The sleep of reason–and moral agency–produces monsters

The New Neo Posted on by

Below, we have Goya’s famous etching”The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.”

It came to mind while I was reading Melanie Phillips, who is presently writing some of the finest analysis of the British (and, by extrapolation, general Western European) reaction to the war in Lebanon that I’ve read.

Phillips makes sobering reading. It does appear that, among a certain rather large segment in Europe, reason has indeed gone to sleep and monsters are afoot. The West, the birthplace of the Enlightenment and its dedication to reason, seems to have lost the ability to do so.

Read most especially and particularly this; (and also this, and this, if you have more time).

Phillips writes with an air of astonishment as well as outrage, the astonishment of the child who points out the obvious fact that the emperor has no clothes, and yet no one will listen. Her “J’accuse” will no doubt be rejected by those she’s criticizing in the press, the intelligentsia, and the Left.

Ms. Phillips writes that the West is in the grip of “a profound moral breakdown.” Some of this is fed by the lies and distortions of the BBC, which provides most of the information for the British populace; the BBC seems to have abandoned not only it’s vaunted objectivity but reason itself.

The consequences are dreadful, because, as Phillips points out, this isn’t about Israel anymore. This is about a genocidal intent on the part of Iran and certain Arab states to obliterate Israel, and to establish an all-encompassing caliphate. If the Jews have always been the canary in the mine (and I believe they have), we’re all in dire trouble. One of the troubles is that so few in Europe seem to recognize their own potentially suicidal defense of their enemies and their refusal to recognize their friends.

I could quote at great length from Phillips’s piece, but I’ll try to be as brief as possible and give you the essence of it. Please ponder this:

But the moral crisis in Britain extends far wider and deeper than the wretched BBC and other media. The surreally distorted response by so many to Israel’s attempt to destroy the would-be purveyors of genocide raises the question of whether Britain will ever again support a just war ”” because it no longer knows what a just war is, and no longer has the intellectual capacity to know. This is in large measure because moral agency has disappeared altogether from the analysis. Intention, the essence of moral actions, is now tossed aside as of no significance. All that matters are the consequences of an action. This is in accordance with the prevailing amoral consensus which has negated moral agency altogether in order to remove the burden of personal responsibility. What someone intends to do is therefore held to be of no account. All that matters is the consequences of their action.

So the fact that Israel is at war solely to prevent the deaths of innocents is dismissed. All that matters is that the consequences of its actions are that Lebanese civilians are dying. The fact that the Israelis do not intend them to die is irrelevant. Those deaths are deemed to be the equivalent of the deaths caused by Hezbollah. The fact that Hezbollah deliberately sets out to murder innocent Israelis is irrelevant. Thus the only thing that matters is which side has more dead people. The fact that there are more dead Lebanese than dead Israelis settles the matter. The Israelis are in the wrong, are behaving disproportionately, are committing war crimes, are the villains of the piece. The fact that they are actually the victims of unprovoked genocidal aggression is deemed irrelevant. Thus the moral bankruptcy of Britain’s post-modern cultural desert…

Such prejudice [towards Israel] is not only despicable. It is also nationally suicidal. For such is the hatred of Israel that ”” fantastically ”” a world war is under way in which the designated victims don’t even realise it is happening.

If Iran succeeds in developing nuclear weapons and wipes out Israel–thus coming a long way to finishing the job Hitler began–will Western Europe mourn, or rejoice? I begin to wonder. Phillips does offer some hope, however–evidence that the middle-class “man in the street” gets the situation better than the intellectuals–and despite the efforts of the press to shape opinion otherwise.

“You and what army?” redux

The New Neo Posted on by

I was going to write a midlength post on the absurdity of the UN’s call to Ahmadinejad to suspend Iran’s nuclear program or face sanctions. The resolution was considered “mandatory” and “binding,” words that are essentially meaningless in the context of the UN and Iran. Or perhaps the UN and anything.

Well, Tammy Bruce called this one. Not that it was so difficult to call. But she did it with special flair and verve.

And Ahmadinejad finessed me–and the UN. He already has responded by rejecting the UN resolution. Surprise, surprise!

“Binding,” indeed! The UN has no power except by the consent of its member nations, and the threat of sanctions. And the latter is almost amusing after the Oil for Food scandal in Iraq.

Another irony: putting teeth into the UN’s ability to halt the nuclear programs of rogue and tyrannical states is actually one of the things the buildup to the war in Iraq was meant to accomplish. But in the rush to tear down that effort, the UN itself lost whatever legitimacy it might have gained through that avenue.

Women and children first: the propaganda of compassion, at Qana and elsewhere

The New Neo Posted on by

The casualties at Qana are horrific. The visuals are heartrending, and the details sorrowful–especially the predominance of women and children among the dead.

We are biologically predisposed to want to protect children–to love them, to smile when we see them. Only monsters kill children, correct?

Although the phrase “women and children first” comes from maritime tradition, the same impulse has meant, historically, that societies were generally dedicated to protecting that especially vulnerable and vital portion of their population from the enemy.

This doesn’t mean that in war women and children were not killed, of course, despite those efforts at protection. In particular, the aeriel bombardments of World War II made children fair game if they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, although they were not specifically targets (except for purposeful Nazi killings of Jewish children during the Holocaust). Some countries, such as England, sent many of their children off to the countryside during the war, because it was mainly cities that were bombed.

And World War II ended with the terrible atomic conflagration of Hiroshima, which killed indiscriminately; a description of the plight of the victims was immortalized in John Hersey’s classic. Hersey’s Hiroshima, published after World War II ended, represented the first attempt of which I’m aware to take a close look at the enemy war dead, and to view them with compassion and even a sense of shame for what an honorable nation, the United States, felt it necessary to do in time of war.

I’ve discussed the pros and cons of dropping the atomic bombs on Japan here; I’m not going to rehash the topic at this point. I’m bringing it up now, however, to illustrate the fact that World War II involved such widespread and horrific carnage–both military and civilian–that, once it was over, there was a natural desire to write about the devastation in the humane (and probably vain) hope that people would somehow found a way to avoid such things in the future.

Here’s what I wrote about Hersey’s work in my earlier post:

Hersey’s book purposely gives his reportage on Hiroshima no context at all, the better to appreciate the appalling human cost. He simply describes, and the reader identifies with the victims. There is no way to read his book and not feel a deep and visceral revulsion towards what happened there.

Although the scale is nothing whatsoever like Hiroshima, the casualties at Qana are dreadful, and we instinctively recoil from them. They are also the sort of the thing that makes good programming for the voracious jaws of the 24-hour-a-day cable news cycle. And as for context–well, too much context would muddy the waters and appear to justify the bombing of children.

But too little context serves the propaganda purposes of the group least interested in stopping the deaths of children such as these, and that is Hezbollah.

In Qana, Israel was targeting a location that had been used repeatedly for rocket firing at Israel’s own civilians. Israel forces had warned the population to leave prior to the bombing. The people who died obviously did not heed those warnings. Whether this was because they didn’t get the word to leave, or couldn’t leave because they didn’t have the resources, or voluntarily chose not to leave, or whether Hezbollah kept them from leaving, we simply do not know.

Israel had no information that this particular structure was filled with women and children when it was targeted. But filled it was. And, as Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club writes, “… all the leaflets in the world can be dropped and the death of civilians still be a near-inevitability.”

The new calculus of asymmetrical warfare, of which Hezbollah is master, is that the sacrifice of women and children is a good strategic move; putting weaponry among its own women and children is the result of a conscious and wily decision on its part.

This is a sort of looking-glass inversion of the old rule “women and children first.” And it tends to work, because current asymmetrical warfare is fought less on the traditional battlefield and more on the battlefield of public opinion.

Hezbollah knows that there’s nothing like dead women and children to turn public opinion against those doing the killing. And there’s nothing like the Western news to fail to adequately provide and evaluate the all-important context for that killing.

Hezbollah could not–and would not–operate this way if it didn’t rely on both the compassion of the West and its news cycle. Without these things, Hezbollah’s actions would be suicidal. But with these things, Hezbollah’s actions are effective.

So, what’s the solution? What should Israel–or any other country faced with such a dilemma–do when an enemy such as Hezbollah turns the tables on the compassionate West, and takes advantage of the compassion to get a twofer: launching rockets from civilian enclaves in Lebanon to directly target Israeli civilians, and then scoring a propaganda coup with the cooperation of the Western media when Israel retaliates and kills the Lebanese civilians?

And then imagine a similar question being asked when a nation such as Iran goes nuclear. The people of Iran will then be in the position of the women and children of Qana, first in line for retaliation if the mad mullahs decide to attack.

And what does Ariel Sharon have to say about it all?

The New Neo Posted on by

No, the title of this post isn’t some sort of joke. And, of course, Ariel Sharon has nothing whatsoever to say–nor (barring some extraordinary miracle) will he ever be saying anything again.

But in one of my many efforts at organizing my papers and tidying up in general, I recently found a stack of unread New Yorkers. I skimmed their “Contents” sections and threw them all out (actually, took them to the dump to recycle, like the environmentally concerned person that I am).

But in one of them, the January 23 and 30, 2006 issue, I found and read “The Samurai of Zionism,” a piece by Ari Shavit based on a series of interviews with Ariel Sharon over the last couple of years. Towards the end, Shavit quotes Sharon as having come to the following conclusions, which I reproduce here as food for thought in this particular crisis:

The conflict isn’t between us and the Palestinians. The conflict is between us and the Arab world. And the problem at the heart of the conflict is that the Arab world does not recognize the Jews’ inherent right to have a Jewish state in the land where the Jewish people began. This is the main problem. This also applies to Egypt, with which we have a cold peace. It also applies to Jordan, with which we have a very close strategic relationship, but this is a relationship between governments, not between peoples. The problem is not 1967. The problem is the profound nonrecognition by the Arab world of Israel’s birthright. The problem will not be solved by an agreement. It will not be solved by a speech. Anyone who promises that it’s possible to end the conflict within a year or two year or three is mistaken. Anyone who promises peace now is blind to the way things are. Even after the disengagement, we will not be able to rest on our laurels. We will not be able to sit under our fig tree and our vine….

The greatest danger is in signing some document and believing that as a result we will have peace. This is not going to happen…Instead, we have to build a process that will enable us to ascertain that indeed a change is taking place in the Arab world. It is necessary to teach all the teachers that Israel is a legitimate entity. And it is necessary to replace all the Palestinian textbooks. And this is beyond the elementary demand for the cessation of terror and the cessation of incitement and the implementation of reforms in the security organizations and the implementation of govermental reforms. It is necessary not to omit a single one of these steps. Under no circumstances should there be concessions. A situation must not develop in which Israel retreats and is chased by terror. Once you accept that, it will never end. Terror will keep chasing us.

Sobering words. I’m not sure he’s correct about everything–I still tend to believe that the population of Jordan, for example, is not set on the elimination of Israel.

But many of his points are spot on. And right now it’s more difficult than ever to see how the vision of the final paragraph could ever be implemented. And the phrase “a situation must not develop in which Israel retreats and is chased by terror” seem remarkably apropos to the current conflict.

I am reminded of an article I read back in my liberal Democrat days, during the early years of the 90s. I’ve searched for this article before, because I’d love to look at it again. I think it appeared in this very same periodical–the New Yorker–but I simply don’t know, and at this point I despair of ever finding it.

But nevertheless I remember the subject matter. The article appeared after Oslo, back when the peace process seemed to be going well and when many people, including myself, were hopeful that things were going in the right direction. The author had visited the areas under the control of the PLO and especially the schools, and what he (she?) found there was chilling beyond belief. The article described the teaching of a hatred so deep and so naked, a hatred involving not just Israelis but Jews in general, that my blood ran cold.

For days afterwards I had trouble shaking the conviction that, whatever we might think about the hope for progress that Oslo represented, when the generation that was being steeped and marinated in such hatred came of age in about ten years or less, something terrible would be happening, no matter what Israel tried to do, no matter how many concessions it made towards peace.

And events have certainly “progressed” that way. And not with just the Palestinians and even the Arab world, but the non-Arab government of Iran. We have in the Iranian leaders and Hezbollah, of course, an enemy that not only hates Israel and Jews, but that isn’t shy about saying so. And that enemy is playing to one of the oldest and deepest hatreds in the world–Jew-hatred–finding a harmonic resonance with all those who profess it, and using them for their own nefarious ends.

A surprise but not a surprise: shooting in Seattle

The New Neo Posted on by

A man opened fire at the Jewish Federation building in Seattle today, killing one woman and wounding four others. He identified himself as an “American Moslem,” and said he was upset about “what was going on in Israel.”

I assume he meant what was going on in Lebanon at the hands of Israel; I sincerely doubt that Katusha rockets raining on Haifa are his main concern.

The shooter was, according to the head of the FBI’s counterterrorism efforts in Seattle, an individual acting alone, with “nothing to indicate it’s terrorism related.”

I’m not sure why an individual acting out a political grudge and declaring himself clearly in such fashion wouldn’t be considered a terrorist, unless terrorism is, by definition, an organized group endeavor.

It’s no wonder that this happened. It’s a wonder it hasn’t happened more often. And in fact, Hezbollah itself has been connected to the worst incidents of attacks on Jewish institutions outside of the Middle East, the most flagrant being the 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires, which killed 100 people and wounded twice that many.

It’s been my understanding that, in the wake of 9/11, many synagogues in this country have quietly beefed up security. It only makes sense. Perhaps the Jewish Federation of Seattle, which is mainly a fund-raising organization, hadn’t seen the need to do so up till this point. My guess is that that will change.

Katushas and other VSBMs as emerging terrorist weapons

The New Neo Posted on by

This quotation has always made great sense to me:

With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter…

The quote came to mind once again when I was reading Daniel Henninger’s opinion piece in today’s Wall Street Journal.

The column is about Katusha and other very short-range ballistic missiles, or VSBMs. Ever since the current Lebanese war began, it’s been clear that these missiles are a force that Hezbollah has exploited, and I wanted to learn more about them.

According to Henninger, these missiles are emerging as an ideal weapon for terrorists at borders, and there is presently no defense against them. Ordinarily, some sort of state apparatus is required to operate VSBMs, but there are certainly enough rouge states these days, or state-allied terror forces such as Hezbollah, to qualify.

VSBMs are not governed by any existing export-control regime. Since terrorists not only don’t care if they kill civilians, but in fact desire to kill civilians, VSBMs don’t have to be “smart” to be effective. Theoretically, they could be fitted with chemical or biological agents as well, although there’s no indication that’s happening at present in Lebanon.

Unless Hezbollah decides to take up residence in Juarez, it doesn’t seem as though VSBMs pose any direct threat to the US. But they certainly pose an indirect one, through the vulnerability of allies such as Israel or South Korea. Previously, the threat was not considered great enough to warrant implementing a defense system against them (Israel, according to Henninger, nixed plans “to deploy Northrop Grumman’s THEL system, whose lasers routinely have shot down Katyushas at the Army’s White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico”). Now that this vacuum in defense has been exploited by Hezbollah, look for that to change.

And what of the quote that began this post? Henninger writes:

As Robert Kaplan pointed out in the Journal last week in his review of “Terrorists, Insurgents and Militias,” the biggest strategic problem today isn’t past notions of big-power miscalculation but new rogue regimes whose ideology means they “cannot be gratified through negotiations.”

That’s the sad truth that many cannot and do not want to hear. We are now in the situation of dealing with a number of unreasonable and inhumane regimes that are truly tyrannical–Iran being the leading one at the moment. Such regimes do not enter into negotiations in good faith. Reason and pleading are not going to work. Although it’s not altogether clear how to “give no quarter,” it is clear that, once such regimes are armed with the nuclear weapons they seek and crave, the consequences will be far worse.

Disarming Hezbollah: either way, the punishment is war

The New Neo Posted on by

The war in Lebanon has dominated the news, the blogosphere, and the thoughts of so many people, including myself.

The mind casts about for a solution. Indeed, there must be a solution right?

Some blame the usual targets, Israel and the US. The UN has come in for criticism as well, and rightly so. The government and people of Lebanon, who have failed to root out Hezbollah and in fact have often lauded it, bear some responsibility.

But there is little doubt in the minds of most thinking people that the lion’s share of the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the black-clad puppeteers behind the action, Iran, and their henchmen and disciples, Hezbollah, as well as their Syrian middlemen. The penetration of Hezbollah into so much of Lebanon has been a slow but steady one, and by now the entwinement is so thick and tangled that it’s hard to see how it can be undone without terrible destruction of innocent people, and the destabilization of the country. Some of this has already happened.

But the mind searches for solutions, because the possible outcomes are so dreadful to contemplate. This morning, while casting about for the views of others, I came across this piece by Michael Totten.

The peripatetic Totten was in Lebanon fairly recently, a long sojourn in which he reported on what he saw there. What’s his solution? Unfortunately, he doesn’t have one. What he offers is a certain perspective, and it’s not a comforting one.

Here’s Totten on the topic of disarming Hezbollah, describing what he saw in Lebanon a few months ago, when neither he nor anyone foresaw the exact course of events to follow:

Many Lebanese Christians, Sunnis, and Druze were getting so impatient with the impasse over Hezbollah’s weapons they threatened to reconstitute their own armed militias that were disbanded after the war. Peaceful and diplomatic negotiation over Hezbollah’s role in a sovereign rather than schismatic Lebanon was not going to last very much longer. Once the rest of Lebanon armed itself against Hezbollah, a balance of terror would reign that could explode into war without any warning. That was the danger. That was the nightmare. That’s why Hezbollah had not been disarmed…

Totten saw the peace in Lebanon at the time as an uneasy and temporary one. Despite whatever polls might have said about Lebanese support for Hezbollah, he saw the people as more frightened of its power than approving. Of course, we have no way of knowing how representative Totten’s informants were, or whether his impressions were skewed by seeing a small sample of the Lebanese people. But still, he was there, and did his best to learn what was really going on.

Now, Totten says that in the heat of this war the Lebanese are angry at the Israelis. Temporarily:

No one is running off to join Hezbollah, but tensions are being smoothed over for now while everyone feels they are under attack by the same enemy. Most Lebanese who had warm feelings for Israel — and there were more of these than you can possibly imagine — no longer do.

This will not last.

Totten makes a prediction about what will happen after. His “after” assumes (as I think it is correct to assume) that this particular episode, the hot war with Israel, will not end with the eradication of Hezbollah in Lebanon. He writes:

My sources and friends in Beirut tell me most Lebanese are going easy on Hezbollah as much as they can while the bombs are still falling. But a terrible reckoning awaits them once this is over.

Some Lebanese can’t wait even that long….

My friend Carine says the atomosphere reeks of impending sectarian conflict like never before. Another Lebanese blogger quotes a radical Christian war criminal from the bad old days who says the civil war will resume a month after Israel cools its guns: “Christians, Sunnis and Druze will fight the ‘fucker Shia’, with arms from the US and France.”

For those who want Hezbollah out of Lebanon, this may sound like a solution. Totten addresses this idea:

Israeli partisans may think this is terrific. The Lebanese may take care of Hezbollah at last! But democratic Lebanon cannot win a war against Hezbollah, not even after Hezbollah is weakened by IAF raids. Hezbollah is the most effective Arab fighting force in the world, and the Lebanese army is the weakest and most divided….

To Totten, Lebanon has been essentially powerless from the start. It had one of two choices: war or accommodation. Since the war against Hezbollah was unwinnable by the weak and divided Lebanon, it chose the latter.

But there’s no accomodation possible with a force such as Hezbollah. Know your enemy; accomodation only buys them time, I’m afraid.

And, in the end, Totten also seems to be saying this. He has great compassion for the dilemma the Lebanese people faced, and still face:

Israel and Lebanon (especially Lebanon) will continue to burn as long as Hezbollah exists as a terror miltia freed from the leash of the state. The punishment for taking on Hezbollah is war. The punishment for not taking on Hezbollah is war. Lebanese were doomed to suffer war no matter what. Their liberal democratic project could not withstand the threat from within and the assaults from the east, and it could not stave off another assault from the south. War, as it turned out, was inevitable even if the actual shape of it wasn’t.

The quote that struck me most forcibly was this, which bears repeating:

The punishment for taking on Hezbollah is war. The punishment for not taking on Hezbollah is war.

It immediately brought to mind a statement by Winston Churchill, he of the silver tongue, when speaking about a similar accomodation sought by the militarily weak British and French prior to WWII:

Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor. They chose dishonor. They will have war.

And please, spare yourself the trouble of informing me that the situation isn’t quite analogous. I know it’s not. But the similarity is this: sometimes what seems like a choice is no choice at all. When dealing with certain enemies bent on destruction and conquest, how can one avoid battle? Sooner or later, the conflagration will erupt. And is it better in the end for it to erupt sooner rather than later, when the enemy is stronger and more deeply entrenched?

The punishment for taking on Hitler was war. The punishment for not taking on Hitler was war. World War.

In the middle of all of this, into my head popped some lines by the ancient Persian (Persia=Iran) poet Omar Khayyam. Somehow they seem apropos to the feeling of futility and confusion, of powerful forces working in mysterious ways that can’t be foreseen.

Omar, a fatalist, didn’t believe very much in the ability of human beings to control their own destiny. He wrote, so long ago, that:

We are no other than a moving row
Of Magic Shadow-shapes that come and go
Round with the Sun-illumined Lantern held
In Midnight by the Master of the Show;

But helpless Pieces of the Game He plays
Upon this Chequer-board of Nights and Days;
Hither and thither moves, and checks, and slays,
And one by one back in the Closet lays.

I’m not ready to subscribe to the level of fatalism of Omar Khayyam. But it does seem right now that the people of Lebanon are “but helpless pieces” in a game being played–if not by the Master of the Show, then by the puppet masters of Iran.

And this verse of Khayyam’s, with its strangely prescient geography (“Naishapur,” Omar’s birthplace, is a city in what is now Iran; and “Babylon” is the ancient word for Iraq), seems apropos as well:

Whether at Naishapur or Babylon,
Whether the Cup with sweet or bitter run,
The Wine of Life keeps oozing drop by drop,
The Leaves of Life keep falling one by one.

The plot thickens, but does the fog of war thin?

The New Neo Posted on by

Today seems to be an all UN, all the time day.

Take a listen to an interview with retired Canadian Major General Lewis Mackenzie, here. Quote: “there’s an information war going on.” Indeed there is, and I’m afraid Hezbollah, with the cooperation of the UN, is winning.

Other quotes: the UN observer said that “Hezbollah fighters were all over his position.”

And, if this is true, why (as Canadian PM Harper asks) had the position not been evacuated by the UN weeks ago?

And then, take a look at this. I’m not sure about the provenance of the video, or who “Alan Peters” actually is, but things seem to be getting curiouser and curiouser.

What hath the UN wrought?

The New Neo Posted on by

I used to like the UN.

As a child growing up in New York City, I would visit there with my class and gaze at the snazzy modern architecture, and watch the General Assembly talk while listening to simultaneous translations on the seemingly-magical headsets.

My admiration wasn’t just for the esthetics, either. I knew about UNICEF, and the goal of eradicating smallpox–and of course, the UN was working towards peace. In fact, you may be surprised to learn that one of my very early childhood fantasies involved an image of myself as successful worldwide peacemaker, addressing the UN after some sort of diplomatic triumph I’d engineered that had averted a war.

That fantasy ended long ago. But my admiration for the UN lingered. Yet, over the decades, my disillusionment with the UN has grown. The Oil for Food scandal didn’t help; that was in the nature of a final straw in the breakdown of any admiration I ever had for the UN. And journalist Claudia Rosett was instrumental in covering that terrible instance of destructive UN corruption.

Now Rosett has written another article about the UN, this time about its role in fostering the conditions leading up to the current Lebanese crisis. I’ve linked to her article in an addendum to this previous post of mine, but I’ve decided it needed to be spotlighted even more.

The article describes how the UN has failed in its mission in Lebanon, allowing the conditions to develop that led directly to this war. Rosett makes the point that, for the six years since the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon, Hezbollah has been arming itself with weaponry that it is not supposed to possess, all under the auspices of the UN “peacekeepers”:

Over the past six years, Israel honored its commitment to peace. The U.N. ”” disproportionately ”” required in practice no such compliance on the Lebanese side of the border. The “peacekeepers” of the U.N. Interim Force in Lebanon, called UNIFIL, sat passively looking on, costing about $100 million a year and doing nothing to stop Hezbollah from trucking in weapons, digging tunnels, and running the armed protection rackets with which it has kept a grip on swathes of Lebanon, including the southern border with Israel, parts of the Bekaa, and southern Beirut.

Rosett goes on to list the biases UN officials have expressed since this war began (the article seems to have been written prior to the death of the UN obervers and Anna’s remarks on that, since it makes no mention of them). It makes sobering reading.

The other day I got into an argument with a friend about the UN. He agreed that it was flawed, but said that it’s our only hope for peace in the world. My answer to him at the time was that the institution has shown such corruption and bias that it cannot act as a force for peace at all, and that it’s a pipedream to think otherwise at this point.

A pipedream, and a dangerous one at that. I have become convinced that the UN and its officials are not just powerless to solve the problem, but that they are contributing to it. How? By their rather large pockets of corruption, by holding themselves out to be equal to tasks they are utterly incompetent to deal with, by their biased prononuncements, and by giving false hope to those who want to believe that problems are being dealt with when they are not. And, while all this happens, the conditions that contribute to wars are allowed to grow and to fester, all under the auspices of the UN, supposed force for peace.

Those infallible Israelis: through the fog of war, Annan jumps the gun

The New Neo Posted on by

The killing of the four UN observers in Lebanon is a tragic and regrettable event, to be sure. But it’s the sort of event that occurs with some regularity in war, and is one of the many reasons why war is universally regarded as a very bad thing–although not always the worst of things.

The expression “the fog of war” is a cliché for a reason, and that’s because it’s a useful and descriptive term for the confusion that inevitably occurs on all sides in a war–for the commanders, the fighting forces, the civilians, the obervers, and the commentators.

When events such as the shelling of the UN post, and the resultant deaths of the UN personnel, occur–and occur they will, almost without fail, in every hot war, no matter how careful the military might be–each side makes statements about what has happened. It’s understood that all such statements are preliminary. An investigation can help dispel the fog, but only imperfectly, and only over time.

In this instance Israel has said that this was a tragic accident–no surprise there. One would also imagine that the UN–an institution at least theoretically dedicated to damping down conflicts, judicious restraint, withholding judgment until all the facts are in–would avoid making premature statements about what happened and what Israel intended.

But in this case, the UN is also the injured party, which makes the fog even thicker. And Kofi Annan’s response has been to interpret this action in the worst light for Israel. At the same time that Annan said he is “trying to get the details” of the attack (a reasonable response), he also called it an “apparently deliberate targeting” on the part of Israel.

It seems clear to me that the latter statement is so excessively inflammatory that it should never have been uttered by any UN official in the absence of strong and incontrovertible evidence that it was true.

So, what gives? Annan was clearly upset by the deaths–as well he might be. In moments of strong emotion, people often let words slip out that would otherwise–and should otherwise–have remained unsaid. And in those moments, people often reveals their biases. However, none of this is the sort of behavior the Secretary General of the UN should display.

It’s not as though Annan’s biases–or those of the UN–were hidden prior to this, though. Case in point: this article, written by Alan Dershowitz on July 20 (prior to the deaths of the UN observers), lists some examples for Annan. And anyone familiar with the history of the UN and Israel since the 1970s knows the sad story there (see also this).

What happened at that UN outpost, and why? I don’t pretend to know. If this report is true–and I have no reason at the moment to think it isn’t–the fog of war must have been unusually thick at the time, allowing some sort of total breakdown of communication that led to the incident.

But, as Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor has said, the accusation that Israel would have deliberately targeted UN officials simply makes no sense:

“Why on earth would we deliberately target U.N. observers?” he asked. “What good would that do either on the military or the political level, because it so obvious that this would be harmful. Of course it is a tragedy for the observers and their bereaved families and we truly share their sorrow and we deeply regret the incident. It was obviously a fatal mistake.

Palmor has said it’s obvious that the accusation makes no sense “on the military or political level,” and I agree. So where does the accusation come from? The charges do make sense in one way, and that is on the emotional level of those making the accusation.

To those who are predisposed to believe that Israel and Israelis are not demonic Nazis, but merely citizens of a country that’s been fighting for its very existence ever since the beginning of that existence, it would seem obvious that this was an error rather than a top-down policy of the Israeli government. But it’s not obvious at all to those who have bought their own rhetoric about Israeli evil.

Those who believe that this was a case of deliberate targeting of UN personnel are not only operating under the supposition of Israeli evil intent, but of Israeli infallibility. The latter two characteristics–evil coupled with genius, as in “evil genius”–have been part and parcel of anti-Semitic thought for centuries. Now that type of thinking has been transferred to those who demonize Israel.

Israel–unlike its enemies–attempts to be a country that fights wars in a relatively humane way. It tries to avoid killing civilians; it does not deliberately target them. This, of course, is in contrast to its enemies, whose main stock in trade is to deliberately target civilians–both Israel’s and its own. And that is no secret; it is obvious and up-front. The enemy targets Israeli civilians directly by methods such as suicide bombing in pizza parlors and restaurants, as well as firing unguided Katusha rockets into Israeli cities. And it targets its own civilians by hiding weaponry and “insurgents” among the civilian population (see this for a discussion).

Israeli weaponry (like that of the US) has developed a remarkable degree of sophistication. In an effort to kill only the guilty, amazing advances have been made. Smart weaponry and good intelligence cannot, however, be infallible, and they can never dispel the fog of war entirely, nor protect innocent civilians (or UN obervers, or reporters), who will always remain at risk.

It is paradoxical, then, that those very advances in “smart” weaponry–and the intent behind those advances, which is the desire to avoid civilian casualties as much as possible–have backfired. Because Israeli attacks are targeted as opposed to indiscriminate, the Israelis are somehow assumed to be omniscient and omnipotent in this regard. And this, combined with the idea that they have evil intent, gives rise to statements such as Annan’s.

[ADDENDUM: Belmont Club offers his usual detailed and knowledgeable analysis of the situation. A must-read.

See also, this: Claudia Rosett on how the UN has grievously mishandled the Lebanese situation since the 2000 Israeli withdrawal from that country. Strong stuff.]

The dump and the lost and the found

The New Neo Posted on by

Yesterday I went to the town dump.

I live in a town where–despite fairly hefty property taxes–we don’t have garbage collection. I’m not sure why, but my guess is that there’s some sort of ethos here that garbage isn’t esthetically pleasing enough; all those cans and bags by the road tend to spoil the bucolic charm. And the town dump is supposedly a happy place where everyone meets and greets, although I can’t say I’ve seen too much of that. Also, I hear tell that the richer among us (that’s not me!) hire private garbage collectors to do their dirty work for them.

Even though I’ve lived in New England for most of my adult life, this was the first place I’d ever resided in that didn’t have garbage pickup. At first I was a bit miffed–after all, what were those high property taxes all about? I don’t have kids any more in the school system, even though I see the need to support it–so I figured I should at least be getting garbage collection for my pains.

But now I’m used to the rhythm of my visits to the dump. If I’ve had guests and the garbage piles up faster and it’s hot out, I can make more frequent visits. It’s vaguely relaxing and mindless work, sorting things out; and I also enjoy the sense of making a clean sweep and a fresh start every time I return home and see those momentarily empty recycling bins of mine.

At the dump there’s a complex system of carefully labeled containers, telling us what goes in where and what doesn’t go in where, with so Byzantine a set of rules that an attorney might be of assistance in deciphering them (and perhaps dump law is a new legal specialty, for all I know). There’s an area where you can bring the sort of waste that’s good for compost, which they then make and sell to raise money; and there’s a huge pile of brush and one of scrap and one of concrete and one of batteries and one of–well, you get the idea.

And the dump has a few more perks. There’s a Goodwill bin that I visit regularly in an attempt to simplify my life. And then there’s the car vacuum machine.

And here I have a confession to make–I sometimes procrastinate at the task of cleaning my car. Yes, I do; indeed I do. But going to the dump and passing by that large suction hose reminds me to look down and notice that, now that mud season is over and it’s truly summer, there’s a lot of debris in my car that could use some getting rid of.

Vacuuming the car is one of the most satisfying tasks of all. First, I clear out all the odd papers and place them in a bag, to be sorted out when I get home. This requires moving the seats and crawling down under them to find the wealth of paper that has somehow, unbeknownst to me, found its way there. Then, put the coins in the machine (four quarters these days, and I’ve found it accepts Canadian!) and off to the races.

Because the vacuum is timed, there’s a sense of urgency to beat the clock, a nice game to play. Floors, cushions, little cracks in between this and that, even the trunk; can I fit it all in? Yes and yes and yes.

And now the inside of my car looks, if not new, certainly newer.

Afterwards, though, sorting out the papers at home (most of them worthless scrap), I found a stamped envelope addressed to the state but unmailed. Not good. I had the sinking feeling that I knew what it was and, opening it, discovered that I was correct.

Speaking of property taxes–inside was a note I’d written three weeks ago that was part of the process of applying for a partial property tax refund that I seem to be entitled to. It was supposed to have arrived at the state office by July 15. I’d filled it out and sealed it and stamped it and put it in the car as I do with all my mail, but somehow it had slipped under the seat and not been posted with all its fellows. And I never noticed till now.

I called the state office involved, and the woman I spoke with suggested I send it to them with a note of explanation. I have no idea whether I’ll still get that rebate I’d been counting on and very much looking forward to, though.

The moral[s] of the story: go to the dump more often? Clean out your car more often? Quit your complaining? Be more careful? Don’t sweat the small stuff? All will be well in the end? The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley? There’s no way to beat death and taxes, even if you try? Mama said there’d be days like this? There’s no business like show business?

At any rate, it’s a nice respite from talking about war all the time.