Who's the Winner?

Certainly not this guy (and a big hat tip to Steve Gilliard for the beautiful job of Photoshopping Bush into ex-Shah Reza Pahlavi's uniform).


No, THIS guy won, the 46-year-old eldest son of a Lebanese vegetable vendor.

The inevitable questions are being asked now in Israel:
How did this happen?
Why couldn't our army manage to resupply and communicate effectively?
Why weren't our reservists adequately trained and equipped?

These questions and others like them have the ability to force a confidence vote in the Knesset that could spell the end of the Olmert Government, and cause Israel to start some serious self-examination. Sort of like what we should be doing in America, provided we actually had a government that had balls and a spine, and a news media who was more zealous in defending their Constitutional prerogatives than in tearing down anyone who disagrees with our Hell-bent theocratic government.

Steve Gilliard makes the point that the big winner - the real winner - in both Israel's incursion into Lebanon and America's invasion/occupation of Iraq was ...

The Islamic Republic of Iran.

We need to reconcile ourselves to the fact that we're basically stuck, have lost all the respect and moral authority we've accrued since World War Two, and have handed our government over to a bunch of greedy rich idlers who are at best incompetent and at worst actually malevolent.