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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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.
Earlier today, Tim Blair laughingly reported on a senior Pakistani shi’ite cleric falling victim to a suicide bomber – presumably fielded by his sectarian rivals. The manner of this man’s demise carries a strong element of poetic justice, considering he allegedly supported Hamas and Hezbollah – both terrorist groups not unfamiliar with “martyrdom operations”. However, I do not feel as jolly about this cleric’s death as many of the commenters on the linked Blair thread. Certainly, when a prominent Hamas and Hezbollah supporter gets his comeuppance in the so-very-appropriate form of a zealot with a bomb strapped to his gut, one could be forgiven for revelling in schadenfreude. Trouble is, such an event is precisely the sort of thing that could trigger a large-scale Islamist movement that overthrows Pakistani dictator Pervez Musharraf, or adds further impetus to ongoing efforts to assassinate him.
The Economist’s recent article on Pakistan is a timely reminder that the West’s current alliance with that nation is conditional in the extreme – and almost wholly reliant on Musharraf – whose death could not come soon enough for a large number of people he rules over. If he is assassinated, the General’s successor might well be cut from a far more fundamentalist cloth. If this circumstance arises, a nuclear-armed Pakistan becomes an even more alarming prospect; raising the stakes over Kashmir and making nuclear weapons proliferation more likely. The risk of a nuclear weapon being detonated in a Western city is proportionate to the greenness of Musharraf’s replacement.
If the Pakistani leadership was to fall into fundamentalist hands, this would represent a massive setback in the global struggle against international Islamic terrorism. The mission in Afghanistan would be deeply complicated, for a start. Then there’s the problem of Pakistan becoming an even greater hub for Islamofascists. I will stop there; the list of conceivable heinous consequences could fill many pages. Unfortunately, “our boy” in Islamabad has made a lot of bitter enemies during his rule, and – according to the Economist article linked above – has also governed in a way that makes a post-Musharraf Pakistan a very ugly prospect indeed. Musharraf’s removal or death would likely be catastrophic to the interests of those nations struggling against Islamofascism.
Certainly, the Pakistani cleric copped it most aptly. However, any gloating at the nature of his death may well be overshadowed by wider consequences relating to it.
I am still unconvinced of the isolationist argument vis Iraq that would have had Western militaries – and probably as a result civilians – quit the entire Middle East, and leave Saddam to wreak havoc as he has before, but my goodness, the case for non-interventionist foreign policy has never looked so good at the moment as the insurgency in Iraq gets worse. Jim Henley sums up the “do as little as possible” school of libertarian foreign policy as well as anyone:
If a war is worth years of struggle, billions squandered and thousands or tens of thousands of dead on both sides, why isn’t peaceful change worth as much? Why is it a “bold initiative” to announce a “generational struggle” to transform a region of the world through a war that might or might not achieve its ends, but preemptively absurd to launch a generational struggle to transform the same region through nonintervention, to instill liberalism and justice by exemplifying it? Because people might get killed? People get killed the other way. Because it might not work? Look around you. The other way isn’t working now.
My main problem with Jim’s argument is that setting an example to the dictatorships, thugocracies etc of that region would strike me as a fairly drawn-out, if not rank impossible, endeavour (that’s putting it politely, ed). We are talking about a process that might last thousands of years. And I am afraid that in the meantime, the various despots in that region might not quite get with the Enlightenment programme and develop a continued fondness for blowing infidels up. At best, I would say that such folk might, even at their craziest, be deterrable, which is why I think the libertarian world-view – if I can presume to call it that – should focus on deterrence, and forswear the temptations of what folk called pre-emptive action. But again – and Jim and others have to answer this question – does observing the niceties of national sovereignty always trump other considerations? For me, one of the clearest-cut examples of justified and smart pre-emption was the Israeli airforce’s bombing of the Iraqi nuclear facilties in the early 1980s. No doubt some libertarian “leave-well-alone” foreign policy commenters fulminated about that event at the time, in a way that may have echoes now in what is being written about Israel’s actions in Lebanon (see the posts below).
What to do?
I take a more equivocal view of the current military actions in Lebanon than Dale. I strongly question the wisdom of dislocating communications and infrastructure in the non-Hezbollah controlled parts of the country, i.e. punishing people who are, if not natural allies of Israel (though some are), at least not currently Israel’s enemies.
And yet…
We cannot pretend that Lebanon is a normal nation-state. The Lebanese government does not in reality control Lebanon, or more correctly, it controls Lebanon’s various regions at the sufferance of the local factional leaders. Clearly just as the Lebanese government is not responsible for the actions of Hezbollah within Lebanon, they cannot then claim their sovereignty has been violated when Israel attacks Hezbollah within Lebanon: they cannot have it both ways. If they are responsible, then the Lebanese state must stop Hezbollah. As they clearly cannot do that, they cannot reasonably object to Israel doing so. But similarly Israel should be very discriminating upon whom they drop their munitions.
I cannot really complain about Israel hammering Hezbollah anywhere they can be found (and I do mean anywhere). Hezbollah must be destroyed in the most literal sense of the word. Moreover the people in Syria and Iran who make Hezbollah possible must also be destroyed, again quite literally… and political posturing, UN resolutions and negotiations will not achieve those objectives. To this end right now Israel should be striking targets in Iran and Syria in retaliation for Hezbollah activities. In short, whilst I am very unhappy to see Israel attacking the airport in Beirut, I would have little problem with them doing exactly that to Tehran or Damascus. I think they are ‘sharing the pain’ with the wrong people.
It is easy to point the finger at Israel (I am certainly not reflexively pro-Israeli myself and Lord knows they can be pretty arrogant and unsympathetic), but in truth I have yet to hear any workable alternatives to what they are doing being offered up by the critics. Hezbollah’s actions are intolerable and so why should Israel tolerate them? If not this then what should Israel do? Methinks this is not an easy question to answer.
The air attack on the Beirut airport in Lebanon has put me in an unusual position: I must condemn Israel’s act as one of egotistical stupidity of the highest order. it is in no one’s interest to push a newly liberated and tentatively democratic Lebanon back into the throes of barbarism and chaos from whence it so recently came. I cannot help but imagine this attack has solidified even the most open minded of the Lebanonese population into a common distaste of their southern neighbor. Should this cause violence amongst factions with Lebanon to flare again, it will be an open invitation for Syria to once more crush Lebanon under its dictatorial tank treads.
Their action is about as negative to American and British strategic interests as it is possible to get. I am certain they are getting exceedingly harsh and less than diplomatic words behind the scenes words from Condileeza Rice and from Tony Blair’s envoys as well.
The damage this has done to Israel’s cause is almost inestimable.
You have lost an awful lot of friends guys. Actions have consequences.
Remember not so long ago?
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