiations to avoid costly entanglements with their neighbors. Now it appears that we only seem interested in standing with the extremists in order to widen this conflict. If the Israelis don't have a sense yet that they could become collateral damage in the neocon's wider vision of a Middle East going through its "birth pangs", they should.