Support a cease-fire in Lebanon?

Oxfam has started a campaign to urge President Bush and Secretary of State Rice to push for a cease-fire in Lebanon. To add your support, click here.

Of the two, Rice may be the easier to convince. Apparently she and Bush are having an unusual disagreement over the wisest path to forge in Lebanon, with Rice preferring to engage Syria and Iran in order to bring the conflict to an end.

I am no Hezbollah sympathizer, and I support Israel's right to defend itself. But I worry what's happening in Lebanon may fail to achieve Israel's short-term goals and will ultimately come back to bite us all. Quoting from Juan Cole's post from August 8:

... extremism has been strengthened. Lebanon is abject, on its knees, stricken with a plague inflicted on it by Bush and Olmert. The abject, the humiliated, the impoverished do not, as Bush and Olmert fondly imagine to themselves, lie down and let the mighty walk over them. They blow up skyscrapers.

The idea that the whole Eastern Mediterranean had to be polluted, that the Christian Lebanese economy had to be destroyed for the next decade or two, that 900,000 persons had to be rendered homeless, that a whole country had to be pounded into rubble because some Lebanese Shiites voted for Hizbullah in the last election, putting 12 in parliament, is obscene. Bush's glib ignorance is destroying our world. Our children will suffer for it, and perhaps our grandchildren after them.