"A moment of opportunity"

Just a few days ago, the slogan for the administration's latest chapter of the weekly cliffhanger was "a moment of clarity."

Today, we've got a new variation on the theme.

WASHINGTON, July 28 — President Bush, vowing to turn conflict in the Middle East into a “moment of opportunity” for broader change, said today that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would be dispatched back to the region on Saturday with a plan for a multinational force that would help Lebanon’s army take over from Hezbollah in the southern part of the country.

Mr. Bush spoke this afternoon at a press conference with Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain, who called the conflict a “complete tragedy” with innocent Lebanese and Israeli lives lost, people displaced, and a “terrible setback” for Lebanon’s democracy.

Mr. Bush said that the “root cause” of the problem was Hezbollah.

“For the sake of long-term stability, we’ve got to deal with this issue now,” Mr. Bush said.

“This is a moment of intense conflict in the Middle East,” Mr. Bush said. “Yet our aim is to turn it into a moment of opportunity and a chance for broader change in the region.”

And what a moment it is.

JERUSALEM, July 28 — Israeli war planes on Friday renewed their bombing raids against suspected Hezbollah sites in southern Lebanon, killing more than 10 people, while Hezbollah fired what it said was a new type of rocket that landed about 30 miles inside Israel.

The Israeli airstrikes were most intense in southern Lebanon, and at least 10 people were reported killed in villages near the coastal town of Tyre.

Israel has been striking frequently in and around Tyre, saying that many Hezbollah rockets are launched from the area. A day earlier an airstrike destroyed a tall building in the town that, according to Israel, served as Hezbollah’s command center for firing rockets at Haifa, the large port city in northern Israel that has been hit frequently.

Israeli jets also bombed several buildings near the town of Nabatiyeh, killing three people and wounding nine, according to Lebanese security officials cited by The Associated Press, and Israel unleashed an artillery barrage on roads and suspected Hezbollah posts in the hills and mountains of southeastern Lebanon and in the Bekaa Valley.

The Israeli military said it carried out more than 180 aerial strikes in Lebanon during the 24-hour period that ended Friday morning, and there were no signs of a letup during the day Friday.

Israel also reiterated its call for Lebanese civilians south of the Litani River to move north. The river runs east to west about 15 miles north of the Israeli border.

In a new development, Hezbollah unleashed large, powerful rockets it said it had not used before in this conflict, and they hit deep inside Israel, in open fields near the town of Afula, according to Israeli authorities.

Hezbollah called the rockets the Khaibar-1. They fell more than 30 miles south of the Lebanese border. A few other rockets have traveled this far, but it was still unusual, according to the Israeli military and police.

The rockets are capable of carrying more than 200 pounds of explosives, making them much more powerful than the Katyusha rockets that Hezbollah has been firing most of the time, Israeli authorities said.

Hezbollah’s leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, said earlier in the week that his Shiite group would strike beyond Haifa, about 20 miles inside Israel, which has been the southernmost city to come under regular attack.

A moment all right, a moment when fools rushed in.

Mr. Bush said that, despite the bloodshed in Lebanon, Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, democracy is taking root in the region and will flower “unless we lose our nerve.”

“This government isn’t going to quit,” Mr. Bush said.

And how much fertilizer, in the form of corpses, will spill before he stops platitudinizing?

And, wha's this? I'd forgotten about the other fields of democracy flowers he's planted.

In a gala for Project HOPE last October, Mrs. Bush praised the project, describing its plan for 94 beds, a state-of-the-art neonatal unit, a linear particle accelerator for radiation therapy and CAT scanners. Ms. Rice added that the hospital “will make a real difference, a life-saving and lasting difference, to the thousands of children and their families.”

But like so many other reconstruction projects in Iraq, the hospital was blindsided by changing realities on the ground. Once considered a relatively tranquil section of Iraq, the south has become increasingly dangerous with the rise of Shiite militias in the past two years — so much so, said Mr. Mumm, the Bechtel official, that construction was often forced to shut down.

With those delays came increasing costs as the company absorbed the expenses of housing, feeding and protecting its work force while the work sat idle, Mr. Mumm said. One consequence was that the nonconstruction costs usually referred to as overhead or administrative costs skyrocketed.

Bechtel estimated that as much as 50 percent of its expenses on the project were overhead costs, which were paid with American money separate from the $50 million construction contract.

David Snider, a spokesman for the United States Agency for International Development, the State Department agency in charge of the project, said that technically, Bechtel’s contract was not being terminated because the contract did not actually require the company to complete the hospital.

“They are under a ‘term contract,’ which means their job is over when their money ends,” Mr. Snider said. So despite not finishing the hospital, he said, “they did complete the contract.”

Another moment of missions accomplished.