Though Israel is dissembling now, Gillerman spoke the truth then. No sooner had Hezbollah taken the two Israeli soldiers hostage than Israel unleashed an air war — on Lebanon. The Beirut airport was bombed, its fuel storage tanks set ablaze. The coast was blockaded. Power plants, gas stations, lighthouses, bridges, roads, trucks and buses were all hit with air strikes.
Within 48 hours, it was apparent Israel was exploiting Hezbollah’s attack to execute a preconceived military plan to destroy Lebanon — i.e, the collective punishment of a people and nation for the crimes of a renegade militia they could not control. It was the moral equivalent of a municipal police going berserk, shooting, killing and ravaging an African-American community, because Black Panthers had ambushed and killed cops.
If Israel is not in violation of the principle of proportionality, by which Christians are to judge the conduct of a just war, what can that term mean? There are 600 civilian dead in Lebanon, 19 in Israel, a ratio of 30-1, though Hezbollah is firing unguided rockets, while Israel is using precision-guided munitions.
Thousands of Lebanese civilians are injured. Perhaps 800,000 are homeless.
Yet, whatever one thinks of the morality of what Israel is doing, the stupidity is paralyzing. Instead of maintaining the moral and political high ground it had — when even Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan were condemning Hezbollah, and privately hoping Israel would inflict a humiliating defeat on Nasrallah — Israel launched an air war on an innocent people. Now, 87 percent of Lebanese back Hezbollah, and the entire Arab and Islamic world, Shia and Sunni alike, is rallying behind Nasrallah. ~Pat Buchanan
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August 2nd, 2006 at 7:44 am
jsinger008
Buchanan makes a number of assumptions that seem strange to this admittedly pro-Israel reader. The first is that Israel launched an “air war on Lebanon” and they were executing a “preconceived military plan to destroy Lebanon”. Whatever you think of Israel’s strategy, they deliberately targeted certain elements of Lebanon’s infrastructure because they believed these elements contributed to the supply of Hezbollah. Pat makes it sound like they bombed everything they could, willy-nilly. On its face, whatever you think of the current destruction, this is just wrong — Israel could have killed thousands and/or destroyed billions more in infrastructure if they really wanted to “destroy” Lebanon. In fact, why should Israel bother to warn civilians they planned on attacking if they want to kill as many Lebanese as possible. Why the hyperbole from Pat when describing what Israel is trying to accomplish?
Second assumption from Pat, that cuts to the core of the problem, is that Lebanon “could not control” Hezbollah’s militia. I read this from many of those sympathetic to the plight of the Lebanese, but where is the evidence for this claim? Did Lebanon’s army ever try to disarm Hezbollah’s militia, as they were required to do when Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon? Did they ever try and police the southern region as Hezbollah launched almost daily rocket attacks on Israel’s northern towns/cities before the cross-border raid?
Then there is the ugly metaphor Pat uses to compare Israel to a rampaging angry police force inflicting as much violence as possible against innocent civilians. Suffice it to say that an “African-American community” is not responsible for policing itself and/or hunting down terrorists hiding amidst its people. That is the job of the police and/or national army and it is not at all clear to me that Lebanon’s government over the past six years tried in any meaningful way to actually disarm Hezbollah.
Finally, why does Pat only refer to the “air war” when he knows that Israel followed their aerial bombing with a ground invasion to “inflict a humiliating defeat on Nasrallah”. Again, whether right or wrong, clearly Israel felt that in order to achieve this Pat Buchanan-approved strategic goal, they wanted to cut off Hezbollah’s support from Syria/Iran and other parts of Lebanon. And while it is true the governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan “condemned” Hezbollah, there is not one shred of evidence that their people and the wider Islamic world wasn’t sympathetic to Hezbollah’s supposed resistance to the hated Zionist state from the get go.
The real problem in the region is that the Arabs, Persians, and to a lesser extent the wider Islamic world hates the fact that Israel exists.