Goodbye frying pan, hello fire

When top Sunni Clerics start issueing religious edicts in support of the starkly Shia Hezbollah you know that things have gone from bad to worse.

In remarks published Saturday, Egypt's Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa — one of the country's most influential religious leaders — described Hezbollah raids on Israel as "defense of its country and not terrorism." Egyptian cleric Sheik Youssef el-Qaradawi, one of most prominent Sunni religious scholars in the Arab world who lives in Qatar, on Thursday issued a religious edict saying support for the guerrillas was "a religious duty of every Muslim."

Ehud Olmert's grand scheme to destroy Hezbollah just became mission impossible... literally. The most... the absolute most that Olmert can achieve militarily, short of setting off WWIII by nuking every one of Israel's neighbors, is to temporarily set back Hezbollah's capacity to fight back.

Once again the cowboy diplomacy of President Bush is revealed for the utter foolishness that it really is. But then again it's been patently obvious all along that his unflinching support for whatever Olmert wants to do has been about domestic politics rather than about either the long-term or short-term national interests of the United States.