War Post

What to do between now and eight AM? What if nothing happens at 8 am —-kind of like the Y2K hype? Perhaps four months from now I’ll be sitting in a bomb shelter and trying to lighten up my neighbors with jokes about that that ceasefire deal, way back when, in August –or was it September? And what if it all suddenly ends, if quiet descends upon the land, and people crawl out of their besieged homes and villages to survey the damage, and infighting is once again the order of the day?

How did this all start again?

We’ll just have to wait and see. In any case, the clock is ticking. Rather than reaching the Litani river by land, they have finally realized they can just parachute down on its banks for the grand “Mission Accomplished” moment, the pacifier in photo op form.

Negotiations. Funny how that was on the table as an option 100,000 bombs ago. It feels like forever.

Via Anecdotes from a Banana Republic.

I just found this hearty, compassionate treatise on why blind war is the best war. And, yes, Blackfive is a very popular milblog.

"It is always wrong to take the risk of killing a child, whether we do it or they do," she will say.

"Why so?" I ask.

"Because it endangers the innocent," she replies.

"If that is the reason," I answer, "then you are wrong.  It is best that we bomb without fear."

Her eyes grow wide.  "You are mad," she says.

"Not so," I answer.  "Consider:  when the enemy seeks to kill our child to motivate us to surrender to his will, is it not because he believes that the danger to the children will move our hearts?"

"It is," she must agree.

"And when he hides among children," I add, "why?  Children do little to deflect artillery.  Must it not be because he knows that we — we ourselves — fear for the children, even his children?"

She nods, silently.

"Then it is proven," I say.  "It is our love of these innocents that endangers them.  If we did not care if children died, they would be in little danger."

"That cannot be," she replies in anger.

"But it is so," I contest.  "If we did not care if our children died, they would not be targets.  There would be no reason to target them, because we would not be moved by their deaths.

"If we did not care if their children died," I add, "there would be no reason to clutter military emplacements with their presence.  If it were not that we are horrified by the deaths of children, the enemy’s children would be clear of all places of battle — because they are, except for the fact that we love them, a hindrance."

She bites her lip.

"Of course, we cannot cut out our hearts," I tell her.  "Nor should we — as we wish to remain men, and good men, rather than monsters.  Yet it is our love that is the chief danger to the innocent now — to our own innocents, and theirs also."

Read the rest here.

Jonathan Steele, writing in The Guardian from Tyre, Lebanon, argues that the three week-long of rocket and air strike exchange, no matter the outcome, is a victory for Hizbullah. "Hizbullah is already the hero, a desperately longed-for proof of success," against Israel’s image of invincibility. Versions of this opinion have been expressed already for the last few weeks, but now with 100,000 Shi’ite protesters in Baghdad, an elected, protected Iraqi government condemning Israel, Steele’s point that "Hizbullah’s victory may do less damage to Israel than to other Arab regimes" bears attention.

The success of a Shia insurgency will encourage other Shias around the region, including those in Saudi Arabia. To the consternation of his American protectors, Iraq’s Shia prime minister, Nuri al- Maliki, did not condemn Hizbullah. But the Sunni/Shia issue should not be exaggerated. Hizbullah’s appeal across the Arab world is a wider matter of Islamism and the struggle against corrupt despotism. Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Jordan - and even in the medium term Syria, which has backed and armed Hizbullah - will feel the shockwaves running through the Arab street.

Those who argue from their pulpits in the mosques that secular modernity inevitably means decadence and selfishness will have gained new followers. Those who say that only Islam can provide the pride and backbone needed to confront the west’s cultural and military interventions will be stronger.

Israel’s Lebanese adventure, and the Bush/Blair folly in supporting it, have done the west damage that will last for many, many years.

Read the rest here.

Something about Middle Eastern political commentary has me unsettled. Perhaps it is the knowledge that within the analysis and theories of how Baghdad might shape Beirut which in turn might shape Riyadh, or Cairo, are the thousands of dead bodies and hundreds of thousands of displaced ones. Considering how the Saudi government might cope with what other commentators have gloomily called a "Shi’ite crescent" from the Bekaa through Baghdad to Tehran overlooks, just like the New York Times and every other American media outlet, the appalling toll on Lebanon and Gaza. The complete devastation of a state and the continued leveling of any shred of modern, hopeful life in the Occupied Territories by the Israeli government are the obvious but shunned details in all of this political talk. In reading someone like Steele, I want to believe that he’s not treating the ruin of Lebanon and Palestine as just proof of a political theory, but rather another grim moment in the on-going and supported violence in Palestine, Lebanon, and Iraq.

Most of all the damage of "Israel’s Lebanese adventure, and the Bush/Blair folly in supporting it" is that these officials, supposedly responsible leaders of free and democratic states, continued to endorse the dismantling of Lebanese life and society, and the deliberate, naive aggravation of anti-Israeli and anti-American emotion.

When I was a child I never wrote a message on a bomb. This week Israeli children are scrawling messages - much like American soldiers after 9/11, before the bombardment of Afghanistan - on bombs bound for Lebanon. The bombs won’t go very far away: up in an F-16 (can an Apache helicopter drop bombs?), rising thousands of feet above the dry land, until falling on Beirut, or Tyre, or a village in Southern Lebanon where "enemies of peace" live. Those bombs will fall from hot, clear skies onto the houses and apartment buildings of families who, because they are Shi’ite, or because they live in Beirut’s suburbs, or because they are Lebanese, are targeted sympathizers of Hezbollah. In Ehud Olmert’s words, the Lebanese children killed by bombs covered in the writing of Israeli children are true "enemies of piece." It’s Israel’s "moment of truth." That is why they have to die. That is why, by today’s count, almost 300 Lebanese have died.

The bombs that are covered in Hebrew with Sharpies are American-made. The warplanes and helicopters they are loaded into are American. But there is a collective shrug in our country as the government and the media distort and downplay the killing, printing headlines that endorse Israeli mathematics and count the precise number of rockets "raining" down on Haifa. They are more general, far less precise, in reporting how many died in Beirut, or Tyre, or Tripoli, or a small village whose name most American newscasters can’t pronounce.

When I was a chid I never wrote a message on a bomb. This summer I’ve been writing and documenting the current war and its historical base on this blog. In keeping a war blog for the summer, I have become obsessed with the war. If those little girls who write on bombs bound for Lebanon are obsessed with war, we’re not so different are we? My obsession involves finding more letters about Indian soldiers eating horses in Iraq in 1916, and then trying to find a military blog that will really explain how a soldier from Texas, or California, kills an Iraqi and then orders Burger King when he gets back to the base.

I wonder how the Israeli girls who write on bombs that kill Lebanese girls, and their mothers and old grandmothers, would explain their war obsession. The girls’ doting mothers take cute photos of them with digital cameras: soccer moms next to tanks, the healthy-looking women crouching to catch this moment in their daughters’ young life. Maybe they talk about this moment at dinner, at night. Maybe they try and tell the daughters that it’s fine to be obsessed with war, to write on bombs, since all they want is peace. Maybe they tell their daughters who the bombs kill, before reminding them to eat their beans. 

I’ve never written a message on a bomb. I’ve just been keeping a war blog this summer, and being obsessed. Maybe the little girls, when their 18 or 20, and in an American college perhaps, will spend a summer with their own war blog, fleshing out their obsessions, reflecting on the bombs they scrawled on.

Photos from the Associated Press