Justus For All

My thoughts are this: I assume that they do that kind of stuff all the time. These terrorists are terrible organizations.

On the other hand, that doesn’t change the fact that the children are dead due to Israeli weapons.

Something needs to happen immediately to ensure that this doesn’t happen again, on accident or via manipulation. Bombs in civilian areas will always lead to tragedies. There have got to be other options.

There are of course other options. If Hezbollah had not been using Qana to launch rockets from I am sure the Israelis would not have been bombing there.

Once a civilian area is used for military purposes, the options are much more limited. You can choose not to target them, out of fear of harming civilians, thus rewarding those who choose to use civilians as sheilds in this way. Eventually, I suppose you will be forced to bomb civilian areas anyway. Your could also bomb as carefully as possible, trying you best just to hit the places where their are weapons and trying to warn the civilians to get clear as best as they can. Doing this will lead to some civilian casualties, and the demonstrated reluctance to harm civilians may lead to unsavory groups purposefully driving civilian casualties up, as is alleged here. A final option would be to pretty much ignore the pressence of civilians and attack militarized instalations regardless of cost an without regard for civilian deaths. This would spill a lot of innocent blood in the sort term, but might actually cause less death in the long run by making the ‘civilians as shields’ tactic totally unrewarding.

Right now it is of course the U.S. and Israel’s policy to go with the second option. I don’t disagree with that, but I am beginning to wonder if it is a mistake, and a more bloody-minded approach might actually be better for everyone. This is not to advocate in any way a genocidal approach, but rather if someone makes something a military target civilian deaths that result from the decision to militarize a civilian area and employ human sheilds will be placed on the group who made that decision, rather than the group who responded to it.

I don’t know if it is effective to try an make up for the barbarity of our foes by trying to limit civilian casualties as they try to maximize them. Placing the blame fully on them for such depravity might be the more humane thing to do in the long run.

I agree with what you’re saying, but simply “blaming Hezbollah” does no good. They are crazy lunatics. Blaming them (or even expecting them to act differently) will do no good. It’s up to us to figure out ways around this tricky problem. They will exploit human casualties to their cause, inciting more violence and instability. We need to outmaneuver them, and I don’t think we’ll be able to do it with bombs.

Don’t misunderstand me - I don’t have any solution for today’s problems. They’ve been brewing for decades and won’t be solved easily. But I do think that we are falling in to a trap that will only make things worse.

I don’t think they are ‘crazy lunatics’ in the sense that their tactics don’t make logical sense. Their goals may strike us as crazy, but their tactics at achieving those goals seem quite rational (if barbaric) to me.

I do think we need more that just ‘blaming them’ a coordinated propaganda campaign where it is explained what Hezbollah is doing, along with a specific warnings that if Hezbollah does not make efforts to remove civilians from targetted areas those civilians will die and it will be considered a war crime by Hezbollah.

For example, if Israel were to announce that X, Y and Z building had been identified as militarized civilian structures and that they would be targeted and called upon Hezbollah to remove the civilians from those structures it seems to me that if civilians were later killed there, the blame would fall upon Hezbollah. Or at least it should. It seems to me that this would have a negative effect on Hezbollahs popularity even in areas that are fairly supportive. It would, if executed properly, provide a disincentive for doing this sort of thing.

Employing sophisticated surveilance techniques and pulicly documenting Hezbollahs behavior would also be a component of this.

I am certainly not claiming that this would solve all the problems in the world, or even the Middle East, but it might put an end to one particularly disgusting tactic.

It would of course require signifigant will and support from Western nations to consciously apportion blame properly.

Dave, I believe you mentioned elsewhere that it may take a force actually going into Lebanon to attempt to restore order to sort things out.

I suspect Hezbollah knows that, if they fire rockets from a certain area, it’s going to get targeted, so I would figure it means they’ll pull out of that area as quickly as possible, meaning Israel is, more often than not, on a wild goose chase as far as where it targets its strike.

Going directly into Lebanon may help cut that down, because the chances of either locating Hezbollah, or forcing Hezbollah to pull out of certain locations, may be better than just firing back at targets from which anything is fired from.

Obviously, there are going to be civilian casualties somewhere. It’s unfortunate that it happens and it can’t be entirely avoided.

I suppose it would be less of an issue if all the civilians willingly supported Hezbollah, because then it is a case of “they reap what they sow” as was the case with Germany and Japan in World War II. But since many of the civilians don’t support Hezbollah, it becomes a stickier issue as to how long Israel can keep justifying its retaliation.

Of course Israel has sent ground troops into Lebanon.

I don’t know what Israel’s reaction speed is between a rocket firing and a response, or how they choose their targets. Certainly we know that their have been pitched battles between Israeli forces and Hezbollah, and that their air strikes have killed Hezbollah at times.

It seems also that Hezbollah plays an interesting game with civilians. When it suits their need, they have popular support and when it doesn’t they are just surrounded by innocent civilians. I think our media has done a pretty poor job of sorting that out. I do expect though that in Hezbollah dominated areas they have at least as much popular support as Germany and Japan did in WWII.

Dave, to what extent does this change your feelings on Qana?

It doesn’t change my feelings, or more importantly, my thoughts at all. Do you think it should for some reason, and if so, why?