CFR’s Henry Siegman holds court today in the smartest moderated discussion I have ever read at WashingtonPost.com. Seigman, who has an excellent background article and exchange in the New York Review of Books, notes:
The “old spiritual leader in a wheelchair” provided the religious justification for the killing of innocent Israeli civilians. He functioned not only as a spiritual leader but as legitimizer of outrageous atrocities. Nevertheless, it was an incredibly stupid thing for Sharon to do, because not only will it not bring peace closer, or even weaken Hamas (it will do the opposite), but it will only increase the vulnerability of Israel’s citizens to the violence that is the result of Palestinian rage.
An unimpressed Hill staffer has a less kind view of Sharon: “It takes some stones to kill a man in a wheelchair … with a [expletive] missile.”