We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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With the IAF striking border crossings with Syria and the Syrians shooting down an Israeli reconnaissance drone in Lebanon, perhaps a greater Middle East war is indeed at hand. As Israel really has no viable options that do not involve destroying Hezbollah and destroying Hezbollah probably requires preventing Syria from acting as either a safe haven or supply source, a wider war was probably inevitable.
Seeing the last of the Ba’athists in Syria crushed would be splendid but of course the most likely people to fill their still smoking shoes would be Islamists of some ilk. Not easy to see a happy outcome no matter what happens and yet doing nothing is not an option for Israel either given that it would be pointless to try and negotiate with such intractable enemies when in truth they will be satisfied with nothing less that Israel’s annihilation.
The picture on top of this New York Times story about Iran’s reaction to the conflict in Lebanon demonstrates the problem.
It also distracts from the story itself, which is pretty interesting in the way it describes how many hopes, and fears, the Iranian regime has invested in Hezbollah.
Its fears are about the military damage that Hezbollah is sustaining under the weight of Israel’s attack. That is something that is totally speculative, as we don’t have any way to assess it. However given the weight of fire that northern Israel is under at the moment, it is quite possible that Hezbollah is being weakened quite considerably by the sheer volume of munitions that it is expending.
I am not a military person at all, but I cannot help but wonder what the military situation might be like if Hezbollah used its rocket artillery strictly against military targets.
Be that as it may, Iran feels that it is benefiting from the increased prestige that Hezbollah is getting from Arab populations, which normally would be denied it for sectarian differences. It is a moot point how well that prestige will last when the fighting stops and Hezbollah has to account for its actions to the rest of the Lebanese community, which is by no means pleased with what Hezbollah has done.
But I still can not get over that image from the streets of Tehran.
Diana Hsieh, a hardline objectivist of the Big-O variety, thinks libertarians like Tom Palmer, whom she cites in an article on her Noodlefood site here, are losing their nerve if they worry about attacks on civilian targets in places like Beirut. She writes:
Obviously, wars cannot be fought without harm to civilian populations. Governments and their militaries do not exist in some separate dimension from civilians, such that they might be uniquely targeted by an invading force. Enemy governments are thoroughly integrated into the territory over which they rule, depending upon its wealth, hospitals, roads, factories, trains, farms, ports, industry, people, and more. That’s why quickly and decisively eliminating the threat posed by an enemy nation cannot but require the bombing of so-called “civilian” targets.
Moreover, without active support and/or tacit submission from a majority of the civilian population, no government could maintain its grip on power. That’s why the vast majority of the population of an aggressive enemy nation are not morally innocent bystanders. The sometimes-awful luck of genuine innocents in wartime, such as young children or active dissidents, is a terrible tragedy. However, the party responsible is not the nation defending itself but rather all those who made such a defense necessary, particularly the countrymen of the innocents complicit in or supportive of the aggression of their nation.
I am very troubled by that last paragraph. Hsieh seems to be saying that civilians in a country that is led by a brutal government are, unless they do everything to rebel, more or less complicit in the crimes of that government. Therefore, they have little or no excuse to complain if bombs come raining down on their homes.
This way of reasoning involves, by an ironic twist, to a sort of collectivist “guilt” shared across a whole populace. If a family living say, in Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany have not actively sought to overthrow those governments, then they are somehow not terribly deserving of our compassion (Hsieh, to be fair, seems to exempt children and one or two other groups from this).
I entirely defend Israel’s right to do what is necessary to defend itself from terror groups like Hamas and Hizbollah, and alas, its actions may lead, inevitably, to the loss of civilian life. I consider myself pretty much pro-Israeli and have nothing but contempt for the bogus moral equivalence drawn in certain parts of the media between the actions of the Israeli armed forces and terror groups. But I have a real problem with the line of argument presented here by Hsieh. The ends do not always justify the means, and as moral agents, it is surely right to minimise loss of innocent life as far as possible if that can be done. For consider this: if the western powers had really thrown off all moral constraints about foreign populations in the recent past, then much of the Middle East would be a radioactive wasteland.
Israel is killing a lot more people in Lebanon targeting Hezbollah position which are located intentionally within populated towns and villages, than Hezbollah are killing in Israel targetting literally anyone with their random rocket attacks fired blindly into towns and cities… but Hezbollah’s poor ‘score’ is not for lack of trying.
At the start of the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, although not unsympathetic to Israel’s security needs, I was very concerned that this conflict not escalate into something which was a war between Israel and Lebanon per se. My view was that as the factions that opposed Hezbollah had been trying to undermine that organisation by getting Syrian forces out, it would be a tragedy if Israel’s military action undermined the pro-modernist forces within Lebanon.
And yet after reading and listening to the remarks of commentator after commentator speaking for various Lebanese factions, I now seriously question if there was ever a realistic chance of these people achieving a disarmed Hezbollah within Lebanon. It appears that views like those of Ahmed Al-Jarallah do not have much currency in Lebanon (and I urge the commentariat to link to Lebanese sources which suggest otherwise), which means if Israel was just going to wait for political development across the border to eventually neutralise the clear and present threat of Hezbollah, they would have had a very long wait indeed.
In short, I find myself inescapably drawn to the notion that not only is the Israeli action warranted, I now think there is no good reason the IDF should avoid attacking targets of strategic value to Hezbollah which are located in non-Hezbollah areas. Moreover, I would urge them to follow the logic of that position and start striking targets in Syria and (above all) in Iran in order to impose a cost on those governments for their actions in enabling Hezbollah.
Much as I support the idea of a modernist secular Lebanon, perhaps that is simply not within the power of non-Islamists in Lebanon to deliver until military realities have altered the political realities. In short, if the other factions within Lebanon do not want Israel to completely demolish the national infrastructure that Hezbollah also uses, they need to realise that they, as well as Israel, need to declare war on Hezbollah. As long as ports, roads and airfields in Lebanon can be used by Hezbollah, neutrality is simply not an option for anyone.
The delicate balance of power within the Cedar nation became untenable the moment Hezbollah in effect declared war in Israel on behalf of all of Lebanon and as a result, either Hezbollah is expelled from the government, declared a criminal organisation and confronted militarily by Lebanon’s army… or Lebanon (and not just Hezbollah) is indeed at war with Israel and must accept the consequences. There are no other realistic alternatives.
Quite a lot really. Whilst Haaretz is not usually my first choice of Israeli newspapers, there is a very interesting article called simply What will happen next that interviews some interesting people and makes some fascinating observations.
Incredibly, Nasrallah is making the same mistakes as Nasser. By puffing himself up, he isn’t deterring Israel; at this point, he’s only making himself and his movement a bigger and more legitimate target. Hezbollah has become a prisoner of its own myth, which is that at any moment it can go one-on-one against Israel – and win. It can’t, and now is the best opportunity to prove it – to Lebanese Shiites, to all Lebanese and to the rest of the Arab-Muslim world
Interesting stuff and well worth a read.
Omar Bakri Mohammed, the Islamic preacher thrown out of Britain for inciting Muslims to violence and calling for the Islamisation of the UK (quote: “The life of an unbeliever has no value, it has no sanctity”), wants the Royal Navy to evacuate him from the fighting in Lebanon. So he hates the UK but wants it to come to his rescue?
The Jews have a good expression expression for this: chutzpah
Reuters journalist Paul Hughes chose to spend a holiday with his wife in Beirut. just as the violence broke out. Here’s his vivid take on what it is like in that city at the moment. When it comes to covering events in Lebanon with a salty mixture of black humour, PJ O’ Rourke, of course, remains the master.
There is a very interesting editorial in the Arab Times that takes the view that Hezbollah is a blight on Lebanon. Moreover the writer, Arab Times chief editor Ahmed Al-Jarallah, clearly dislikes the fact that it is the Lebanese people, not Syria and Iran, who are paying the price for Hezbollah’s lethal antics. He is none too flattering about the Lebanese government either.
[Hezbollah leader] Nasrallah has dragged Lebanon and its people into misfortune. In spite of the destruction caused by Israel, Lebanese politicians don’t want to be frank with their people and tell them that they should not support Nasrallah’s decision to declare war on Israel. Nasrallah has hijacked the authority of the Lebanese government to have control over the people of Lebanon while Lebanese politicians continue to remain mute spectators without voicing their true feelings.
Read the whole thing for a very clear Arab opinion of where the blame should lie for the ongoing horror… and it is not Israel.
Lebanese Political Journal makes for grim reading. It is all well and good to wish for the destruction of Hezbollah (as indeed I do) but that does not reduce the sadness I feel when I read personal accounts of the cost to ordinary Lebanese people.
If only there was some other way but I cannot see what that would be. My fear is that the aftermath of this will kill off the modern secular state Lebanon is struggling to become.
The anger of the Lebanese people under the bombs who do not support Hezbollah is understandable but that does not change the fact Hezbollah exists as a state-with-a-state and that it attacks Israel and is dedicated to its destruction. Until there is a Lebanese solution to the ‘problem’ of Hezbollah, Israeli interventions are inevitable. Unfortunately I am unsure Israel has exercised sufficient discrimination to keep this as a war between Israel and Hezbollah rather than Israel and everyone in Lebanon.
People in Lebanon have ample reason to distrust Israeli good will or promises but then Israel knows all too well what Hezbollah has in mind for it and until the Islamo-fascists and their sponsors are taken out of the equasion it is hard to see how anything will improve.
The Hezbollah missiles landing on civilians deep within Israel change everything. I would suspect that the Syrians and Iranians who have supplied Hezbollah with the weapons to effectively attack Israel’s cities will soon find Israel’s fury directed against them directly. If we start seeing chemical or even radiological warheads, which are by no means beyond possibility, the Israeli reaction scarecely bears thinking about.
Will the US and UK get dragged in? Well given that Syria and Iran are both also integral to the insurgency against the US and UK in Iraq, it may well be in the interests of the allies to strip away the fiction that these nations are not a key enabler of their woes in Iraq. A wider Middle Eastern war would open all manner of options against the manufacturers and suppliers of the weapons killing US and UK forces. The upside/downside could be considerable. Roll the dice.
Pondering putting your spare cash onto petroleum futures? You had better do it quick.
This by Greg Burch, about the differences between Marxism and Islam, linked to by Instapundit, strikes me as shrewd. And the posting is also, unlike other blog postings I have found myself reading recently, mercifully brief, saying a great deal in a few pithy paragraphs.
Marxism, Burch reminds us, promises heaven on earth, and in time, this promise will prove wrong. So, to defeat Marxism all you have to do is quarantine it, and then wait for it to defeat itself. But Islam makes no verifiable and hence self-defeating real world promises.
This difference makes the nature of the protracted struggles faced by the West against these two fundamental challenges very different. In many ways, there was a basic premise inherent in the policy of containment taken against the communist world: Wait long enough and the truth of the superiority of liberal societies will become apparent to the world. But a policy of containment against Islamic imperialism cannot hope for such eventual success. Since Islam does not make any ambitious proposal to improve the lot of its followers in the real world, but only in an imaginary afterlife, no amount of waiting can undermine its claim to truth.
I do not claim that this is in any way a new insight, but it is an important meme, well stated. It also feeds in to what Johnathan said yesterday, about us “setting an example” to Islam rather than barging in and re-arranging it.
Another good Islam-related meme emerged from a not-that-recent (but it deserves to be placed on the Samizdata record, I think) conversation between me and Perry de Havilland. Perry perpetrated that widespread meme-that-ain’t-so, to the effect that Islam needs a Reformation. The muddle here is that it confuses Reformation in the sense of reform in the direction of sanity and niceness with reformation in the direction of more devoted adherence to the original texts, which of course means the exact opposite of sanity and niceness.
My so far rather limited reading of the Koran causes me to agree with Islamic fundamentalists about what the Koran says and what it demands of Muslims. Reformation, in the sense of what happened historically in Europe with Christianity – believers reading the stuff for themselves and not allowing the message to be bent out of shape by priests before it gets to them – is what Islam has for many decades now been busily engaged in, and that, from the point of view of Western Civilisation, is the problem, not the solution.
Perry quickly rephrased what he was all along trying to say. Islam, he said, needs a New Testament. I.e. something fundamentally different for the fundamentalist true believers to read. Again, I am sure that this is not an original notion, but it is still a meme to conjure with, I think. It is a lot to ask, but that is the point. Islam has to change a lot before it can hope to rub along contentedly with the rest of us.
I suspect that lots of people benignly raised within the Muslim religious tradition, but appalled by what Islam actually says, have many times attempted such a project, but that Original Islam 1.0 contains not only the contradiction of all such niceness memes, but also other memes which have the effect of preventing the niceness memes from ever catching on and becoming more than historical footnotes.
However, the world is a very different place now to what it has been throughout most of Muslim history, and I remain optimistic that Islam may eventually reform itself, in the sense that Perry and I and everyone else who is civilised would all like. Such a benign transformation would be unprecedented and utterly out of character with almost everything that went before in Muslim history. But, so are mobile phones.
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