CNN:

President Bush said Monday there could be no cease-fire until Hezbollah was reined in and international borders respected, reiterating the U.S. stance on the conflict.

I'm confused. I remember a time not too long ago when a well-armed militia disrespecting the border of a sovereign country was a good thing--so good, in fact, that US politicians from both parties lined up to vote this militia upwards of $100M to keep it equipped and in the field. Israel even did its bit to help out, and the people most committed to them are now helping make US Middle East policy. This militia was known as the Contras, and were certainly the most well-financed and -equipped militia the world has ever known. Oddly, despite this lavish funding, the contras never managed to hold a square inch of Nicaraguan soil, and they rarely if ever confronted their adversary directly, unlike Hezbollah, because they always got creamed. Instead, the contras' strategy was to use their base camps on the Honduran border to launch attacks Nicaraguan citizens, killing, maiming and raping them before retreating to their sanctuaries. (Similar militias were also being funded by the US in Angola and Mozambique.)

These atrocities, amply documented by human rights groups at the time, were denied by the US government and minimized by the press. Instead, Ronald Reagan lionized the contras as "the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers," and all responsible opinion in the US agreed that, whatever the contras' failings, the real problem was the elected government of Nicaragua, which had to be brought down by whatever means possible.

Even more confusing to me, back then Nicaragua had no right whatsoever to cross the Honduran border to attack these contra camps. Indeed, the camps' very existence was denied by the people supplying them with weaponry. Eventually this fiction collapsed, but a new one replaced it, which was that any hot pursuit by the Nicaraguan army of contra units across the Honduran border constituted a gross violation of international law, meriting stern condemnation from the political class and dutiful water carrying by responsible opinion in the press.

Indeed, I can vividly recall sitting in a Tegucigalpa hotel restaurant in 1987 and overhearing a gaggle of Newsweek journalists at the table next to me. The Nicaraguan army had briefly chased the contras into Honduran territory, and the reporters, reading the published account of it in their magazine, were chuckling at how their editors had exaggerated the size of the incursion on the map accompanying their article, to show the commies encroaching on the Honduran capital--indeed, on the very restaurant we were sitting in! Oh, that liberal media and its puckish sense of humor.

How things change. Now, of course, Israel has every right, not just to repel Hezbollah, but to raze all of Lebanon if necessary to secure its own territory. Many urge that Israel and the US go to the "root cause" of its troubles and attack Syria and Iran. I lately wonder what the reaction would have been if the Sandinistas had attacked the "root cause" of its problems, or at least its principal offshoot, and had shelled the US embassy in Honduras. Something tells me we wouldn't be hearing platitudes from Condi Rice about "birth pangs of a new Central America."