[lit-ideas] Re: Israel's Invasion Pretext Under Fire
- From: John Wager <john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2006 12:42:53 -0500
Stan Spiegel wrote:
Omar conveniently cites:
"Israeli forces have gone on to kill over 370 innocent Lebanese civilians
(compared to 34 killed on Israel's side) while
displacing hundreds of thousands more."
As Omar knows, Hezbollah has enmeshed itself into the civilian
structure of Lebanese life: hides guns and all sorts of assault
weapons in children's bedrooms and apartment houses. It is Hezbollah
that recognizes no limits -- and to fight Hezbollah it becomes very
difficult without hurting some civilians.
Perhaps the point was that it was both immoral AND self-destructive to
bomb so many Hezbollah targets when they were so closely embedded in the
civilian population. Back in the Vietnam war, a general is reported to
have said "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." The
calculus of human death and suffering is never easy to make, but I
personally think Israel fell into a Hezbollah trap in deciding to place
the amount of civilian suffering at so low a priority. Yes Israel needs
to reduce the danger to its citizens, but doing so in a way that
temporarily relieves the number of rockets fired while increasing the
number of volunteer rocket firers seems counter-productive. The U.S.
may be slowly learning this lesson in Iraq--It does no good to eliminate
a "threat" if you do so in a way that increases the number of people who
will threaten you in the future as a result.
Israel seems to have decided that just bombing the targets from the air
was not enough to stop the firings, and that a certain amount of ground
action is also needed. Someone in the Israeli air force probably was
arguing for using FEWER bombs precisely because they would probably not
work, and somebody else in Israel decided that despite the lack of
chance for success, the number of civilian casualties should NOT prevent
the bombing from taking place. This seems both immoral and
counter-productive to Israel's long-term security. I suspect the reason
that unnamed Israeli made the decision to bomb those targets was the
same reason American military planners do the same thing--to avoid
future military casualties in a ground operation. But again, like the
U.S., Israel may (unfortunately) discover that their actions have
produced more hostility and more danger to the troops they sent in that
those troops would have been subject to if Israel had not been so
cavalier about its bombing targets.
--
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"Never attribute to malice that which can be
explained by incompetence and ignorance."
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John Wager john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx
Lisle, IL, USA
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