Breaking news!

The President of the United States and the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom agree: People in the mideast should probably stop blowing each other to shit, and they should stop doing it soon.

Seriously: what the hell is up with them hesitating to endorse a cease-fire? The cynic in me wants to say that this is just an honest depiction of how world politics really are: rich, Christian white men in the Western world fucking around with the lives of a whole lot of non-rich, Christian white men, mostly for their own personal gain.

The naive optimist in me wants to say that these men are all, if nothing more, far more experienced in these matters than I am, and likely know what they're doing. No doubt they have important, valid, respectable and well-thought-out reasons for not flat-out demanding an immediate cease-fire.

At the point where those two parts of me meet, overlapping and leaning in varying directions, I think that this is a step in the right direction. A delayed step, yes, but better late than never, right? It's also an indication of my first (cynical) point: Bush and Blair are kicking back in a mansion in DC, while hundreds of civilians get killed. At a time like this, there's no way to justify it being about politics. It must be about stopping the bombing at any political cost. I know it sounds intolerably simple-minded, but no civilians should die for the actions of their nations military. That's no how the civilized world works, and if we're going to insist on being the world's Safety Patrol, then we have to actually do it, step in where's needed, and not go away until they put down the guns.

What are they afraid of, that it'll destabilize the political situation in that region? Because that's the only thing I can think of, and I'm fairly certain that happened quite some time ago (eg, starting here ["Hey Cain, where's Abel?"], continuing right on through here [hello, Imperial Britain], and extremely recent history speaks for itself).