Hezbollah didn't win. Nobody won.

Don't believe the nonsense you hear that Hezbollah (or Hizbullah, or any other manner of spelling it) has won the latest chapter in the centuries-old war in the Middle-East. Nor have they lost. Neither has Israel won or lost.

A cease-fire will be just that, they'll stop shooting, for the most part. There is no victory. There can be no victors. There will be no final victors. And when the oil runs out, it will stop being important to the rest of the world. When the oil runs out, nobody will care if the Shia wipe out the Sunnis or who lives in Israel/ Palestine/West Bank/Gaza/Kurdistan/the other two parts of Iraq/or any of the Emirates.

Most of us will never see that day, but it is as inevitable as death.

When the oil runs out the hatred and killing in the Middle-East will be as remote to the rest of the world as the same behavior in Sudan is now or as Rwanda was a decade ago.

"The Arab Street" will be as meaningless as "The Peruvian Street." And by the way, how crazy is it to decide life and death and the possible annihilation of the planet by how many goobers are jumping up and down on top of flags they don't like, firing guns into the air and acting like fools?

Why not just decide everything the same way the winner is decided on "American Idol?" So kindly don't tell me that Hezbollah won because "The Arab Street" believes it to be true. They also believe that women should walk around with their heads covered up and that thieves should have their hands cut off.

It is like having U.S. foreign policy decided by the students at Bob Jones University. Of course, that's how the Republicans gained control of U.S. foreign policy. The Arab Street and The Republican Base have a great deal in common.

And before you get to weeping over the slaughter of the innocent in Lebanon, consider that many of the surrounding countries, and all of the radical Islamists want Israel wiped off the map. What would you do if they said the same thing about the United States and attacked us. Oh, you mean they did? And you even supported BUSH when it came to raining fire on the Taliban who supported Al-Qaeda, didn't you.

Supported? You cheered.

And when the Germans and Japanese threatened our survival you didn't hesitate to wave the flag when we fire-bombed the civilians of Dresden and wiped out two entire major Japanese cities with nuclear weapons.

So don't come crying to me when innocents are killed in a war.

This is dirty. We encouraged it. We stood by while the bombs fell. No, we were not threatened. You're doing a heckuva job, Condi.

Hezbollah didn't win. Nobody won. Everybody lost. There is no chance for a lasting peace, and hardly a chance for any kind of settlement brokered by the crew currently representing us. Perhaps when the Republican finger-painters who are at the controls lose their jobs in 2008, some reason might be restored to the process, but even Clinton couldn't make a peace with those who only wanted Israel destroyed.

On the other hand, it was Europeans who created the country of Iraq out of three groups who hate each other and planted the seeds bearing fruit today by their other colonial mistakes. It was also Europeans who decided that Jews should own the land where Israel now sits, and told the people who had been controlling that land to go fuck themselves. There's that.

People tend to forget these things.

It's obvious the U.S. has squandered any positive role it might have had in the Middle-East. Perhaps a leader from a country other than the U.S. can emerge and stop all this, but I doubt it. The state of the holy land is the best argument for atheism.

This also appears on huffingtonpost.com