Chris Bertram

If you aren’t reading “Billmon”:http://billmon.org/ on the war in Lebanon, well you should be.

From one of his “more recent posts”:http://billmon.org/archives/002581.html :

bq. I’ve been watching events in the Middle East off and on for the past 25 years, and I’ve seen the Israelis get ugly before. But I can’t remember a time when I’ve seen them this ugly — Ariel Sharon’s scowling mug excepted, of course. It’s almost as if bits of Sharon’s DNA have been duplicated and injected into the entire Israeli cabinet and the general staff: Massively disproportionate use of force (as defined in the Geneva Conventions, not the fevered war porn fantasies of Right Blogistan) reprisal terror bombings, an if-it-moves-shoot-it mentality on the ground:

bq. “Over here, everybody is the army,” one soldier said. “Everybody is Hezbollah. There’s no kids, women, nothing.”

bq. Another soldier put it plainly: “We’re going to shoot anything we see.”

bq. And now a proposal to turn all of southern Lebanon into a free fire zone.

bq. This all might be considered normal military behavior for, oh say, a Bosnian Serb militia captain, circa 1991, but when the political and military leaders of an allegedly civilized state start talking this way, something big is going on, and going wrong.

UPDATE: A couple of people have emailed to make the point that the two quotes from soldiers need to be read in the context of the previous paragraph of the report from which they are taken, which reads:

bq. Now more Israeli soldiers are on the way, including an armored unit being transferred from Gaza to Lebanon. They have been told civilians have left the region where they will fight.

Perhaps that makes those soldiers’ remarks less damning as indicators _of their personal attitudes_ , but it rather raised the question of who is telling them the falsehood that civilians have led the region and why, since their acceptance of that falsehood might well lead them to kill non-combatants. In the context of Billmon’s post as a whole — which you can read by following the link — it is clear that the “proposal to turn all of southern Lebanon into a free-fire zone” is a reference back to statements by the Israeli Justice minister Ramon, and not a conclusion based on those quotes from soldiers.

I wish Daniel would post more on CT and less on the Guardian’s Comment is Free site, partly because I worry that regular CT readers may sometimes miss his pieces. Today he has “a really interesting article”:http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/daniel_davies/2006/07/dumping_dumping.html arguing that agricultural subsidies aren’t always bad for the global poor and, indeed, by lowering prices for Africa’s consumers, may often be good for them. That definitely goes against the conventional wisdom (both left and right) in blogdom. Definitely worth a read.

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“Mary Wells”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Wells came on the radio the other day singing “My Guy”, and when she sang the line

I’m sticking to my guy like a stamp to a letter

it set me thinking about the way that old technologies get referred to in popular song. There’s no end of trains, especially in country music, but even horses and ferries get a lot of attention. Old technology is homely and part of the shared cultural experience even of people who hardly use it. By contrast, digital technology hardly gets a mention, and when it does the results can be embarassing. “Cheezeball.net refer to this cringeworthy effort”:http://www.cheezeball.net/Features/OTSD-RunninOutOfMemory.htm from one Tim O’Brien:

My color screen won’t even function,
My hard drive it went soft, my application coughed,
and I’m a runnin’ out of memory for you.

Ugh!

“Bob Harris”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio2/shows/bobharriscountry/index.shtml played a Guy Clark song tonight called “Analog Girl”. It was pretty good, and managed to mention email and websites without making me want to curl up and die. But of course the whole point of the song is that its heroine is authentic because she eschews all contact with the digital world. Other non-embarassing mentions of computers, technology and the internet in popular song?

“Steven Poole”:http://www.unspeak.net/ seems to have gone on holiday, so it must fall to others to catalogue the emergence of new unspeak terms. “Rebalancing” seems to be the vogue word with British government ministers at the moment. It is used when the government wants to restrict the rights of people accused of crimes, to promote summary punishment of offenders, to impose harsher sentences, and so on. The open admission that the government wants to restrict civil liberties would cause many people to worry about justice. “Rebalancing”, with its tacit reference to the scales of justice, and its suggestion that this or that measure is merely the tuning of a delicate machine, aims to calm such anxieties. Authoritarian thug Home Secretary John Reid is “a frequent user”:http://society.guardian.co.uk/crimeandpunishment/story/0,,1824989,00.html of the word, and I see that blogger Oliver Kamm “likes it too”:http://oliverkamm.typepad.com/blog/2006/07/justice_means_s.html .

Michael Walzer has “a piece in the New Republic”:http://www.tnr.com/user/nregi.mhtml?i=20060731&s=walzer073106 which addresses the question of how Israel may legitimately prosecute its war in Lebanon. There’s much to agree with in the piece, especially since Walzer is clear about the impermissibility of deliberately killing civilians and deliberately destroying the infrastructure necessary to support civilian life. There’s also much with which I disagree. Walzer tends to take IDF claims about the extent to which they actually do seek to minimize civilian casualities at face value; the reports from Lebanon would seem to support a more sceptical stance. I was, however, brought up short by this:

bq. the Israeli response has only a short-term aim: to stop the attacks across its borders… Until there is an effective Lebanese army and a Palestinian government that believes in co-existence, Israel is entitled to act, within the dialectical limits, on its own behalf.

Now I don’t dissent from the proposition that Israel is entitled to act to stop attacks across its borders. But Walzer’s linkage of that claim to the capacity of the Lebanese government is surely perverse. The claimed legitimacy of many of the Israeli actions has hinged on the failure of Lebanese government to act and on its legal responsibility to do so. Attacks on facilities outside the Hezbollah zone of control have been conducted with this explicit justification. But if it is part of the case for action that the Lebanese government actually lacks the capacity to act — as it surely does — then those operations were wrong.

Israel can’t simultaneously base its justification for action on the responsibility of the Lebanese government to act _and_ on its incapacity to do so, except insofar as it limits itself to actions that an effective Lebanese government would be duty-bound to perform, namely, suppressing Hezbollah. But Israel hasn’t limited itself to such actions, it has attacked other Lebanese targets.

The Walzer justification could surely only be offered in good faith by a party that was also committed to enabling the Lebanese government to exercise effective sovereignty over its territory. The Israeli attacks aren’t strengthening the post-Cedar-revolution government, they are increasing the probability that Lebanon will once again descend into being a failed state.

Trying to make sense of what Israel is actually doing is hard, in my opinion. I don’t believe that Israel can destroy Hezbollah by direct military action, and I’m sure they don’t believe so either. The point of their action can’t be to get the Lebanese government to act, because, as the Walzer justification insists, they lack the capacity to do so. So what are they trying to do? My guess, is that they are trying to exploit the US commitment to a post-Syrian Lebanese order to bounce the US into acting against Syria and Iran. “Take action Condi, or we’ll screw an important plank of your Middle East policy” is the message, and this might indeed be an effective way to get Hezbollah to stop firing rockets. If Iran or Syria pushed Hezbollah to provoke Israel (and I think it very likely they did) then presumably they’re also trying to pressure the US to make a deal in some way whilst they can. Lebanese civilians are expendable chips in what looks like a high stakes game of diplomatic poker.

One of our loonier commenters referred yesterday to the “locally predominant anti-Israel consensus” at Crooked Timber. Odd that. One of our contributors strongly identifies with Israel and I spoke up last year against the proposed academic boycott by UK academics. (One unexpected consequence of which was that I was absolutely deluged for a while by emails from pro-Israel lobby associations, keen to share with me their view of the latest Palestinian outrages. No wonder bloggers of a certain disposition don’t struggle to find material to relay.) We don’t have any kind of a party line on Israel at CT, but my guess is that most of us share the view that many sensible Israelis have. Namely that an eventual solution will involve two states with something like the 1967 borders, and that it would be better if that came about sooner and with less bloodshed rather than later and with more.

All of which is a preamble to saying that “the current actions of the Israeli government”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5177346.stm , in bombing facilities like Beirut Airport and a power station in Gaza, in deliberately making civilians suffer (and in many cases causing their deaths) are illegal and disproportionate, words that don’t do justice to the bloody reality. Collective punishment and reprisal are not permissible actions, but that is plainly what is going on here. Lebanese people are being killed as a matter of policy in order to put pressure on the Lebanese government. There is also the matter of the Israeli government continually referring to actions against its soldiers as “terrorist”. At other times they have made a big deal out of the unwillingness of news organizations to use the term, but when they openly seek to gain the rhetorical benefits of the word in relation to actions that are plainly military, though irregular, they illustrate why the BBC and others operate the policy that they do.

Saying this is not to offer apologetics for Hamas or Hezbollah. Seizing soldiers as prisoners of war may not be illegal, but seizing anyone to use them as a hostage plainly is. And there seems to be evidence that Hezbollah’s actions are part of a power play by a Syrian government that once again sees Lebanon and Lebanese civilians as expendable pawns. But what Israel is doing in Lebanon and Gaza at the moment is wrong, and that needs to be said.

UPDATE: See Jonathan Edelstein at “The Head Heeb for some further comment”:http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/032451.html .

The British “pro-war left” blog Harry’s Place, to which we still link in our sidebar, has recently expanded its roster of bloggers. One of the new crew, Brett Lock, has now posted “a lengthy diatribe”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/archives/2006/07/12/a_little_pizza_jordan_a_little_pizza_israel.php about the sinister campaign that has led Palestinian schoolgirls to bake a Pizza in the shape of a Palestine that appears include Israel too. This on the basis of an article in a small circulation London local paper. I thought this kind of thing — objectively terrorist cake-blogging — was the preserve of Fafblog or The Onion, or of wingnuts like Malkin (remember the “crescent-shaped” UA93 memorial?). Whatever next?

Steven Poole, our guest-blogger from last week, has this to say about “asymmetric warfare”:

bq. Asymmetric warfare’ is the term employed by the US military for fighting people who don’t line up properly to be shot at: on the one side you have battalions of American infantry, marines, tanks and aircraft; and on the other you have terrorists, or guerrillas, or militants, or insurgents. [“Read the whole thing”:http://unspeak.net/C226827506/E20060611135824/index.html , as they say. cb]

Of course the reason people don’t line up to be shot at, wearing proper uniforms, distinguishing themselves from the civilian population, and so on, is that it would be suicidal so to do. And here lies a real difficulty for conventional just war theory. If recourse to war is sometimes just — and just war theory says it is — but it may only be justly fought within the jus in bello restrictions, then it looks as if an important means to pursue justice is open to the strong alone and not to the weak. Faced with a professional army equipped with powerful weaponry, people who want to fight back have no chance unless they melt into the civilian population and adopt unconventional tactics. If those tactics are morally impermissible because of the risks they impose on non-combatants, then it looks as if armed resistance to severe injustice perpetrated by the well-equipped and powerful is also prohibited. And that looks crazy.

[click to continue…]

Well here we are, and I might as well start things off. I’ll be backing Italy. The French team have played some nice football, but France as a nation were largely indifferent to the competition until their team got within sight of the trophy. The Italians, on the other hand, care deeply. My Italian friends will be ecstatic or suicidal; my French ones will either give a smile of contentment or a shrug of resignation.

Many thanks to Steven Poole for a very stimulating series of guest posts on topics as diverse as football, religion, Chomsky and torture. Be sure to head over to Steven’s own blog “unspeak.net”:http://unspeak.net/ , from where you can follow the links to buy his excellent book Unspeak in which he dissects the evasive and shameful rhetoric of our many professional apologists for power.

Thomas Scanlon in What We Owe to Each Other:

bq. Suppose that Jones has suffered an accident in the transmitter room of a television station. Electrical equipment has fallen on his arm, and we cannot rescue him without turning off the transmitter for fifteen minutes. A World Cup match is in progress, watched by many people, and it will not be over for an hour. Jones’s injury will not get any worse if we wait, but his hand has been mashed and he is receiving extremely painful shocks. Should we rescue him now or wait until the match is over? (p. 235).

Hmm. I can see that some members of the Harvard philosophy department might act now, but as an appeal to commonly-held moral convictions, I think this one fails. (h/t Martin O’N and a few others.)

It was interesting to watch England’s defeat in a bar in Dublin. The locals were plainly pleased with the result, and so were — on the whole — RTE’s studio panel. But I rather got the impression that the anti-Englishness was more for form and tradition’s sake than based in any deep feelings of hostility. Contrast that with the Scots. I just wouldn’t have felt comfortable (or safe) to cheer England on in Glasgow.

I had a chat with an Estonian philosopher on the subject, which revealed a couple of interesting data points. First, that Estonians don’t feel anything like the degree of sporting antagonism to the Russians that you’d expect (she found the Scottish feeling about the English mystifying). Second, she was rather hoping that the Germans would do well. I’d hypothesized the day before that no-one except the Germans themselves would be supporting their team (with the possible exception of Austrians and the odd relic of a Nietzschean colony in Paraguay). It seems I was wrong: Estonians will happily cheer for the Germans. (The English, on the other hand, backed Argentina against Germany to the last, despite a recentish war and some notable grudge matches between England and Argentina.)

There are clearly some patterns out there reminiscent of those typical of the Eurovision song contest. (Maybe a Finnish team composed of axe-wielding lunatics in latex masks would get widely supported.) So which other countries do your compatriots support? And which do they have an “anyone but X” policy towards?

Just back from going to hear Tony Blair give “a speech”:http://www.pm.gov.uk/output/Page9737.asp on the criminal justice system. It was the usual stuff about “rebalancing” the system in favour of the victim, with a lot of noise about the need for “fundamental debate” on principles but no actual discussion of said fundamentals. An important rheorical subtext in the speech was Blair-as-outsider, pitted against the “legal and political establishment”, which is a bit much coming from a legal professional from Derry Irvine’s chambers who has been Prime Minister for the past nine years! There was also a heap of cod sociology, reminiscent of “Henry’s post the other day”:https://crookedtimber.org/2006/06/20/speaking-sociology-in-clear/ , about how we once lived in nice cosy communities but that this stable order has been swept away by globalisation to be replaced by anomie etc. Blair spoke as if he intends to go on and on, which will be bad news for Gordon Brown if true (but maybe PMs always talk like this).

There was an uncomfortable amount of attention to immigration and asylum seeking in the speech, including this:

bq. Here is the point. Each time someone is the victim of ASB, of drug related crime; each time an illegal immigrant enters the country or a perpetrator of organised fraud or crime walks free, someone else’s liberties are contravened, often directly, sometimes as part of wider society.

I’m quite puzzled by why Blair thinks that the mere entry of an illegal immigrant amounts to a contravention of someone’s liberty.