Xander wrote:But you're willing to hold nations to standards that don't actually exist outside your head. Understood.
There is a fundamental difference between saying “Because the world works the way I say it does, people should do X, Y, and Z” and saying “If our goal is to try and achieve a world that works in a certain way, actions X, Y, and Z are precisely the wrong ways to go about getting there.” My post was the later and I would agree that the former would just be wishful thinking.
Xander wrote:So... generally speaking, I'm all for hitting back when you're attacked.
I’m for a reasoned response that takes into account all aspects of the situation and leads to the best results for all parties involved. Maybe that involved hitting back. Maybe not.
Look, we should probably stop talking about “terrorists” and “people who attacked Israel” or even just “Lebanese” and talk specifically about the situation at hand. It is Hezbollah that did these things, not just “them” or “those bad guys over there”. And “these things” are in particular fired rockets and captured (“kidnapped”) soldiers, and not much else besides that.
I’m ok with hand waving the idea that Hezbollah is a terrorist group. Never mind that I haven’t heard of Hezbollah doing beheadings and that HEzbollah doesn't send troops into Iraq and that Hezbollah doesn’t use suicide bombers any more and that Hezbollah publicly decries the killing of civilians as an act of resistance including objecting to 9/11. We’ll also ignore Hezbollah’s humanitarian efforts or the fact that they have increasingly in recent years shown reluctance to use terrorist tactics in their struggle against Israel. And there’s no reason to really talk about the fact that most nations of the world including the UN don’t consider Hezbollah to be a terrorist organization or the fact that Hezbollah repeatedly asserts that the areas that they have attacked are areas under dispute with Israel and really shouldn’t be under Israeli control. Lastly, we’ll not take into account at all the fact that Hezbollah has largely given up rhetoric of the destruction of Israel and have primarily at least overtly been concerned only with the removal of Israel from disputed territories.
Instead, we’ll assume that the media has not been lying to us and that there are probably good reasons to think of Hezbollah as the irredeemable bad guys. After all, they have ties to Iran and Syria therefore they must be bad, right? But we don’t need guilt by association, we’ll presume that someone so inclined can produce a litany of horrible acts committed officially by Hezbollah in the name of resistance in recent years and that we will see a trend of the build up of those acts up until it became so intolerable that Israel had no choice but to act. And we’ll accept the proposition so often asserted that Hezbollah is 100% constituted with the kinds of people who are never ever going to give up their campaign for the destruction of Israel and that whenever they say otherwise they are obviously lying in order to cover up their true aims.
Even if we accept all of that, I still can’t begin to tell you profoundly unhelpful the proposition “if they attack us, we must fight back” is for the determining of foreign policy. There is a large continuum of possible actions ranging literally from doing nothing at all to, to nuclear war and/or genocide. There are a number of possible actions that are on the side of little to no military force being applied and a great many more that are further on the side of not taking extreme military intervention off of the table. And you don’t have to do just one thing. You can do a lot of little things, or a big thing and little things, or you can do nothing for a while and then do something big and then do a few little things, etc.
How would one choose between these options? I submit that any consideration between these options that does not take into account what kind of end game you are trying to achieve is a very bad one. Hence, when I describe a system whereby the UN serves a more active role as an arbiter of peace, effectively policing the conflict and treating each side neutrally, I am being very serious. This is a very real goal you can work towards and certain actions are more helpful for reaching that goal than others. This is not an idea that is pure fancy that has no precedent in the history of the world. Much of the impetus for the creation of the UN was the desire to create a kind of peaceful cooperative of nations that could lead to a sort of international rule of law, or at least not lead to the wholesale destruction that occurs during a world war.
Now nobody has to accept this vision of an endgame. You’re welcome to believe that it is impossible to achieve or that the end would be worse for the region than some particular alternative. But it would be wise to spell out what that alternative vision is and to be able to justify your actions as reasonably leading to the establishment of that order.
We can look at the rhetoric and try to piece together what Israel and the US really want to do when they engage in disproportionate offensive attacks. I’m not particularly familiar with the dialogue within Israel, but here on the US side, the punditry makes repeated reference to promotion of peaceful stable democratic states throughout the middle east. I can’t quite swallow that entirely since even the nations we count as our allies and enemies don’t quite fit that rubric very well. The things we object to tend to be more about whether a particular state will be friendly to us and do as we tell them. A more complete picture seems like it is that we want capitulation to US interests first, peace and stability second, and democracy third if we can get it. A cynic might look at this and say that what we really want is to create a Middle East that is an extension of our military and economic interests, that can send resources our way as if they were states under the control of our greater empire, like South America. Is it no wonder then that our direct empyreal competitors like Russia and China aren’t exactly one hundred percent behind us in this?
Now, I’m not a cynic and as much as the plan to impose our vision of how states should behave and what kinds of political and economic institutions they must adopt sickens me, I would still be willing to get on board with it. At the very least the word “stable” sounds very good to me. At least people would not be dying, at least people would be able to go about finding whatever happiness they can without fear that every five to ten years there will be another war that requires them to up and leave their homes not sure if they are going to survive to see their next day.
But even if you believe that this is the goal, the question remains are the current actions by the US and Israel even contributing effectively to that goal. Note, I am including Israel here because there is some reason to believe that the US is very much on board with Israel’s actions here and see it as contributing to the larger US plan for the region. That’s if you don’t buy the theories starting to float about the US was largely behind the entire ordeal in the first place like here.
But if you deny this conglomeration of two very separate agendas, I am sure that the argument I have made thus far and am about to make below can easily be adapted to Israel alone.
I submit that whatever else the US is doing, these conflicts have not been particularly helpful for creating the Middle East that they are promising. And unless you think blowing up schools and hospitals, roads and bridges, shutting down air ports and forcing mass exodus is likely to result in greater “stability” or you believe that throwing a state into near civil war and increasing the power and influence of one of the more fanatically anti-American nations in the region is likely to promote US interests in the region, I just can’t understand how you could possibly make the claim these goals are being achieved.
So that leaves three possibilities that I can see.
1. The US has some other ultimate goal in sight. They have some different vision that is at odds with their rhetoric. I can’t for the life of me figure out what that is. Is it to preserve and promote the instability of the region because it is profitable? Is it to eradicate the population? Is it that we want non-democratic oppressive states that are bent under our thumb? Is it that we want to make the people so terrified that they dare not fight back? Each possible explanation seems to go further and further into wacko-land. There are not unintelligent people who really believe that something like this is the real reason for our aggression. I need more evidence before I’d accept any of the propositions. But I am at a loss to come up with an alternative vision that is being followed.
2. The “democratization” goal I’ve described or something very similar to it is the real goal, but we’ve just been making a whole lot of bad decisions. Maybe it’s shortsightedness, maybe its hubris, maybe its incompetence maybe its stupidity. But whatever it is, we’ve repeatedly unerringly made decisions that are not putting us appreciably closer to the goal that we seek and which many would argue have actually set us further and further back. I’m not saying it’s easy. I’m not above to wave my hands in the air and pull out a document called “the magic plan that any idiot can see will bring about a permanent peace in the middle east.” I can’t pretend that my knowledge and creativity is up to the task when so very many other great minds who have put their minds to it have not yet found a long term solution. I can tell you that from what I’ve read and from what I believe, the crisis mentality that has lead to many of our recent actions has not been working.
3. It isn’t this goal and it isn’t another goal. It’s no goal. The people in charge are not really looking farther than their own noses. The mentality is entirely, if they have rockets, destroy the rockets, if they have nuclear facilities destroy the facilities, if they try to kidnap soldiers beat them up and get the soldiers back, if Saddam Hussein is an evil jerk who doesn’t like us, take Saddam Hussein out of power. Perhaps the thought process never goes beyond the immediately achievable results without thought to the greater consequences. Maybe we’re just wishing that things will work out.
I honestly can’t say which of these possibilities terrifies me the most. I’ve gotta hope that the reality is a sort of modified #2. That is to say, that the US government isn’t hypocritical, it does want what it says it wants and it is going about doing it in the best way it knows how. I can hope that we are making mistakes, but not colossal, irreparable ones, and that more tangible progress is being made than is readily apparent. These things take time, perhaps hundreds of years, and it is too soon to say whether some particular act will ultimately turn out to have been a brilliant stroke or a terrible blunder. At least, that’s what I tell myself before I go to bed at night.