My lat­est col­umn is up on Spot-on and — surprise! — it’s about the one-year anniver­sary of the Lebanon War.

Today, a year ago, I was wit­ness to what U.S. Sec­re­tary of State Con­doleezza Rice would come to call “the birth pangs of a new Mid­dle East.“
I was in Jerusalem, “cov­er­ing the abduc­tion of the Israeli solider, Gilad Shalit”:http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1211595,00.html?iid=chix-sphere, by Pales­tin­ian mil­i­tants in the Gaza Strip for TIME Mag­a­zine. Word soon came fil­ter­ing down from the north on July 12, 2006. Hezbol­lah, the mil­i­tant Shi’ite group, had cap­tured two sol­diers and killed three oth­ers. Three other reporters and I rushed up to Israel’s North­ern Com­mand. On the first day, Israel had launched a fierce series of airstrikes against Hezbol­lah posi­tions and infra­struc­ture, bomb­ing three to five bridges “and more,” said Col. Boaz Cohen, chief of oper­a­tions for Israel’s North­ern Com­mand. I remem­ber ask­ing Cohen if the list of tar­gets would grow, to include tar­gets in Beirut.
“Wait and see,” he said.
The next morn­ing, I woke up to Katuysha rocket strikes just a few hun­dred meters from the bed and break­fast where we’d found rooms and the news that Beirut’s air­port had been bombed.

“Check out the rest”:http://www.spot-on.com/archives/allbritton/2007/07/lebanons_war_one_year_later.html if you like…