mideast musings
I keep starting posts about the fighting in Israel and Lebanon, then discarding them, and starting again. It seems wrong not to acknowledge the fighting and the heartbreak it is bringing to people on both sides, but I’m not sure what I have to add to the conversation.
Lisa at Global Voices Online reports that this is probably the most blogged war in history. I’ve been reading Allison Kaplan Sommer, who discusses such homely details as her decision whether to send her kids to camp this week.
I think Allison is right that the US would be totally unrestrained in a comparable situation. I don’t think even W. is nuts enough to go nuclear, but pretty much everything else would be considered fair game if US cities were the target of missile attacks. But that doesn’t mean it would be right. There’s basically two arguments for hitting back with everything you’ve got. First is the purely political consideration that anything less would be considered week and make the government vulnerable to criticism. The second, and more significant, argument is the idea of deterrence — that if everyone knows that you’re going to respond immediately and hard, they’ll be less likely to attack in the first place. But the problem here is that Hezbollah wants Israel to respond out of control, because that response stirs up the mass hatred of Israel in the Arab world.
I do think the US would have been slower to react to the kidnapping of American soldiers. For better or worse, because we don’t have a draft, I think there’s more of a sense of "they’re professionals and knew the risks that they were taking." Because an Israeli soldier could be, quite literally, anybody’s child, I think there’s more of a commitment to doing whatever it takes — from commando raids to exchanging prisoners — to get them free.
July 21st, 2006 at 2:52 pm
It has always been the position of the people and government of Israel that they do not negotiate for hostages–they go and get them back, whatever it takes. No Jew will ever be abandoned again, unlike during the Holocaust.
July 21st, 2006 at 6:50 pm
That’s not true. They have a long history of prisoner exchanges and they have many times negotiated to get their captured soldiers back.