Walzer: Is Israel Justified In The Lebanon Attacks?
At TNR.
Walzer: smart guy. Knows much about just war theory. I haven't read it all yet, as I found it right at bedtime. Walzer's usually worth a read, though.
I consider just war theory to be one of the best achievements of practical ethics. Much of it's just common sense...but think about the short supply of that commodity... Just war theorists fight the good fight against foreign policy "realists" on the right and against pacifists on the left, striving mightily to bring both humanity and sanity to debates about the use of force.
At TNR.
Walzer: smart guy. Knows much about just war theory. I haven't read it all yet, as I found it right at bedtime. Walzer's usually worth a read, though.
I consider just war theory to be one of the best achievements of practical ethics. Much of it's just common sense...but think about the short supply of that commodity... Just war theorists fight the good fight against foreign policy "realists" on the right and against pacifists on the left, striving mightily to bring both humanity and sanity to debates about the use of force.
posted by Winston Smith at
10:41 PM
35 Comments:
A couple of things:
First, unless Israel is able to utterly destroy Hezbollah's capacity to resist or attack it (not bloody likely), it will end up strengthening it. Ever since Israel withdrew from Southern Lebanon in 2000 (they occupied Lebanon for 18 years, remember?), Hezbollah has been struggling to justify its existence in the country: a task made more difficult by Syria's troop withdrawl last year. Attacking Israel in response to the Gaza incursion (which included the destruction of power plants and the embargoing of aid shipments) was meant in part to show that Hezbollah was the lone champion of the Palestinians in the Arab world. Israel coming down on Lebanon (ALL of Lebanon: they haven't been particularly choosy about their targets, which have, once again, included power plants, civilian bridges, and, in a nice twist, a hospital) just galvanizes Lebanese support for Hezbollah. Well done, sirs.
Also, it's interesting to note that Lebanese army units have suffered from attacks from Israeli bombs and jets, even though, Israel is demanding, ostensibly, that the Lebanese army replace Hezbollah on Lebanon's southern border. It reminds me of the second intifada, when Sharon would alternate demands for the Palestinian Authority to crack down on terrorism with bombing raids against Palestinian police offices, destroying the very law enforcement infrastructure they were insisting should be used against terror groups.
It's also interesting to note that the two groups Israel has been battling with, Hamas and Hezbollah, are both to some degree Israeli creations. Hezbollah sprang up as an agent of resistance to Israel's occupation of Lebanon, and Hamas's rise in influence was secretly underwritten by Israel in the late 80s as a way to undermine the authority of the PLO.
So, I think I'm going to have to go with "unjust" on this one.
there's also this:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-havoc19jul19,0,314217.story?coll=la-home-headlines
some relevant text:
"As the crisis deepened this week, Lebanese officials said Israeli bombs hit the nation's largest milk factories, a major food factory and an eagerly awaited aid convoy that was making its way toward Beirut from the United Arab Emirates."
Yeah, I'm gonna stick with "unjust."
Much of what you say is consistent with what Walzer says. Note that he is primarily addressing questions concerning *jus ad bellum*, i.e. about the conditions under which war can justly be initiated. His argument is that the conditions have been met. There are also question concerning *jus in bello*, i.e. questions about what one can justly do in a war. Walzer notes that Israel cannot intentionally attack innocent civilians, nor the primarily civilian infrastructure.
Now, to the extent that Israel is doing *that*, their actions are unjust. I've been largely out of the loop, so I didn't hear about the hospital. If true, that's obviously out of bounds.
Much of what you say is just about prudential stuff--basically you're arguing that it's not smart for Israel to attack as it is. But that's a different question. The question here is "Do they have a right to attack?" not "would it be smart for them to do so?"
I'm not defending either side here, because I don't have a position on this issue. Not that that matters.
You may be interested in Chris Bertram's post on Walzer's article at Crooked Timber, Winst:
http://crookedtimber.org/2006/07/20/walzer-on-lebanon/
The Bertram post makes a point that I wish I had made in my initial response here:
"Walzer tends to take IDF claims about the extent to which they actually do seek to minimize civilian casualities at face value; the reports from Lebanon would seem to support a more sceptical stance."
Supporters of Israeli attacks often point out that, though attacks end up killing a lot of civilians, in fact numbers of civilians whole magnitudes beyond the numbers of Israelis killed by the provocation, that this is morally permissible because the IDF isn't INTENTIONALLY targetting civilians. I would argue that the utter disregard Israel shows for civilians in these attacks ends up with results that are largely indistinguishable from those of a bombing campaign atimed explicitly at civilians. Bombing residential neighborhoods and civilian infrastructure (which not only kill those innocent people who work on and around such facilities, but which degrade the ability of civilians to survive in general) cannot be justified because there might be Hezbollah fighters in the neighborhoods, or that Hezbollah might use the infrastructure as well.
I think that the question of the wisdom of Israel's actions does connect to the question of their morality. Taking the step to assault a sovereign country which you have largely admitted is unable to exert control over the force that is your main enemy is a venture which guarantees large-scale suffering of civilians populations. Inflicting such suffering can only be justified on the grounds that it is the best way to bring about an end to significant violence. If your military action has no real chance of succeeding at this end, and is in fact more of a show of strength for the benefit of a domestic political constituency or in order to pressure world actors to accomodate you in other ways, then the suffering is not justifiable.
Absolute silence about Hizbollah lobbing rockets willy-nilly directly at Israel's civilian population. Astounding.
Self-preservation is always justified. In fact, I think it's a fellow named Bastiat who argued against capital punishment because even a justly condemned man has the right to fight for his life. An elegant argument, that.
As Dershowitz pointed out the other day, you rob a bank and hide behind a civilian and the civilian gets killed, it's you the bankrobber who holds the moral (and legal) responsibility.
The Israelis are not the wanton killers here. Hizbollah are. Put the moral responsibility where it belongs.
"Absolute silence about Hizbollah lobbing rockets willy-nilly directly at Israel's civilian population. Astounding."
Wow. Talk about a strawman. Implicit in the recognition that Israel has a right and even an obligation to act is the assumption that the launching of the rockets is morally repugnant.
Does it really need saying if one is already to the point of supporting Israeli action?
Not to mention that it's not entirely the bank robber's moral responsibility if the death was due to force which was greater than necessary.
An essential facet of what the whole debate is about.
and yet, somehow, hundreds of innocent Lebanese are being wontonly killed. Funny how that works.
I would also like to stress that the background assumption of this discussion is that Israel has the right to self defense. The question is what sort of self defense is morally tenable. I maintain that collective punishment of thousands of Lebanese who have no control over the actions of Hezbollah is not morally tenable.
Not only what defense is morally tenable, but also what defense is practical in the long term. Saying kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out may be cathartic even for non-idiots, but it will only exacerbate the problem.
Violence against Hezbollah should be measured and judicious not because Hezbollah morally deserves it but because its neighbors, many of whom are now collateral corpses, deserve it. Neocon morons think winning the war is enough and give no thought to winning the peace.
Israel's existence is threatened by Hezbollah and its long-time sponsor, Iran. A disproportionate response is fine. But it has to hit those who are actually responsible.
An indiscriminate response is not fine, morally or practically, yet that's what Israel is doing. That response is also a threat to Israel's existence - the Islamists only have to win once, and this provides them the support of the population, instead of driving a wedge between Hezbollah and the Lebanese.
After years of studying philosophy and finding no good arguments for the existence of God, I've finally found sufficient evidence to not only believe in God, but to convert to evangelical Christianity. I'm talking about the increasingly clear evidence that the Book of Revelations is true and we're well on our way to armaggedon ignited by the Middle East conflict.
Ok, bad joke. I'm not really in a joking mood right now but I'm trying. I have relatives who had to move to the mountains of Lebanon to escape the seige in Beirut and we haven't been able to get through to them in a week. So discussing this war is not an exercise in practical ethics for me. Maybe I can't be as objective as I'd like to be about this.
With that said, I agree completely with Matthew's posts. I also found the Walzer piece strangely detached from what we know about the targets Israel has hit in Lebanon over and over again. Israel may have had a right to respond in some way, but the way it has responded is much closer to the tactics that terrorists use than that of a state engaged in a just war.
I don't make that comparison lightly, but I think that it applies. Israel's air campaign has not had much of an impact on Hezbollah, according to recent reports. Nor will a ground invasion really solve the problem (will Israel occupy Lebanon for another two decades?) It doesn't really have an ethical military option here. The strategy seems to be to make life hell for the Lebanese so they will cry uncle and turn on Hezbollah. This is the strategy they are also using in Gaza, incidentally. I'm sorry to say it, but that's a form of state terror. (We really need to stop using the word "terror" as if it's only stateless groups who can inflict it).
Tom, you say that self-preservation is always justified. Up to a point--there are some actions which it may be better to die before committing. You may also want to be careful about who accepts your just war theory. Hamas argues that Palestinains' self-preservation is at stake, and that's why they resort to terrorism. Hezbollah has argued for years that Lebanon's existence was at state, and that's how they justified their actions. I don't think we want to go there.
Hey, Jared. Good to see you around, and I hope your relatives are o.k.
I'm actually with you on all this, which puts me more-or-less with Matthew, too, now, except for a few details.
It's hard for me to tell with any precision, but I'm inclined now to think that Israel has, as they say, over-reacted.
Israel does not, as Matthew asserted, utterly disregard civilian deaths, but it seems that they may not weigh them heavily enough. Though THAT part just isn't clear to me--note that I'm too busy these days to have my finger on the pulse of CNN. Israel says that they only attack Hezbollah targets, and that civilians who have been killed were harboring Hezbollah. We don't know whether that's true or not yet, but Israel does seem to be attacking the civilian infrastructure, and that's not permissible.
This is one of those cases where I think we need to exercise great caution when drawing conclusions. I see lots of folks (mostly on the right) who will support almost anything Israel does, and lots of folks (mostly on the left) who interpret every action by Israel in the worst possible light.
It's a messy problem, and I know very little about it, so all I can do is keep my conclusions tentative.
One last point: I think Matthew mentioned upthread that likelihood of success should matter when evaluating a war as just or unjust, and that seems to be right. Grotius, for example, says that there must be a reasonable chance of success in order for a war to be just.
That raises interesting issues, b/c it makes us reflect on what counts as success. In the case at hand, success must be something like *significantly weakening Hezbollah.* Note, however, that success in Iraq probably can't mean *deafeating the Iraqi military*, but, rather, *establishing a just Iraqi state.* Since the administration didn't plan for after the war, they probably don't meet that condition, so that would make the Iraq war unjust. (This isn't just gratuitous Bush-bashing...but we were on a related subject.)
Sure we do. War is war.
But I was referring not so much to political entities (or non-entities) as much as life and death.
Hizbollah are wanton murderers of civilians. And a difficult moral case arises when a civilian population lets murderers operate freely in their midst. Hizbollah has offices, holds marches to cheering crowds, and certainly didn't move thousands of missles to the Israel border without anyone noticing. I'm not quite prepared to give the Lebanese people as a whole a pass on this.
Sure there are innocents involved, but unless Israel is directly targeting civilians, the moral culpability remains Hizbollah's.
And if Lebanese choose to live in apartments above Hizbollah headquarters, that's hardly Israel's fault either.
Well, living above them hardly entails supporting them...but I guess they knew the apartment was dangerous when they took it...
Hezbollah is evil...but there are limits to what one can do in fighting evil. Even if one doesn't target civilians intentionally, there is some limit to how many one is allowed to kill and injure accidentally. This is basically the same point Matthew was making above, I think, though I'm less inclined to attribute Lebanese deaths to Israeli malice than he is, I think.
Thanks, Winston. We're crossing our fingers.
That was me, btw...
But keep in mind, WS, that Hizbollah is quite popular in south Lebanon and nobody lifted a finger to stop them taking over for all practical purposes. The civilian population brought this on themselves, and indeed many are members of Hizbollah.
If they start lauching rockets at Israel, they take the consequences (and Israel has been good enough to drop leaflets warning of impending attack, which of course the Hizbollah murserers do not).
I should be past being appalled at the moral cowardice of some of your commenters, who can only work up a decent indignation for Israel failing to meet the highest of standards and barely a word for the bad guys who have no standards at all. On the scale of moral outrage, Hizbollah is a 9, Israel a 2. Talk about "disproportionate."
I am past being surprised, but not appalled.
This discussion highlights, I think, one of the problems I've always had with ius ad bello -- namely, figuring out the appropriate time-slice to count as "before war," and the appropriate entities/persons whose actions we're attempting to judge. Matthew traces the genesis of Hezbollah and Hamas to Israeli actions; Tom asserts that self-preservation is always justified. both of these are true, but it's not difficult to see where the logic ultimately leads.
If self-preservation is always justified, there are very many Lebanese who would right not be perfectly within their reights to start lobbing inaccurate missiles in the direction of military targets in Israel, and if they happen to miss and kill some civilians or children, ah well, c'est la guerre. And if Israel's actions twenty years ago undermine its ability to invoke just war theory today, there are not very many nations that will ever be able to fight a justified war, no matter the immediate circumstances.
I recognize that I'm twisting both of the above arguments, but hopefully it's for the good cause of framing a rhetorical point (and the less-good cause of cowardly positioning myself in the oh-so-reasonable-pox-on-both-your-houses middle). Ius ad bello is all well and good where all we've got is nation states lurching towards conflict from a peaceful status quo ante.
But that's not where war is today -- there are militias, non-state entities, and anyplace war is likely to break out, there's a long history of violence stretching way back. Israel's response, Walzer argues, is justified as a response to a military action -- Hezbollah's raid capturing and killing Israeli soldiers. But this just begs the question -- it's just as easy to apply just war analysis to Hezbollah's raid. It's certainly possible to situate their attack as a response to the Israeli military action in Gaza -- and launching an attack to open up a second front is of course a well-accepted military tactic. And bouncing back again, the move into Gaza was well-motivated by another raid and capture -- which was itself aimed at an army outpost. But it didn't occur in the context of a well-delimited military engagement.
Maybe this is where things terminate -- but is it really the case that the moral status of Israel's invasion of Lebanon is wholly determined by the actions of Hamas in the Gaza strip a month previous? This seems to lead to results that are essentially accidental -- my intuition is that the moral status of World War I shouldn't depend on whether the guys who assassinated Ferdinand had a legitimate grievance or not!
Hopefully the weaknesses are clear -- there's very often going to be some event or three immediately motivating every action taken by both sides, and cutting off consideration at some arbitrary point is very unsatisfying. If each discrete event widening the scope of a conflict requires us to reevaluate its just-ness de novo, a whole lot of aggrieved victims are going to be able to claim that their acts of "resistance" are justified. Again, there are quite a lot of innocent Lebanese who have lost their families and homes, and taking up arms against Israel seems justifiable. But this line of reasoning suggests that Israel's actions themselves were justified, so now we've got a theory in which two antagonists are locked in a death-struggle, both wholly justified.
Further, I made a rather facile leap identifying Hamas with Hezbollah, implying that if Hamas was justified in defending itself from the Gaza invasion, then Hezbollah would be justified in attacking Israel as part of the same conflict. Lumping together everybody with similar interests (or similar religions, or ethnic identities) is likely to tear just war theory to tatters -- but in this context, saying that each state, or even each faction, stands alone is fundamentally to misdescribe the situation as it actually is.
This all seems highly problematic to me, and I have no idea of how to set up the analysis in an appropriately neutral way.
With that said, part of my dissatisfaction here arises from what might be an idiosyncratic moral position: maybe it's the Catholic blood in me, but I find the idea that one isn't morally culpable for one's actions just because somebody else has done something to provoke or constrain those actions utterly false.
Certainly culpability can in many circumstances be vitiated, but I don't think there's ever a situation in which one can check one's responsibility at the door. If you kill a hostage in an attempt to apprehend a dangerous criminal -- or kill civilians in an attempt to protect your nation or family -- the fact that the killing wasn't a senseless murder doesn't mean it lacks any moral weight whatsoever. And if you're put in a position where self-preservation requires you to kill let's say ten innocent people who are in no way to blame for your current state of extremity, I think there's a very strong argument that actually you don't have a right to self-defense there after all -- because if you do, then each of those ten must have the exact same right, and if the pieces are set up in all the correct places, this can keep going and going.
Probably if you don't share that fundamental intuition, my objections have less force. And the abstract frame I employ in the above paragraph does feel a bit forced. Still, I think it's a not completely inaccurate model of the modern Middle East, where justification -- even rigorously, honestly thought-out justification -- can be just another weapon.
Which is all to say that I think the Middle East has been so violent for so long, and justifications are so mutable and subjective, that I don't see how conventional just war theory really offers much of analytic weight. Ruling one side, or both, or neither, to be acting correctly seems very hard to do responsibly, and at any rate I'm not sure what good it does. Any given person will be able to argue convincingly to him- or her-self that almost anything he or she does is a rational, proportionate response to some atrocity or other. Maybe they're right, maybe they're wrong, in some ontological sense -- but the only way out is if some proportion of the aggrieved, at the moment when they're sure of the justice of their cause, instead put down the fucking rock or rifle or IED or bomb. I have no idea how to do that, but I don't get the feeling that proponents of ius ad bello do either.
Apologies for the length -- the Middle East makes me depressed and prolix, and I've had a drink or two.
He may be like one grain of sand at the beach, but I guess it's a start. I'm not sure I would have the character of this guy if I were in that situation. An emotional read:
http://www.ipforum.org/display.cfm?id=6&Sub=15&Dis=22
Mike: I think that we can still condemn attacks on civilians which are not also attacks on military targets. That's why I abhor Hamas' tactics and believe that Hezbollah has crossed the line with its missile attacks, even if they haven't done much damage, relatively speaking. I agree with you about drawing facile conclusions about who is to blame for this whole mess. But we should also condemn Israeli attacks on civilians that are not clearly also attacks on military targets, and there seem to be many examples in this conflict (see below).
Tom: what are you going to call us next, after "moral cowards"? That's what your side always does--reduces a debate into name-calling. How about this response: I know you are but what am I? As for your point about Lebanese civilians bringing this on themselves because they have supported Hezbollah: We can safely exclude the Sunnis and Christians from that group, and we can also safely exclude children as well. Finally, not all Shiite civilians in Lebanon support Hezbollah, nor is it clear that they deserve to be punished for Hezbollah's actions. And I'll remind you again, your argument parallels the logic that Hamas uses to justify its attacks on Israeli civilians. I'll wait for you to reply to that charge, along with more name-calling.
"Officials at the Tyre Government Hospital inside a local Palestinian refugee camp said they counted the bodies of 50 children among the 115 in the refrigerated truck in the morgue, though their count could not be independently confirmed...When the Israeli loudspeakers warned villagers to evacuate the village of Marwaheen last Saturday, the families packed their belongings and headed for safety. More than 23 of them piled into a pickup and drove toward Tyre...As the pickup raced to Tyre, Ali al-Ghanam said, Israeli boats shelled their convoy, hitting the car and injuring the women and children in the back. But within minutes an Israeli helicopter approached the car, firing a missile that blew the truck to pieces as the passengers struggled to jump out, he said. His brother Mohammad, his wife and their six children, were killed instantly along with several of their relatives. The only survivor in the car was the brothers' 4-year-old niece, who survived with severe burns to much of her body."
-From "In Scramble to Evade Israeli Bombs, the Living Leave the Dead Behind" NY Times, A9, Friday, July 21, reported from Tyre Lebanon
Hizbollah has no chance of winning. That is an "unjust" war. The moral responsibility for the above falls to them. They unleashed the dogs of war, and very bad things happen.
If there's a sniper in my neighbor's window killing my family, I'm taking him out even if I have to blow up the place, unless the sniper took the occupants hostage (which, for the sake of this illustration, is not the case in southern Lebanon).
The "innocent civilians" there watched Hizbollah bring in 10,000 rockets with which to murder the Israeli's civilian population.
"They're Israeli's problem," they must have thought. Guess again. They're yours. That's how it works in the real world. If it's my family or yours that is to die, sorry, you're out of luck, because you let the murderers in your front door.
(If you want to be part of a "we," Jared, that's fine. But I speak for myself, so leave me out of a putative "side.")
And I do not withdraw my remarks toward some of the commenters in this thread. To let one's own children die at the hands of murderers is cowardly, to sit back in the comfort of a peaceful country and expect those in beseiged ones to let their children die over your own moral sensibilities is appalling.
Not one Israeli child should die at Hizbollah's hands. The blame for "collateral damage" lies with the initiators of this "unjust" (as opposed to "just") war, the sniper in the window, the Hizbollah murderers.
Jared: I agree wholeheartedly on the need to condemn attacks which lead to excessive or exclusive harm to noncombatants. Traditionally, that's been labelled the province of ius in bello -- law in war -- and to my mind there's very little problematic about it. The Geneva Conventions and other instruments constituting the law of war are a robust, nigh-universally-adopted framework for thinking about these issues, even though the application of their principles may be difficult in practice.
What I was mostly trying to think about was ius ad bello -- roughly, "the law of going to war." This is the theory labelling particular causes -- and by extention, the wars fought to advance those causes -- as just or unjust. And while I think it's a noble enterprise, ultimately I find myself having grave doubts.
Tom: I have a very hard time understanding your position. Apologies if I'm doing violence to what you're saying here, but is it really the case that you think that Native Americans would have been perfectly in their rights to kill every white American man (and their attendant women and children, if they were in the way) who supported, or at least did too little to stop, the political regimes that displaced them from their land, wiped out their culture, and killed them by sword, bullet, and plague? If so, would such actions still be justified today?
I ask because you seem to be saying that because Hezbollah initiated an unjust war, Israel is non-culpable for civilian deaths proximately caused by its actions, no matter the circumstances. I think you're slipping very easily from the premise "Israel's airstrikes and invasion of Lebanon are motivated by a just cause" to the conclusion "therefore the moral and humanitarian constraints on their actions are relaxed." This is certainly a possible position, but to my understanding it's an *extremely* idiosyncratic one, and my opinion morally, philosophically, and legally incoherent.
Secondarily, while I know that the probability of success is often cited as one of the prerequisites of a just war, but is it really tenable to argue that the French resistance fighters were unjustified in their actions when it looked like they were losing? Or was the hope of US intervention enough to justify the cause?
[And as an even deeper aside, I'm not even sure one can say that Hezbollah has no chance of winning -- it appears to me that their major goal has been to spark a region-wide conflagration, which seems sadly plausible]
Even if one is attacked unjustly, there are things one cannot do in response.
Jared gives us a clear, particular case. The Israeli actions are, so far as we can tell, insufficiently discriminate.
I tend to sympathize with Israel. I grew up being a big Israel fan for various reasons. I've become less favorably disposed toward them in the last 10 years, but I still have a generally favorable view of them.
I'm also a hard-line supporter of the right to self-defense. But the right to self-defense follows from the obligation to protect the innocent. Initially I applauded Israel's attacks against Hezbollah. But this is just too much. They've crossed the line. My worry is that the bombing-of-the-pickup story is just the tip of the iceberg.
Look: if the Israelis are losing people like me, that's a bad sign. When you cut through all the mindless right-wing Israel worship and all the mindless, left-wing anti-Israel propaganda, you're just left with the blurry, fragmentary accounts that are trickling in to us. And an objective assessment of those seems to indicate that the Israelis have simply gone too far, too fast.
"If there's a sniper in my neighbor's window killing my family, I'm taking him out even if I have to blow up the place, unless the sniper took the occupants hostage (which, for the sake of this illustration, is not the case in southern Lebanon)."
If you're going to blow up my apartment building with me and my family in it, I'm taking you out, even if I have to kill a few of your friends and family members around you.
Dear Guy,
If it were the only way to save my children, and I knew you gave the keys to your apartment to the sniper knowing full well what he was up to? Damn right, dude. You're toast.
Mike, I think you're close enough to fair with your Native American comparison. What you describe actually did happen.
I have difficulty condemning the Native Americans' reaction.
Now, should one kill civilians over border disputes or culture? We'd probably agree, no. Which makes Hizbollah's attacks and the Lebanese toleration of them even less defensible, and more morally culpable.
(I have written a slightly expanded version of my remarks here over my groupblog. I originally started blogging as a result of the limits of the shorthand needed for Philoraptor's comments section.)
Tom,
THanks for the tip. Will check it out.
There's a tendency to spin hypothetical examples in the favor of one's conclusion...dunno to what extent we are all doing this.
The case at hand lies somewhere between:
(a) I gave the sniper permission to shoot from my window
and
(b) I didn't even know there was a sniper there.
Since my guess is that we all agree about (a) and (b), I conclude that we disagree about the facts of the case. That seems consistent with what's been written so far.
My guess is that none of us really know all of the relevant facts of the case. I suspect there will be lots of factors one doesn't normally consider, and which are hard to deal with...like a "frogs in hot water" effect. Hezbollah probably moved into given neighborhoods slowly...there probably wasn't a big sign that went up saying "New Headquarters of Hezbollah Terrorist Organization! Grand Opening Tuesday!"
Tom--
Bad link.
WS, I'm afraid Hisbollah certainly did have a public office in southern Lebanon, and a 9-story one in Beirut.
Make that had.
Folks can hunt me and my groupblog by clinking my blogger profile or at www.thereformclub.org. I'm able to acknowledge some nuances that the comment format prohibits. Sorry for the bad link.
No I didn't give him the keys. I didn't know who he was, and even if I did, I couldn't call the cops because he and his gang have them outgunned.
Anyway, you also deprived all of my neighbors of clean water, food and killed many from their families; so any sympathy for your cause you might have gotten from them has now been transformed into enmity for life. You might be hearing from some of their family members soon, as might some of your family you sought to protect.
Well done.
Yeah, I realize that, actually...but those aren't the only targets that were hit. I'm talking about the other buildings where the occupants were allegedly harboring Hezbollah.
The point being this: some shady characters move into the neighborhood, you maybe raise an eyebrow but you don't just up and move. Then more follow and maybe some folks move, but maybe they aren't hasseling anybody and maybe lots of other folks don't have the coin to move, and so they stay around, and then maybe more shady characters move in, but by that time you're pretty much used to it, and then maybe some move into the apartment upstairs and you don't much like it but whattaya gonna do, and...
Anyway, the point is that there are lots of different ways the facts could be on the ground, all the way from the scenario I sketch above to outright support for the bastards. My guess is that it's a big mix.
What Israel should have done--and probabaly was obligated to do--was to issue some kind of warning before the attack. Not "we're going to attack here, here, and here on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday," but, rather something like: "Listen, you civilians, here's the way it is...and next time Hezbollah pulls big shit with us, we're going to hit 'em. So make sure you're not around 'em. Drive 'em out of your neighborhood or get the Hell out, 'cause we don't want to hurt you."
You complain upthread that no one is bashing Hezbollah...but that's because we all think their obvious bastards and that doesn't need to be said. Criticizing them is like criticizing OBL or an earthquake. It goes without saying and does no good. Israel, however, is more or less one of us. They can be reasoned with, and can be profitably criticized. Nobody here supports Hezbollah, the SOBs.
...that doesn't need to be said.
Yes, it does, WS. In the approximate proportion of 9 to 2. The most profitable thing would be to get their back instead of in their face. I reject the argument that the easy things should be done instead of the difficult.
But I've said my piece, which is all I ever ask, mate, and developed it further elsewhere. Thank you for the forum. Peace, I'm out on this one. People know where to find me if they are disposed to leave the safety of numbers.
I've been re-reading Benny Morris' history of the Arab-Israeli conflict recently, and he begins the work with a relevant quote:
"I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done,
Do evil in return."
-W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"
What's most depressing about the Middle East is that the Arabs and the Israelis have been locked in a death grip for over 50 years. A lot of evil has been exchanged back and forth. It's worth keeping that in mind, I think, and not to forget that this current conflict has a very long history.
I absolutely agree. It's like the Balkans...the epicycles of errors and evil and hatred get so baroque and go back so far that it's almost impossible to sort them out and attribute guilt or innocence. It's like toxic stew of violence and hatred. Philosophy and rational discussion may well be impotent in the face of such a situation.
Winston:
You might be interested in this discussion:
http://crookedtimber.org/2006/07/22/legitimate-targets/
Winston, there seems to be psychological evidence for the limits of rational discussion on issues like this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/24/opinion/24gilbert.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
Richard Rorty has an interesting (and slightly disturbing) essay on human rights and the "sentamentalists" (eg, Hume). He argues that there's no need to find a theory to justify that human rights exist, and to explore which human rights there are in order to create a more liberal, just international order. According to Rorty, we simply need to tell each other more sad, tear-jerking stories to get people to view the other side as human beings. (In fact, he uses the Balkans as an example of dehumanization). So Rorty may have some evidence from psychology backing him up here, even if his philosophical point about justifying human rights is wrong.
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