They Ask Questions

Apparently there is only so much lint to be gotten from one's navel, because there's a new kerfuffle afoot in the blogosphere. If I were twenty years younger, and had neither family, job, nor school to occupy the bulk of my time, I could take part in more kerfuffles. I suppose I am something of a blogospheric National Guardsman then, taking part in weekend kerfuffles here and there. It's either that or paintball, and those little motherfuckers sting when they hit. Take it from me, you can't get away with paintballing in your underwear with a sack of Cheetos and a vat of Mountain Dew. This alone makes the weekend kerfuffle the superior option.

Anyway, there is much ado about why Left Blogistan has been comparatively silent about the Israel-Hezbollah skirmishes. Of course, said ado is taking place in the incestuous realms of Right Blogistan, so there's that. But there is a nugget of truth to it. Billmon has contributed prodigiously to the analysis, but other than that, most of us have been perhaps a bit reticent on the subject, and not without reason.

I can't and won't presume to ventriloquize the reasoning of my peers, but I haven't said much about it because there's not much to say. These people have been at each other's throats for thousands of years, over some of the most undesirable scraps of land on the planet. Rationality is, shall we say, not a huge part of the equation.

Growing up, I was a diehard supporter of Israel, and in many ways I still am. One of my cousins is in fact a rabbi who spent about a decade on a kibbutz, and reading about the Holocaust when I was younger has always stayed with me. (For the record, as far as I know, I do not have any Jewish lineage, though I am one-eighth Polish-Russian, so it's possible.)

At this point, however, I have come to look at Israel/Palestine as an intractable situation, because of the behavior of both sides. And here is perhaps the core of people's reluctance to comment on anything to do with the situation -- the constant threat of being mired in the argument of "moral equivalence". Arabs (Palestinians, Hezbollah, whoever) deliberately target civilians; Israel never does. Well, that's not true; Israel has decimated Lebanon's recently rebuilt infrastructure, there are hundreds of thousands of internal refugees there now, and there are generations of Palestinians who have lived and died in refugee camps. There are more ways to destroy lives than by merely killing people. Collective punishment is one of them.

Anyway, so this has sparked a rather contentious debate in the recently-outed Tom Bongiovi's (sorry dude, couldn't resist) blog, with some participants from a noted righty site. As usual, the epithets were fast and hyperbolic, but I noted this more measured comment:

What do you believe is the proper course of action for Israel to take in response to attacks on it by people who come right out and say their objective is to wipe the country off the map? Do you agree or disagree with their goal?

I originally tried to respond in the comments section, but it exceeded the character limit (imagine that), and I don't want to hijack Tom's thread anyway. So here's the short answer; certainly better people than I have tried to get to the bottom of this eternal conundrum:

I don't think Israel's goal was to wipe out Lebanon's infrastructure. I think they might have been counting on the "adults" (that is, the U.S. gov't) to step in and break it up and get more talks going, as we always have in the past.

But because we have an incompetent shoe-shopper as our chief diplomat, and a cadre of Serious Thinkamatin' neoclowns forming policy, Israel perhaps got thwarted in their own goal -- by us. They can't "get rid of" Hezbollah, much as they'd like to, any more than England could "get rid of" the IRA. They know this. Bush clearly does not.

Let's take Bush's "stop this shit" comment as being logically true -- why then has nobody been dispatched to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop said shit? Why does the putatively liberal media focus on the mode of Bush's babbling, and not the functionality of the substance? If it's as simple as he made it sound to his lapdog Blair, then where's the pressure on Syria? The thing is, since Chimpco has royally fucked the dog in Baghdad, they seem to think that the only way they can save face is by doubling down in Damascus or Tehran.

You think Hezbollah doesn't realize this as well? You think they don't watch the armchair generals prancing around on Fox, acting like they're the ones about to firebomb Dresden all over again? I know Serious Thinkers like Billy Kristol and George W. Bush make it all sound so simple. It is a very seductive scam. But it ignores the possibility that maybe Bush and Kristol don't know jack shit about what they've already gotten into, much less what they want to get into next.

I think it's super that the 82nd Chairborne deems it unfortunate, yet tragically necessary, that we get ready to muster for WW3 for Israel. But I submit that Hezbollah knew exactly what it was doing by goading Israel. They knew Olmert would be pressured by the threat of a Likud takeover if he didn't respond quickly and overwhelmingly. They knew Olmert would also be counting on us to step in and mediate before shit got out of hand. And they also knew that, because this administration is desperately committed to its failed ideal of total transformation, no matter the cost, the Bushies would view all this as yet another opportunity to fuck yet another, bigger dog.

So please, neoclowns, spare the moral equivalence lectures, m'kay? We could have stopped this shit (to use your wampeter's faux-Texan parlance) two weeks ago. We clearly don't want to, and we are happy to let Israel set the stage by trying to build a buffer zone to the Litani (which essentially means just cleaning the fucking area completely out). Perhaps Syria will be provoked and defend its corner of the Litani, or the Bekaa Valley, and then we will step in. And then you get the war you crave.

Perhaps you think all-out regional war is preferable to the boring politics of incrementalism. Good luck fighting it, then.

(Incidentally, it appears that our liberated populace of Iraq has made a point of turning out en masse in support of Hezbollah. What do you serious moral thinkamators plan to do about that, now? I suspect nothing, as you clearly still don't realize that you have a tiger by the tail, and your grip is slipping. Why exactly is it that we're supposed to trust your judgment about anything anymore?)