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It shocks me a little to keep reading assertions on this thread that Hezbollah started this war when the only way to plausibly account for the events of the last month is advance preparation by the IDF.
And it disappoints me that so many intelligent people seem to cling to this idea that this war was only started a month or so ago. This is just the latest skirmish, and probably the most high-profile and bloody one since 2000. Rockets, small air strikes, flyovers and ground incursions have been happening for years, and all the time. The last time Hezbollah kidnapped Israeli soldiers was only two years ago. None of this is anything new, it's just that this is the first time for a good few years that Israel has decided to take a significant action rather than simply reacting. A lot of people are of the opinion that what the IDF is doing is disproportionate. Well, of course it is - if it's a reaction to Hezbollah's piecemeal 'rockets and kidnappings' strategy. If, on the other hand, it's a premeditated action, then proportionality doesn't come into it. At that point, you have to look beyond issues of tit-for-tat cause and effect ("It's six of one and half a dozen of the other! Now I want you two to shake hands and apologise!") and look at what the goal of this particular Israeli offensive might be.
Incidentally, I'm a little unclear over whether this is actually a war? If it is, then surely the bombing of civilian targets and infrastructure is fairly standard practice? The Geneva Convention explicitly prohibits collective punishment, but I think that only applies to foreign occupiers of the nation in question being punished...
Not that it should make much difference, I suppose. The US never stopped bombing Iraq between Gulf Wars, and as Israel have already pointed out, NATO bombed the fuck out of the former Yugoslavia in 1999, including all manner of civilian targets and infrastructure. These are hardly the only examples of attacks on civilian targets by national and international forces, even over the last ten years. So what's the diference, exactly?
Although I'm no apologist for the crimes of the IDF over the last fuck-knows-how-long, it does strike me that there's a tendency amongst certain commentators in the West to constantly cast Israel as 'the bad guys', hand in glove with the US, and to the exclusion of anyone or anything else. It seems to me that this is precisely the kind of thinking that doesn't solve international political/military crises with a huge and tangled history of tit-for-tat violence. The culture of blame is wonderful for getting some of that White Hot Rage off your chest, but not really particularly productive, whether you're a diplomat struggling to solve the problems in the region or a member of an online bulletin board involved in a debate on the problem in the region. |
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