And the innocent die

Bombs do not have eyes. Those dropped early yesterday morning in one more Israeli air strike on Lebanon could not see the faces of more than another 40 civilians they killed, some of them reportedly disabled children, to add to the horrible total wiped off since the three-week old counter campaign began. Bombs are unseeing, but those responsible for them do see. They cannot be blind to the consequences of their actions.

The dollops of hypocrisy being dropped over Lebanon by the Bush and Blair administrations simply make that gruesome reality more obvious. American President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair have known all along that the longer they procrastinated to make an effort to stop hostilities, more people would be killed, mostly civilians.

The vicious circle was bound to get more vicious. Its logic defies sense. Israelis live in fear of attacks from without over a situation created from within. Israel describes itself as a regional superpower. It must be that to back its determination to exist, however, many Palestinians were displaced when it was set up, and how many more were shoved out as its territory has grown since 1967.

It is now establishing unilateral boundaries, convinced that is the only way it can survive in the midst of continuing resentment and hatred towards it by many Arabs, and even non-Arab Islamists in Iran. It faces constant threats from Palestinians, organised in Hamas and even fiercer entities, and from the terribly-named Party of God - Hizbollah - within Lebanon.

The new Israeli Prime Minister, not a military man and a war hero like his predecessors, reacted to typical provocation by Hizbollah in a manner that had its own logic - to strike at Hizbollah's ability to hurt Israel with its arsenal of rockets sourced from Iran. He did so disproportionately, possibly driven by his personal insecurity and by the militancy of his armed forces, backed by public opinion within the state of Israel.

President Bush and Mr Blair, the discredited terribly insensitive twins, turned a blind eye to the disproportion, though critics liken the Israeli response to a hypothetical onslaught on Eire as a country by British forces in response to attacks by the IRA.

The UK, through Mr Blair, cosied up to the Bush/Condoleezza Rice cynical stay-away line, waiting until Israel had "softened" Hizbollah. The EU, to our shame, did the same. Israel could, therefore, declare that the international community had given it the go ahead to continue to use the sophisticated weaponry supplied to it by the US to pound Lebanon as it sought to render Hizbollah incapable.

Three weeks into the carnage, with no reports that a single specific Hizbollah target has been taken out in the blanket Israeli strikes, the Blair-Bush tandem talk blandly of a pause in hostilities, of humanitarian corridors, of sustainable ceasefire, of an international force to act as a buffer to the sad, murderous logic that pervades the scene.

Meanwhile, Hizbollah continues to fire its rockets, justifying hard backing among Israelis for their tough, rampant armed forces. And those forces continue to attack southern Lebanon and hit and kill civilians, after unctuously issuing warnings for populations to move out of the way of its intended attacks.

And unseeing bombs hit United Nations positions and convoys trying to deliver humanitarian aid. Israeli forces target civilian areas because Hizbollah members hide among them, and even if they do not, as was said to be the case yesterday, when three dozen and more civilians, mostly terrified women and children seeking shelter, were blown out of existence.

Meanwhile, the hypocrites from outside who assume they can speak and act with authority when it eventually suits them, ignore the roots of injustice to the tension in the god-forsaken Middle East, where logic is now another name for heartlessness, and the innocent live in terror or die.