July 14, 2006

Proportional Response


10 comments:

  1. yeah, remember when i was defending israel earlier this year?

    oops.

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  2. Anonymous7:44 PM

    what's wrong with blowing up Hizbollah targets? From what I've been able to tell, Israel is basically trying to complete isolate and destroy a terrorist organization. How is this bad?

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  3. This is the CNN summary of the events for this month (so far):

    July 2006: Hezbollah militants cross into Israel, kill three Israeli soldiers and kidnap two others in a bid to negotiate a prisoner exchange, a demand rebuffed by Israel. Another five Israeli soldiers are killed after the ambush. Israel responds with a naval blockade and by bombing hundreds of targets in Lebanon, including Beirut's airport and Hezbollah's headquarters in southern Beirut. Hezbollah responds with rocket attacks targeting northern Israeli cities. Fighting leaves dozens of Lebanese civilians dead and coincides with a two-week-old Israeli military campaign in Gaza in response to the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier by Palestinian militants. [emphasis added]

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  4. If you click on the picture it opens up a nice NYT graphic on the events...
    But, of course, nothing is technically wrong with attacking terrorists (I mean, intel is always a better way to undermine terrorist operations than indiscriminate or poorly informed missile attacks that exacerbate the very tensions that produce terrorists in the first place), but my problem isn't with them responding to the kidnappings. Its with the disproportionality/WorldWar3provoking insanity of it

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  5. Anonymous2:18 PM

    Yeah, big motherfucking oops. Seal admits an error!

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  6. Anonymous4:54 PM

    Yeah. God forbid a country respond to an internationally accepted act of war (killing and kidnapping soldiers), with you know, war.

    Proportional responses don't win wars. Nor does dying for ones country. To win a war you make the other poor bastards die for their country.

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  7. Platitudes and generalizations don't win wars either. How stupid do you have to be to reduce an incredibly complex scenario like this to "make them die for their country?"

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  8. Anonymous12:32 PM

    How stupid do you have to be to not recognize an obvious paraphrase from one of the great movies of all-time, Patton.

    But more to the point, I have no problem with Israel's response. We should've taken the leash off the IDF years ago.

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  9. Patton is just one of those movies I've meant to watch but never gotten around to. Like Soulplane.
    Anyway, sure, we can take the leash off of IDF, or even better, we could kill every Palestinian, Syrian, you know, just annihilate everyone in a 200 mile circle around Israel's borders. It still wouldn't solve the problem of the Arab world detesting Israel and, come to think of it, might even make things worse.
    On the other hand, if you can neutralize terrorist groups within countries (because remember how civilian casualties don't kill/stop terrorists?), you might actually have a shot at a solution that doesn't kill everyone in the long run.

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  10. Anonymous12:41 PM

    So this blog is liberal again now? I guess Seal's relative silence has toned down the reactionary content.

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