'A Moment of Opportunity'

President Bush's "moment of opportunity" in the Middle East is increasingly looking like an opportunity for disaster.

Bush's official position is that some blood-spilling in the Middle East is worth it in pursuit of the region's positive transformation.

Even in the wake of an Israeli airstrike Sunday that killed 57 civilians in the Southern Lebanese town of Qana, every terse presidential acknowledgment of the human toll is accompanied by soaring rhetoric about freedom and democracy and lasting stability.

In the best of circumstances, Bush would be running the risk of being considered callous. But in the current circumstances, he runs the risk of being considered both callous and delusional.

By almost no stretch of the imagination is the current conflict strengthening Bush's hand or advancing democracy. Rather, it appears to be emboldening Bush's enemies.

It's increasingly accepted wisdom in Washington that what's going on in the Middle East right now is a "proxy war" between the U.S. and Iran. But even through that lens, the U.S. appears to be losing.

And Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, heading back to the U.S. after another round of what some journalists are credulously calling "shuttle diplomacy," appears to be "negotiating" primarily with Israel -- her own proxy.

You don't get much more Washington Establishment than Richard N. Haass, who was Bush's first-term State Department policy planning director and now leads the Council on Foreign Relations. And he apparently finds Bush's position laughable. Literally.

Peter Baker writes in the Washington Post that Haass "laughed at the president's public optimism. 'An opportunity?' Haass said with an incredulous tone. 'Lord, spare me. I don't laugh a lot. That's the funniest thing I've heard in a long time. If this is an opportunity, what's Iraq? A once-in-a-lifetime chance?' "

In Their Own Words

---

The White House position appears to be to refuse to even contemplate ideas that, elsewhere, are widely considered obvious: That regardless of who started it, Israeli strikes are taking a vastly more terrible toll on Lebanese civilians than Hezbollah is taking on Israelis; that Israel's actions are turning the region ever more resolutely against the United States and its goals; that the war is undermining Lebanon's fragile democracy; that the death of 37 children in an air strike is more than just a "qualifier" -- it is a bloodbath that shocks the conscience of the world; and that there is more urgency to stop the killing than there is to pursue a dubious and so far disproved theory of regional rebirth.

Here is Bush this morning in Miami: "The current crisis is part of a larger struggle between the forces of freedom and the forces of terror in the Middle East."

Here is Bush yesterday afternoon , responding to the Qana bombing: "The current situation in the Middle East is a reminder that all of us must work together to achieve a sustainable peace. America mourns the loss of innocent life. It's a tragic occasion when innocent people are killed, and so our sympathies go out to those who lost their lives today, and lost their lives throughout this crisis. . . .