Monday, July 24, 2006

Crime and punishment

Nobody is really objective. Some people don’t try to be, but listening to CNN while on the treadmill this morning, there was little to be heard other than the carnage in Lebanon. Of course it’s real, it’s horrible and it’s infuriating, but does that make CNN objective? Collateral damage, our usual euphemism for civilian casualties, from the US invasion of Iraq was far higher, although I am fairly certain that US weapons were not deliberately aimed at housing blocks, hospitals or markets. We were often reminded that this was the case while the Shock and Awe was shocking and awing. Still some military targets were hard by civilian structures and when we attempted to bomb a restaurant that we thought held Saddam Hussein, we didn’t phone ahead for a reservation.

Of course the carnage continues in Iraq and is reported as one isolated event after another and presented as the work of outsiders or extremists without reference to the fact that such things were impossible before we destroyed the country, removed all leadership and opened the borders. It’s just more collateral damage that we regret cannot be avoided. The rogue troops who rape, loot and pillage, torture and kill are a fringe element that will be dealt with and they do not reflect on leadership or policy at all. Such things just happen. If we do disagree, we’re traitors, or worse: Liberals who don’t support the troops. Objectivity is relative.

Artillery rockets are not guided, they are fired over the horizon on a ballistic trajectory, like the Nazi Vergeltungswaffen; the V1 and V2, to land where they may in a certain area. When launched by Hezbollah or Hamas, they are as likely to hit an Arab child as an Israeli government building and serve to promote an atmosphere of terror as much or more than to damage infrastructure. Not much more than a dozen Israeli civilians have so far been killed from these random rocket attacks and not much coverage has been given. Perhaps the death toll would be higher if Hezbollah had weapons that could be accurately aimed and perhaps higher still if Israel put munitions caches in apartment buildings and parked rocket launchers next to buildings where people work and live and go to school, but the death toll in Lebanon is certainly quite a bit higher than in Israel and coverage of civilian carnage is relentless, emotional and filled with pictures of empty bassinettes and scattered toys. Rightly or wrongly, the incidents; the attacks that launched a thousand planes have been obscured by the blood of the innocent and the guilty.

Some years ago, I was excoriated by a German national in an internet forum because while I was being born, Dresden was in flames and the civilian death toll was enormous. The fellow went on an on, invoking the screams of old men, women and children, until I asked him about what noise those millions who died in Hitler’s gas chambers and ovens and death camps made? I asked who was responsible for the deaths of 50 million people; those who started it, or those who defended against it? As you can imagine, no such discussion can have a conclusion, and I fear that the current conflict will have no conclusion, much less will any discussion of it. Yet to my way of thinking, no discussion is relevant or objective or pertinant unless one question is answered: Does Israel have a right to exist or is it's existence an act of provocation?




5 comments:

Intellectual Insurgent said...

The question of whether Israel has the right to exist has already been answered. The real question is whether the Palestinian people have a right to exist.

d nova said...

good post.

i assume the question is rhetorical.

Crankyboy said...

Int. Ins -

You say the question of whether Israel has a right to exist has already been answeder. I know you havn't missed the Iram president's pronouncements of destroying Israel. He says them now about every day. The time of the destruction of the Zionist entity is near he proclaims. Hamas, the government of the Palestinian Territories has never said Israel has a right to exist. It only has said that for now it pre-67 borders should occur. It says nothing about its plans after that. I doubt you will find a Hezbollah member or spokesman (never a woman) say Israel has a right to Exist. Same with Syria. And since Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons as fast as they can and Hezbollah is their creation, I wouldn't be so definitive of your claim.

Intellectual Insurgent said...

Why not? Those three entities do not decide whether Israel has the right to exist or not. The question of Israel does not depend on any of them.

Just as Hizballah is Iran's creation, Hamas is Israel's creation, in case you didn't know. Israel thought it would be funny to play the religious nuts against the secular PLO. They are reaping what they have sown with that one. Getting religious fanatics riled up is never a good idea.

Capt. Fogg said...

I wasn't aware that Israel had been pursuing Palestinians simply for being such. Certainly I believe that the existence of Israel is a provocation enough for some people and no return of land or return to pre-1967 borders will change that.

Countries like Iran have no particular mission to restore the former Palestine to the descendents of those displaced in 1948, it's simply a good way of maintaining the kind of chaos that furthers their ambitions to power and again, to them, the idea of a legitimate Israel does not suit their purposes.

I tend to believe that Palestinians are being victimized as much i not more by the rest of the world that has an interest in continued war.

It is a shame that any step taken in teh direction of trading land for peace seems to end in that land being used as a base for attacks,