The State Department has taken a distinct and troubling new step by praising the assassination by car bomb of Imad Mughniyeh of Hezbollah. Not that I'd disagree too much, mind you -- the man who planned the 1983 Beirut bombing of the Marine barracks, and several of the Beirut Hezbollah kidnappings of the late 1980s, is probably indeed better off dead. A strict Christian approach to confronting evil would say that one can never rejoice over another's death. But let's face it, I was overjoyed the day Augusto Pinochet bit it, and will probably feel similarly for, say, Henry Kissinger or Dick Cheney (not the president, who is too much of a bumbling tool of the powerful). But I know I'm wrong to have a "party on the gravestone" view, and it seems troubling that the governments of the U.S. and Israel would make an official statement to praise a murder.
