Lebanese Politician Assassinated

Another anti-Syrian Lebanese politician has been assassinated:

A bomb rocked a Christian suburb east of the Lebanese capital today, killing an anti-Syrian lawmaker and six other people, security officials said.

Antoine Ghanem is the eighth prominent anti-Syrian figure assassinated since 2005.

Ghanem, 64, a member of the right-wing Christian Phalange Party, was targeted by the bomb, said the officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media.

The Voice of Lebanon radio station, which is owned by the Phalange party, confirmed Ghanem's death. The identities of the others killed were not immediately known.

The assassinations of anti-Syrian figures began with former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was killed in a massive car bombing in February 2005. Syria's opponents in Lebanon have accused Damascus of being behind the killings, a claim Syria denies.

His death sparked massive protests that helped bring an end to Syria's nearly 30-year domination of Lebanon. Damascus was forced to withdraw its troops from Lebanon in 2005, and a government led by anti-Syrian politicians was elected.

Since then, the government of U.S.-backed Prime Minister Fuad Saniora has been locked in a power struggle with the opposition, led by Syria's ally Hezbollah. Government supporters have accused Syria of seeking to end Saniora's slim majority in parliament by killing off lawmakers in his coalition.

After the assassination of Parliament member Walid Eido in June, many majority legislators spent the summer abroad for security reasons. Others who stayed took extra precautions.

Kidnappings Pre-text for War

I had always thought that the attacks on Hezbollah and Lebanon last summer were the result of an over-emotional reaction to Hezbollah's provocations following similar attacks by Hamas shortly before. I appear to have been wrong about that (via War & Piece):

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the Winograd Commission that his decision to respond to the abduction of soldiers with a broad military operation was made as early as March 2006, four months before last summer's Lebanon war broke out.

In his testimony, Olmert claimed he had held more meetings on the situation in Lebanon than any of his recent predecessors. The first meeting was held on January 8, 2006, four days after Olmert was called to take the place of Ariel Sharon, who had fallen into a coma.

Further meetings were held in March, April, May and July, after Corporal Gilad Shalit was abducted to the Gaza Strip.

The day before he appeared before the commission, Major General Gadi Shamni, Olmert's military secretary, presented its members with the schedule of the meetings on Lebanon.

The scenario presented in the various assessments reflected prior incidents: the abduction of soldiers from Israeli territory accompanied by heavy cross-border shelling. Then-chief of staff Dan Halutz said such an incident would have far-reaching consequences for Israel's deterrent capability. Halutz said Israel could not show restraint in the face of a kidnapping in the north, and it had to respond. Olmert testified that he accepted this stance.

Perhaps they are now wishing for a do-over.

Cluster Bombs in Lebanon

I've already discussed David Bernstein's contention that civilian casualties in the Lebanon war last summer were considerably lower than originally thought, a result that-"if true"-he finds to be "unprecedented in modern warfare." However, reading articles such as this one, it is difficult to argue that the IDF did not operate with a high degree of recklessness and disregard for civilian casualties during the offensive:

The US State Department said last week that Israel "likely could have" misused American-supplied cluster bombs by peppering civilian areas from which, Israel says, Hizbullah was operating. Similar Israeli usage in 1982 led to a six-year ban of US sales of the controversial weapon, though analysts do not expect such a sanction of the US ally today.

But as UN-organized demining teams toil across olive groves and tobacco farms to destroy what they call an "unprecedented" concentration of the controversial cluster bombs here, the casualties continue to mount.

The Zayoun family alone accounts for three of a postwar Lebanese toll that today stands at 184 wounded and 30 dead.

Father Mohammed blames himself for picking up the small metal cylinder and putting it in his bag while cutting thyme in a field that had been marked with red and white warning tape.

Just after nightfall, with the house lit only by a few candles, his 4-year-old daughter Aya Zayoun found the cluster bomb in her father's bag outside. She took it inside to the living room and handed it to her older sister, Rasha, who thought it was a toy bell.

Then it exploded.

It cannot be argued that these casualties were not a direct result of the summer war even though they occurred place months later. It is also difficult to argue that the IDF acted with great restraint when they deliberately bombed civilian populated areas with such munitions. I do not argue that they did so as part of a campaign to depopulate southern Lebanon. However, their disregard for the effects of these weapons on civilians does not at all comport with an "unprecedented" effort to avoid civilians casualties.

Casualties in the Lebanon War

Not unsurprisingly, there is still considerable debate about the number of civilian fatalities resulting from Israel's bombing campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon last summer. Unfortunately it is simply not possible to come up with a definitive number of civilians killed in the campaign. But a lack of definitive numbers does not support the contention that David Bernstein at Volokh Conspiracy puts forth (which I post nearly in full because of it's brevity):

During the Lebanon War last Summer, and ever since, just about every media source has reported that "most" (sometimes "the vast majority") of the 1,200 people killed in Lebanon during the Hezbollah-Israel war were civilians. At the time, I pointed out that reporters actually had no way of knowing this, and that their sources--Hezbollah and the Lebanese government--had the incentive to inflate civilian casualties and (especially with regard to Hezbollah) downplay terrorist casualties.

My GMU colleague Peter Berkowitz notes in a completely different context (i.e., not discussing the media at all) that Israeli military analysts believe that 750 Hezbollah fighters were killed in the war. That figure is consistent with analyses I've read in various Israeli media outlets, in all cases just discussing the successes and failures of the war, not indulging in media criticism.

If Israeli military and intelligence estimates are correct, a slew of corrections is in order. Moreover, it's an extraordinary achievement by the Israeli military: if indeed Israel managed to battle a non-uniformed force hiding in civilian urban areas for a month, with an extremely supportive civilian population, with this low a military-civilian casualty ration, I believe this would be unprecedented in modern warfare. Quite a difference from the (as yet unretracted?) claims of the Juan Coles of the world that Israel was intentionally terrorizing the civilian population the better to permanently depopulate southern Lebanon, not to mention the Amnesty and Human Rights Watch claims of massive war crimes by Israel.

This is the entirety of the supporting text that Bernstein is linking to in his post:

Third, Israel killed roughly a third of Hezbollah's fighting force, about 750 out of a 2,000 to 3,000-man army (while 119 Israeli soldiers were killed).

Bernstein fails to link to anlyses that he's read which support this figure, which is unfortunate. Not because I don't believe that he's read any such thing, but because I would like to read those analyses for myself. Bernstein seems to accept matter-of-fact that the Israeli figures are correct. In fact he seems to be saying that only the Israeli figures can be correct, and that Lebanese, U.N., or figures of independent human rights organizations (most of which support a total casualty figure-including combatants-of about 1200) cannot be trusted. Clearly there is a disparity of numbers, but Bernstein leaves it up to me to go out and find the Israeli sources that support a figure of 750 Hezbollah fighters killed.

Bernstein also appears to imply that only the number of fighters killed can be questioned, and not the total of those killed in the war, civilian or combatant. Is it not at least possible that more fighters were killed than acknowledged by Lebanese authorities or Hezbollah, and yet the same number of civlians were also killed, raising the casualty figures in total? That possibility goes unmentioned. And without reading the original analyses that he's referring to, it's difficult to know if such an accounting is a possibility.

His call for a "slew of corrections" is absurdly premature. The entire following paragraph is premised on a single word, "if." Bernstein himself has offered no evidence that the civilian casualty figures are incorrect, only some evidence (possibly subject to bias, as all evidence can be) that more fighters were killed than Hezbollah claimed, which I've already stated does not necessarily undermine civilian casualty figures. Second, regardless of the total number of civilians killed, it is inarguable that the IDF was at least grossly negligent in attacking some civilian targets. In fact they were so negligent in some instances that it may be presumed that they intended to carry out such attacks without concern for the consequences for civilians. This includes mutiple attacks on convoys of civilians fleeing bombed cities in southern Lebanon, or deliberate attacks on civilian vehicles attempting to provide medical services or aid to wounded civilians, just to name two examples.

I for one do not know if Israel was attempting to "terrorize" the civilian population in an effort to depopulate southern Lebanon. But regardless of their intent, that appears to have been the effect, as nearly 1 million Lebanese were driven north from the zone of the fighting.

No "slew of corrections" or retractions is in order. Rather, this appears to be an instance of someone reading something they want very much to believe, and attempting to wield it against those who disagree not realizing exactly how ephemeral a rhetorical weapon it is they wield.

Cease-Fire in Lebanon

Although sparse fighting between the IDF and Hezbollah fighters continues, a cease-fire has largely gone into effect in southern Lebanon, and civilians are returning home:

Hundreds of thousands of displaced Lebanese families streamed homeward toward their devastated villages as soon as the shooting stopped Monday, navigating around destroyed bridges, fording the Litani River and creating monster traffic jams on bomb-pocked roads leading south along the Mediterranean.

After 33 days of warfare between Israel and the Hezbollah militia, the trip home to southern Lebanon confronted many with a trail of destruction, village after village wrecked by Israeli warplanes hunting the Hezbollah fighters who had fired rockets into Israel until the last minute before a U.N. cease-fire took hold at 8 a.m.

Hezbollah claims that they are the victors after a month of fighting Israeli forces:

In Beirut, Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, in a televised speech, declared, "On this day, we find ourselves looking at a historic and strategic victory for Lebanon, the resistance and the nation, the entire nation." Celebratory gunfire broke out and fireworks rose into the sky over Beirut, where Hezbollah staged a noisy victory parade through the center of the city.

In Khiam, Lebanon:

There was no gunfire in the air, no chants, no jubilant displays of celebration. There were, rather, the satisfied expressions of survival. Men embraced, kissing each other's cheeks, some emerging into sunlight for the first time in weeks. Cellphones, in almost everyone's hand, rang with queries of others' whereabouts, the fate of houses and the reality of a cease-fire that still seemed fragile. They smiled. "Thank God for your safety" was the refrain.

And Hussein Kalash, burly, hard and confident, offered three words that defined the war for Khiam's defenders, the Hezbollah fighters.

"We're still here," he said.

Far from claiming victory, Israelis-though relieved that rockets are no longer falling from the skies-are nonetheless frustrated with the outcome:

"There have been failings and shortcomings," Olmert, with deep circles under his eyes and a haggard look on his face, told a special session of the Israeli parliament. "We need to examine ourselves in all aspects and all areas. We will not sweep anything under the table, we will not hide anything. We must ensure that next time things will be done better."

...The statements came as Binyamin Netanyahu, an opposition leader and former prime minister, described a "national soul-searching" over risks "threatening our very existence."

On Monday, Yaron Ezrahi, a Hebrew University professor and one of the country's leading political analysts, echoed Netanyahu's assessment, saying, "There's a collective soul-searching in the army, in the government and in other parts of society."

Israel's sober assessment of the outcome is of course not preventing President Bush from proclaiming victory over Hezbollah, grossly over-simplifying the situation, conflating the struggle with our own "war on terror", and once again using the "war on terror" for political gain:

President Bush asserted yesterday that Hezbollah was defeated in its month-long conflict with Israel, casting the fighting that killed hundreds of Lebanese and Israeli civilians as part of a wider struggle "between freedom and terrorism."

Speaking to reporters at the State Department, Bush brushed aside suggestions that the United States was slow to respond to the crisis in Lebanon or that the war had resulted in anything less than a clear defeat for Hezbollah.

..."Forces of terror see the changes that are taking place in their midst. They understand that the advance of liberty, the freedom to worship, the freedom to dissent, and the protection of human rights would be a defeat for their hateful ideology," Bush said. "But they also know that young democracies are fragile and that this may be their last and best opportunity to stop freedom's advance and steer newly free nations to the path of radical extremism."

Such a ridiculous assessment, which makes no distinction between Hezbollah and the unique circumstances that created the conflict in Lebanon and our own struggle with Al-Qaeda affiliated groups, indicates that our own White House continues to buy into such a worldview. And there are no doubt many on the right who buy into it as well, but George Will proves in his column today that to be a conservatives doesn't mean one has to be lacking in common sense, and his column is worth quoting at length:

Cooperation between Pakistani and British law enforcement (the British draw upon useful experience combating IRA terrorism) has validated John Kerry's belief (as paraphrased by the New York Times Magazine of Oct. 10, 2004) that "many of the interdiction tactics that cripple drug lords, including governments working jointly to share intelligence, patrol borders and force banks to identify suspicious customers, can also be some of the most useful tools in the war on terror." In a candidates' debate in South Carolina (Jan. 29, 2004), Kerry said that although the war on terror will be "occasionally military," it is "primarily an intelligence and law enforcement operation that requires cooperation around the world."

Immediately after the London plot was disrupted, a "senior administration official," insisting on anonymity for his or her splenetic words, denied the obvious, that Kerry had a point. The official told The Weekly Standard:

"The idea that the jihadists would all be peaceful, warm, lovable, God-fearing people if it weren't for U.S. policies strikes me as not a valid idea. [Democrats] do not have the understanding or the commitment to take on these forces. It's like John Kerry. The law enforcement approach doesn't work."

This farrago of caricature and non sequitur makes the administration seem eager to repel all but the delusional. But perhaps such rhetoric reflects the intellectual contortions required to sustain the illusion that the war in Iraq is central to the war on terrorism, and that the war, unlike "the law enforcement approach," does "work."

The official is correct that it is wrong "to think that somehow we are responsible -- that the actions of the jihadists are justified by U.S. policies." But few outside the fog of paranoia that is the blogosphere think like that. It is more dismaying that someone at the center of government considers it clever to talk like that. It is the language of foreign policy -- and domestic politics -- unrealism.

Foreign policy "realists" considered Middle East stability the goal. The realists' critics, who regard realism as reprehensibly unambitious, considered stability the problem. That problem has been solved.

Of course Kerry was right, because what he said, and what Will repeats, is obviously true. Battling terrorism is without a doubt primarily a law enforcement function, and the military should step in when the task is beyond the ability of law enforcement (such as the removal of a hostile regime that tolerates or aids terrorists that threaten us, such as the Taliban.) Only in the Bush administration, with it's rhetoric of "freedom", it's conflating the "war on terror" with a life or death struggle against Islamic fundamentalism, the neo-cons love of the use of force to solve foreign policy dilemmas, it's unwillingness to admit to error, and a constant eye on what will get Republicans re-elected, would such an obvious truth be rejected out of hand.

In the sphere of foreign policy there is room for debate between conservatives and liberals, between "realists", "interventionists" and "isolationists", etc., etc. But there is precious little room for debate about what does and does not work at advancing the interests of our country. Our actions either do or do not better our position in the world. Supporting and aiding a ground offensive and bombing campaign against Hezbollah that killed hundreds of civilians, left Hezbollah degraded but in a position to claim victory, left the Israelis frustrated and dissatisfied, and angered the Arab world against us, all as part of some sort of proxy war with Iran or as part of the larger "struggle" against terrorism, unquestionably did not work. This tried-and-true rhetoric about freedom and the unbelievable claiming of a victory over Hezbollah, is all merely an effort to disguise the obvious from American voters thinking about how they're going to vote in November, proving yet again that the foreign policy approach of this administration is a convenient mixture of the neo-cons beyond unrealistic hawkishness and a desire to do whatever it takes to get a vote.

Lebanon Round-up/Extent of Civilian Casualties

The campaign in Lebanon, now in it's third week, still seems nowhere near an end as Israeli forces begin to intensify the airstrikes and Hezbollah threatens to launch rockets on Tel Aviv:

Israeli warplanes pounded targets across Lebanon Friday, hitting a farm produce warehouse near the Syrian border, several bridges north of Beirut and houses in southern Lebanon in airstrikes that left dozens of people dead or buried under rubble.

The Shiite Muslim militant group Hezbollah, meanwhile, fired nearly 200 rockets into northern Israel, killing three Israeli civilians and injuring eight others, police said. The Israeli military reported three Israeli soldiers killed and two wounded in ground fighting with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon Friday.

Israeli forces are not only intensifying the scale of the attacks, but expanding the extent as well:

Israel unleashed airstrikes across Lebanon Friday, severing the last major road link to the outside world and killing more than 30 people.

The bombs destroyed four bridges along the main north-south highway in what had been the largely untouched Christian heartland north of Beirut and far from Hezbollah territory. With the road from Beirut to Damascus already cut at several points, this was the only practical way to bring in relief and other supplies from Syria, tightening the sense of siege here.

Israeli forces also appear poised to extend the security zone in southern Lebanon, beyond what they occupied after the 1982 invasion (via Kevin Drum):

Such an operation would extend Israel's control past the security zone it held until the withdrawal of its troops in May 2000. For now, the cabinet has approved the creation of a buffer zone some eight kilometers inside Lebanon which Olmert wants the military to control until an international peacekeeping force can be deployed in the area.

This will not prevent Hezbollah from launching rockets into Israel, but Israel hopes that it will weaken Hezbollah's base of operations and asserts that they are creating a buffer zone in which any international peace-keeping force can operate.

World opinion continues to support calls for an immediate cease-fire while Arab opinion around the Middle East and in Iraq turns harshly against Israel and us:

Throngs of Shiite men, most clad in white burial shrouds that symbolized their willingness to die, gathered in the northeast Baghdad slum known as Sadr City and marched toward the center of the capital, chanting "Death to Israel" and "Death to America." Marchers waved the yellow flag of Hezbollah and the red-and-green flag of Lebanon, while occasionally pausing to desecrate the Israeli flag.

Finally, via praktike at American Footprints, Zbigniew Brzynzski, in a briefing on July 26th, gives us some perspective (pdf) on the civilian casualties in Lebanon:

By way of reference, let me simply remind you of the fact that NATO waged a 78-day-long aerial campaign against Serbia, the purpose of which was to force Serbia out of Kosovo by imposing serious costs on Serbia focusing of course on infrastructure, but in the process also producing what is sometimes euphemistically called collateral damage.

NATO admitted up to 30 incidents involving civilian casualties that were unintended. Human Rights Watch conducted a very extensive investigation after the end of the hostilities and discovered that this was an underestimate, that in fact a number of civilian incidents were larger. Human Rights Watch visited 91 sites, cities, towns, and villages that were exposed to NATO bombing, and located at least 42 sites in which there were civilian casualties.

And after 78 days of bombing, approximately 500 casualties were identified. That is roughly five-times higher than the rate of civilian casualties inflicted so far in Lebanon and in Gaza by the ongoing campaign, for the hostilities in Lebanon and Gazahave now lasted two weeks roughly. The Serbian hostilities lasted 11 weeks. This suggests that perhaps some of the casualties were the result of excessive use of force or not closely supervised use of force, and that has political costs.

And Daniel at Crooked Timber has an excellent discussion regarding the recent report by Human Rights Watch (pdf) and whether some of the airstrikes carried about by Israeli forces could be characterized as war crimes:

My summary of the report’s conclusions would be that the proposition that the IDF “takes the utmost care to minimise civilian casualties” has been falsified to a high degree of certainty, and even the weaker claim that the IDF does not intentionally target civilians looks a lot less certain than one would previously have believed. The attacks on infrastructure such as the LibanLait dairy look not at all like legitimate attempts to shut down Hezbollah and very much like attempts to intimidate the Lebanese population; unless we are prepared to postulate a truly colossal series of blunders, it looks very bad indeed.

The report by HRW says as much:

Statements from Israeli government officials and military leaders suggest that, at the very least, the IDF has blurred the distinction between civilian and combatant, and is willing to strike at targets it considers even vaguely related to the latter. At worst, it considers all people in the area of hostilities open to attack.

On July 17th, for example, after IDF strikes on Beirut, the commander of the Israeli Air Force, Eliezer Shkedi, said, "in the center of Beirut there is an area which only terrorists enter into." The next day, the IDF deputy chief of staff, Moshe Kaplinski, when talking about the IDF's destruction of Beirut's Dahia neighborhood, said, "the hits were devastating, and this area, which was a Hezbollah symbol, became deserted rubble."

On July 27th, Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon said that the Israeli air force should flatten villages before ground troops move in to prevent casualties among Israeli soldiers fighting Hezbollah. Israel had given civilians ample time to leave southern Lebanon, he claimed, and therefore anyone remaining should be considered a supporter of Hezbollah. "All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are in some way related to Hezbollah," he said.

This is what Israeli commanders and leaders have said themselves, indicating that they have been somewhat less than precise in distinguishing between civilians and combatants.

Again and again, those who support the bombing campaign in its present ferocity trot out the line that Hezbollah fighters hide themselves and their supplies among civilians, thus inviting attacks on those civilians. This is true (and this is also a war crime, as Daniel points out in this post at Crooked Timber), and it has resulted in the deaths of many civilians as the Israelis have bombed buildings they believed Hezbollah fighters to operating in or around. Nonetheless, Israel has also shown a reckless disregard for civilian casualties in other circumstances, such as the bombings of convoys of civilians fleeing north, the bombing of buildings in which there is little to no evidence of Hezbollah activities, and the bombing of the U.N. post after repeated warnings from U.N. personnel. These attacks have taken place despite Israeli claims that they seek to avoid civilian casualties. In the former, one is left to question what criteria the IDF uses to determine if a moving vehicle or a building contains Hezbollah personnel (clearly it did not include seeing such personnel get into the vehicle or building) and in the latter, one is left to question to what degree the IDF is willing to moderate their fire in circumstances where they know for a fact that innocent lives are at risk and it is unlikely that Hezbollah fighters are in the vicinity.

I'll state again: it is impossible to argue that Israel has conducted a campaign that has been anything less than reckless towards Lebanese civilians. The images, stories, and now the numbers, are undeniable.

From Bad to Worse

An Israeli airstrike yesterday killed 57 civilians-including women and children-in the Lebanese town of Qana. Apparently the casualties are too egregious for even the Israelis to gloss over, and they have instituted a pause in the air campaign as a result:

The announcement of a pause in airstrikes was made after midnight by State Department spokesman J. Adam Ereli to reporters traveling with Rice. It fell short of the full cease-fire many world leaders had sought. The suspension will not apply to other parts of Lebanon, nor diminish ground operations underway along the Israeli-Lebanese border. And the two-day pause, which will include a 24-hour window for relief organizations to deliver supplies and allow residents to leave southern Lebanon, could be jeopardized if Hezbollah continues firing rockets or Israel detects an imminent launch, a U.S. official said.

The bombing also has had the side effect of completely derailing negotiations for an end to the conflict:

After the strike, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice canceled a planned trip to Beirut and decided to return to Washington on Monday to hammer out a resolution to the conflict that could be brought before the United Nations this week.

“I will continue to work and work and work, that is what we can do,” said a visibly shaken Ms. Rice. “If there is a way humanly to accelerate our efforts, I would do it.”

The Lebanese prime minister, Fouad Siniora, made it clear that in any case Ms. Rice would not be welcome in Beirut on Sunday and demanded an immediate cease-fire. “There is no place on this sad day for any discussion other than an immediate and unconditional cease-fire, as well as an international investigation into the Israeli massacres in Lebanon now,” Mr. Siniora said.

So it appears now that the only actual participant in the conflict that we'll be speaking to is Israel, to whom we've already given our blessings to continue bombing Lebanon for as long as it takes. Given our position, it's not surprise the Lebanese government has no desire to talk to us. What would they talk to us about?

Our policy of supporting the Israeli air campaign, whatever the cost, has-predictably-begun to cost us badly needed support in the Middle East:

“American-made bombs, dropped by Israeli planes, with Arab cover,” said one sign in Arabic. The last phrase referred to the initial criticism of Hezbollah by the leaders of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan when the fighting erupted nearly three weeks ago. Already worried about the growing appeal of political Islam, those governments worried that Hezbollah’s success would only bolster the strength of Islamists.

Arab public opinion, already holding that Americans do not care about Arab lives, given the dozens killed daily in Iraq, will undoubtedly sour even more on the United States.

“There is a feeling right now that this war is not really an Israeli war against Hezbollah, but an American war to get rid of Hezbollah,” said Hussein Amin, the chairman of the journalism department at the American University in Cairo. “I think most of the coverage, in showing the dead children repeatedly, is something that is going to provoke rage and anger throughout the Arab world.”

No doubt the images of dead women and children will be used cynically as propoganda by our enemies in the Middle East. But regardless of how the Arab public comes to see them, it is a defeat for our credibility that-alone except with Britain among the world powers-we continue to support an air campaign that has resulted in the death of hundreds of Lebanese civilians. This from the Washington Post analysis:

Although the United States has urged Israel to use restraint, it has also strongly defended the military assaults as a reasonable response to Hezbollah rocket attacks, a position increasingly at odds with allies that see a deadly overreaction. Analysts think that if the war drags on, as appears likely, it could leave the United States more isolated than at any time since the Iraq invasion three years ago and hindered in its foreign policy goals such as shutting down Iran's nuclear program and spreading democracy around the world.

In other words, we've shot ourselves in the the foot. To establish credibility in his situation, we would have had to have acted as a truly honest broker, working for a cease-fire that would achieve the disarmament of Hezbollah politically, not simply green-lighting an Israeli bombing campaign that would fail to achieve just that militarily, and leave us looking like we're perfectly okay with civilian casualties no matter how dubious the aims of our approach. Which well, we are.

What exactly are our goals in the conflict?

The White House...thinks the missiles flying both ways across the Israel-Lebanon border carry with them a chance to finally break out of the stalemate of Middle East geopolitics. Bush and his advisers hope the conflict can destroy or at least cripple Hezbollah and in the process strike a blow against the militia's sponsor, Iran, while forcing the region to move toward final settlement of the decades-old conflict with Israel.

And yet, we seem to seeing the exact opposite result. The consensus is Iran either instigated or approved of the initial raid by Hezbollah, and though Israel's response-in my opinion largely an emotional response after the provocations by Hamas-was far beyond what anyone was expecting, Iran's position as a player in the Middle East seems only to have been increased after demonstrating it's ability to produce conflict. At the same time, the bombing campaign has failed to achieve even the limited goal of destroying Hezbollah's ability to launch rockets into Israel, let alone Israel's original, but now abandoned, goal of disarming Hezbollah entirely. Rather, Hezbollah has improved it's standing throughout the Middle East by being willing and able to stand up to Israel in a straight fight, and it clearly will be a victory for them to simply emerge from the conflict intact.

Clearly, this is why the foreign policy of the Bush administration is such a failure. It would be one thing if our foreign policy were merely dictated by the hawks in the administration. The hawks are almost certainly saying "Destroy Hezbollah, eliminate terrorists, above all else" and while such an approach might be counter-productive and fool-hardy, there'd at least be no hypocrisy in it. Instead, we get this muddled approach where we allow Israel to bomb women and children to achieve a dubious goal that isn't enough in our interest to be worth the cost, while at the same time talking about "opportunity" in the "new" Middle East. Not only do we look like we don't care about the cost, but we also look like hypocrites, and even worse, like fools for failing to understand the dynamics at play enough to realize that Israel cannot win this war by force alone, that we are isolating and hurting ourselves in the Middle East, and that our stupid and short-sighted foreign policy is only aiding our enemies and those who would undermine everything we've tried to accomplish. Quite simply, there's no understanding what the Bush administration is really trying to accomplish, or how they possibly think they can still get there at this point.

Disproportionate in any Moral Universe

I've sort of gotten out of the habit of spending my time refuting various important pundits (mostly Christopher Hitchens and Charles Krauthammer) because it gives them more credit than they deserve and they don't care what I think anyway, but sometimes I see something that's just too good (bad) to pass up. Like, this one in today's Washington Post, in which Krauthammer steadfastly refuses to find anything wrong with Israel's air campaign despite the hundreds of casualties it's caused among civilians and non-combatents:

What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities -- every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians -- and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy's infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?

Well, already there are two things wrong here. First of all, let's not forget that Hezbollah's original act of aggression was to kill eight and kidnapp two Israeli soldiers, and that the rocket attacks came after Israel responded by initiating their air campaign. And secondly, precision-guided munitions do not have the unintended effect of killing civilians when they are actually dropped on those civilian's cars as they flee the bombing, therefore it is okay to question whether in fact the deaths that result from such strikes are unavoidable.

It gets worse of course. Krauthammer then goes on to distort history to make his point:

When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel "proportionate" attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cinders, and turned the Japanese home islands into rubble and ruin.

Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right -- legal and moral -- to carry the fight until the aggressor is disarmed and so disabled that it cannot threaten one's security again. That's what it took with Japan.

Can someone explain to me how the extremely limited war between Israel and Lebanon parallels our hemisphere spanning war with Japan? At the same time that Japan was handing us our asses in Pearl Harbor, they were lining up to do the same thing in the Phillipines, and expand their Pacific empire even into Australia. The circumstances were drastically different, and as a result we engaged in unlimited war with Japan, because otherwise they would not have been persuaded to surrender. Israel, in contrast, is not in a fight to the death with Lebanon. Thus, one is lead to wonder why they are permitted to bomb Lebanese civilians fleeing southern Lebanon in their campaign against Hezbollah. There is nothing historically similar to the war with Japan beyond the fact that somebody attacked somebody else, therefore his attempt to parallel it with Israel's current campaign is simply obfuscation. But he can't stop the WWII anologizing there; no, Britain gets tossed in for good measure:

Britain was never invaded by Germany in World War II. Did it respond to the Blitz and V-1 and V-2 rockets with "proportionate" aerial bombardment of Germany? Of course not. Churchill orchestrated the greatest air campaign and land invasion in history, which flattened and utterly destroyed Germany, killing untold innocent German women and children in the process.

Again, it's not the same thing. Britain was literally in a fight for it's life against Nazi Germany, a no-holds-barred, knock-down, drag out fight between two powers in which the only way someone was going to give up was if they were made to give up. Britain's only choice in defeating Germany was to carry the war to Germany, on the ground and in the air. Again I must ask, where exactly does Lebanon and her civilians fit in this historial parallel? A closer analogy would be that of bombing Nazi-occupied France, killing innocent French civilians who probably opposed the Nazis. The problem with that analogy is that again, Hezbollah cannot possibly destroy Israel in the same way that Nazi Germany could have destroyed Britain, and the analogy fails.

Krauthammer then goes on to assume things about the Israelis that we simply do not know:

The perversity of today's international outcry lies in the fact that there is indeed a disproportion in this war, a radical moral asymmetry between Hezbollah and Israel: Hezbollah is deliberately trying to create civilian casualties on both sides while Israel is deliberately trying to minimize civilian casualties, also on both sides.

Are they? Israel has said repeatedly after bombing convoys of fleeing civilians that they believed those vehicles were acting in some relation to Hezbollah and the rockets being fired. But how do they know that? Given that they have bombed vehicles that actually didn't have anything to do with Hezbollah, then surely their intelligence is wrong. What intelligence did they have? In truth it's most likely that the Israels have taken a dim view of any vehicles fleeing Hezbollah positions, and have bombed and missiled those they suspected of being involved with Hezbollah's activities. But when you don't know that for sure, and you fire a missle through the roof of a bus carrying 19 civilians feeling to the north, are you deliberately trying to minimize civilian casualties? Is the standard "Well, we didn't fire at anyone we knew were civilians...we think...except maybe when we had to"? Is that how low the bar is set to be "minimizing" civilian casualties?

Don't get me wrong. Hezbollah is deliberately trying to maximize civilians casualties. There's no doubt about that. And yes, they are running in and out of well-populated centers, inviting strikes that kill innocents. That's why they're terrorists. The Israelis are on the other hand not terrorists, and so perhaps we should be holding them to a higher standard. Is it wrong to hold a nation to a higher standard than that of an unscrupulous terrorist group?

Had Israel wanted to destroy Lebanese civilian infrastructure, it would have turned out the lights in Beirut in the first hour of the war, destroying the billion-dollar power grid and setting back Lebanon 20 years. It did not do that. Instead it attacked dual-use infrastructure -- bridges, roads, airport runways -- and blockaded Lebanon's ports to prevent the reinforcement and resupply of Hezbollah. Ten thousand Katyusha rockets are enough. Israel was not going to allow Hezbollah 10,000 more.

Ignoring for a second that the Israelis did just that in Gaza (apparently collective punishment of the Palestinians for daring to elect Hamas politicians is on the table), I'll agree that Israel has for the most part used precise weaponry. What I question is whether they've used precise targeting. Though, I suppose it is precise to drop a bomb right through the roof of a vehicle moving at 45 mph. Or right on top of a U.N. observation post.

Israel's response to Hezbollah has been to use the most precise weaponry and targeting it can. It has no interest, no desire to kill Lebanese civilians. Does anyone imagine that it could not have leveled south Lebanon, to say nothing of Beirut?

Leaving aside for a second that the Israelis did just that in Gaza, I'll agree that Israel has for the most part used precise weaponry. What I question is whether they've used precise targeting. Though, I suppose it is precise to drop a bomb right through the roof of a vehicle moving at 45 mph. Or right on top of a U.N. observation post.

Instead, in the bitter fight against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, it has repeatedly dropped leaflets, issued warnings, sent messages by radio and even phone text to Lebanese villagers to evacuate so that they would not be harmed.

Well yes, and then it promptly bombed some of those fleeing civilians, after bombing the roads they needed to flee on.

Again, for the umpteenth hundred time, nobody argues that Israel should have to tolerate a hostile militia on it's border actively carrying out attacks on it. Nobody argues that Israel does not have a right to defend itself. Everyone agrees that Israel had the right to respond to the killing and kidnapping of its soldiers with force. The problem is that Israel has acted with a reckless lack of concern for Lebanese civilians, to the extent that one can legitimately wonder if inflicting civilian casualties are not a way of "sending a message" to Lebanon in general that support for Hezbollah will cost them in the future. Whatever you may think of this strategy in war, it is without question immoral. Krauthammer is fond of bringing up WWII over and over again, where we committed such acts as fire-bombing Dresden and Hamburg and nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but he neglects to point out first that Israel isn't at war with Lebanon (at least no technically) and second that since then, most civilized nations have uniformely rejected the strategy of deliberately targeting civilians. That many nations continue to do it in no way excuses such a tactic. Quite simply, it strains credulity to compare favorably what Israel is doing now to the massive bombings of WWII, or to believe that Israel is not in some way deliberately punishing the Lebanese people with their complete recklessness in bombing civilians. Krauhammer knows how difficult it is to justify scenes of children being killed, and that's exactly why he brings up 60-year old events, to attempt to persuade us that against those massive bombings, Israel is acting with restraint and discipline. Don't buy it.

The Bombing Continues

And the Israelis have apparently lost their minds:

An Israeli air and artillery attack hit a United Nations observation post near the Israel-Lebanon border Tuesday, killing four members of a U.N. peacekeeping force, U.N. officials announced. The bomb struck a post in Khiyam, near the eastern end of the border with Israel, manned by the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, known as UNIFIL, U.N. spokesperson Marie Okabe said.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan called on Israel to investigate the "apparently deliberate targeting" of the UNIFIL post by Israeli defense forces. "I call on the government of Israel to conduct a full investigation into this very disturbing incident and demand that any further attack on U.N. positions and personnel must stop," Annan said in Rome, where he is attending a conference on situation in Lebanon. The United Nations said it is trying to rescue survivors. Annan said the names and nationalities of those killed are being withheld pending notification of their families.

UNIFIL spokesman Milos Struger said in Lebanon Tuesday that Israeli forces continued firing close to the U.N. post even during a rescue operation. Since the conflict began, he said, a civilian employee of UNIFIL and his wife have also been killed, and five UNIFIL soldiers and one military observer have been wounded.

The Israeli military had no immediate comment on the airstrike.

Because after all, what do you say when your own reckless acts produced the casualties? "Sorry...we only meant to fire near you" doesn't quite cut it.

There isn't much else to say. Israel continues to bomb Lebanon, Hezbollah continues to fire rockets into Israel (killing an Israeli girl today), the Europeans want a cease-fire but won't pony up the troops, the Bush administration doesn't want a cease-fire until Hezbollah is degraded and the plan that they seem to be developing involves asking Syra, to whom we do not speak, to reign in Hezbollah with neither a credible threat of force or any incentives/concessions on our part, and attitudes throughout the Middle East harden towards us and the Israelis.

The U.S. and the Israeli/Hezbollah Conflict

The Washington Post reports today that President Bush will be dispatching Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice to the Middle East this weekend. Whereas Kofi Anan is calling for an immediate cease-fire we appear to be dawdling, and this is creating tension between us and our allies:

The United States is increasingly out of sync with key allies, however, because it remains content to allow Israel to pound Hezbollah, both to remove it as a threat and to undermine the region's extremist movements and hard-line regimes.

European allies are particularly alarmed about the disproportionately high civilian death toll in Lebanon. They are also concerned that the U.S. position will increase tensions between the Islamic world and the West by fueling militants, playing into the rhetoric of Osama bin Laden and adding to the problems of the U.S.-led coalition force in Iraq.

The one thing that is guaranteed to send the Arab world and the Persian world over the edge is for the U.S. to be seen ultimately to be doing what they always believed -- to be fully in cahoots with Israel," said a European official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of diplomatic relations. "The danger of allowing it to continue is that the United States is more and more despised. It's not like the U.S. had a good reputation within the region to start with."

The Bush administration is not exactly sure what Secretary Rice will do when she arrives:

Rice is now expected to travel to the Middle East as soon as this weekend, but with a limited listening mission in Israel and Egypt. The United States is still struggling to define the timing and purpose of her mission. She is tentatively expected to leave a team behind in Israel, head on to Malaysia for a conference of Southeast Asian nations, and possibly return to the Middle East for further negotiations if her team can put the right "building blocks" in place, a U.S. official said.

As the NY Times reported yesterday and the Washington Post reports today, this delay is deliberate strategy on the part of the Bush administration:

The outlines of an American-Israeli consensus began to emerge on Tuesday in which Israel would continue to bombard Lebanon for about
another week to degrade the capabilities of the Hezbollah militia, officials of the two countries said.

Then, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice would go to the region and seek to establish a buffer zone in southern Lebanon and perhaps an international force to monitor Lebanon’s borders to prevent Hezbollah from obtaining more rockets with which to bombard Israel.

The strategy carries risk, partly because it remains unclear just how long the rest of the world, particularly America’s Arab allies, will continue to stay silent as the toll on Lebanese civilians rises.

It appears that the Israelis are deliberately putting pressure on on the civilians populace by bombing Lebanon's infrastructure. Strikes on roads, carried out primarily to intercept the traffic of missiles from Syria and/or Iran to southern Lebanon where they can be fired at Israel, are also having the effect of making it difficult for civilians to get away from the bombing and the fighting. Israel has also warned residents of southern Lebanon to evacuate, forcing a mass exodus, and Israeli generals refuse to rule out the possiblity of a ground invasion of southern Lebanon. There is now speculation that Israel is even deliberately targeting areas of Lebanon that do not favor Hezbollah, in an effort to stir up anger and resentment with the terrorist organization.

The Bush administration has given Israel the green light to bleed Hezbollah until it no longer poses a viable threat. Unfortunately, Israel's air campaign seems deliberately designed to coerce the civilian population of Lebanon whether they are Hezbollah supporters or not, and this is beginning to rile not only the "Arab street" but key allies of ours. Everyone readily admits that Israel has the right to eliminate a threat on it's northern border, and most accept that Hezbollah is to blame for touching off this latest crisis. But Israel's disproportionate response, and our tacit acceptance of it, is winning us no friends in the Arab world at a time when we need them more than ever. Purely out of our own self-interest, we should be questioning how much free reign we're going to give Israel to bomb a country to destroy a terrorist organization that isn't even a threat to us, when it is damaging our standing and credibility in the world. I for one think we've let it go on too long already.