On his syndicated radio show, Matt Drudge was objecting to the news media coverage of the Israeli attack on Lebanon. In particular he was upset with the showing the bloody mangled bodies of Lebanese civilians whom Israel has bombed. The reality is grim. Suggesting that the news media should not cover it is burying our heads in the sand.

We should change that reality rather than ignoring the horror of it. When we invaded Iraq, we invaded a country that had nothing to do with the attack on our nation, a country that did not have weapons of mass destruction, but it was a country that had the second largest oil reserves in the middle east after Saudi Arabia. Our preemptive strike set a rather bad example.

Our presence in the middle east and our bad example has emboldened Israel to pursue the same policy. If you can’t get back at the people who attack you, just kill a bunch of innocent civilians.

An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth only gives you blind toothless people. The present situation is even worse, the Israeli response was not only misdirected, as was our response against Iraq, like our response against Iraq, it was totally disproportionate and has resulted in the injury and deaths of a large number of innocent people.

We need to eliminate our reliance upon foreign petroleum in order to have the possibility of a balanced middle eastern foreign policy.

We also have to get out of this mode of living in fear, whether it is fear of attack or fear of shortages of resources. If we had spent the money that we wasted during the very first year of our occupation of Iraq on wind power instead, we would have displaced the energy equivalent of all of the oil we import from the middle east.

If you are thinking yes, but grid power is not equivalent to liquid fuels, it is true that they are not directly equivalent. However, we generate a large percentage of our electricity by burning natural gas. If we displace the electricity coming from natural gas with electricity from wind, that natural gas can then be reformed into liquid fuels. And actually synthetic oil from natural gas is far cleaner than natural crude in that it lacks any impurities such as sulfur.

All that revenge accomplishes is the perpetuation of human suffering.