Entries from July 2006 ↓

Israel’s bombing campaign in Lebanon has so far killed 380 civilians, and wounded nearly a thousand more. Half a million Lebanese have been displaced. At first glance, this would seem to be a criminal, monstrous act. But Alan Dershowitz has taken it upon himself to explain to us why it’s actually probably ok:

We need a new vocabulary to reflect the realities of modern warfare. A new phrase should be introduced into the reporting and analysis of current events in the Middle East: “the continuum of civilianality.” Though cumbersome, this concept aptly captures the reality and nuance of warfare today and provides a more fair way to describe those who are killed, wounded and punished.

What follows is a lot of careful parsing of the word “civilian” that explains why people who let terrorists live among them are closer to the “deserve to die” end of the spectrum of civilianility than, say, a couple of five-year old boys who just happened to be playing soccer when the bombs started dropping.

But children don’t get a free pass:

Nor can women and children always be counted as civilians, as some organizations do. Terrorists increasingly use women and teenagers to play important roles in their attacks.

Dershowitz doesn’t make an effort to define the various points of his continuum, but we imagine that it would look something like this:

1. Innocent Civilians
2. Innocent But Slighty Tainted Civilians
3. Not Very Innocent At All Civilians
4. Not Innocent Civilians
5. Very Bad Civilians
6. Osama-Loving Civilians
7. Indistinguishable From Filthy Terrorists Civilians

So the five-year old boys would probably be Innocent Civilians, unless, of course, a terrorist strolls by when they’re playing soccer, and they don’t notify the nearest American authorities: then they’d become Innocent But Slighty Tainted Civilians. If they actually talk to the terrorist, they’re immediately demoted to Not Very Innocent At All Civilians. If they let the terrorist join their soccer game, then they are Not Innocent Civilians, at which point they become eligible for murder by bombs.

That’s the thing with the continuum. It’s slippery. There you are, one morning, watching TV with your family, secure in your Innocent Civilianism, when — suddenly and without warning — a message from Osama Bin Laden comes on. You don’t change the station, unfortunately, and by the end of his spiel you look up to discover that you’re an Osama-Loving Civilian, and so really have nothing to complain about when your house is flattened by that four-thousand-pound bunker buster.

The other issue that Dershowitz doesn’t address is the punishments that one should mete out as civilians slide up and down the scale. Indistinguishable From Filthy Terrorists Civilians must die, of course, and, really, you can probably kill indiscriminately all the way down to Not Innocent Civilians. But what about Not Very Innocent At All Civilians? Probably you shouldn’t kill them, but perhaps a maiming is in order: a shot across the bow of their mortality, as it were.

The Innocent But Slightly Tainted Civilians are a harder problem: probably the rule of thumb here is that you shouldn’t hurt them physically, but you can turn them out of their homes and send them scurrying into overcrowded cities, where they’ll vie with a million other civilians for whatever scant resources you’re letting into the country.

A tough thing, this continuum of civilianality. I applaud Mr Dershowitz for taking it on. The world we live in is really too complex for simple-minded, black and white demarcations between which civilians should die, and which shouldn’t.

Heartbreaking letter from Beirut, via Juan Cole …

The AUB hospital sent out an urgent call for blood donations. Others were organizing aid to refugee families housed in schools and other make-shift shelters. A protest against the Israeli bombing has been scheduled for Thursday at 11 am in the city center. Will anyone be listening and watching? Lebanon has only words and pictures with which to fight. As Khalil Gibran wrote, “your pain is the breaking of the shell that encloses your understanding.” By now, Lebanon must be the wisest of nations. Not everyone finds it easy to transmute pain into wisdom like Gibran’s Prophet. “Pity that the stags cannot teach swiftness to the turtles.” I fear that, for most, pain creates a reservoir of revenge: a pool of hatred in which to baptize another generation of killers. Does terror ever really work? And what becomes of the bombardier’s soul? In the film Fog of War, former US Secretary of Defense McNamara admits that, had the Japanese won World War II, he would have been convicted of war crimes for his involvement in the firebombing of Japanese cities in World War II. But who gave him, or anyone else with the power to win and write history, the license to kill?

Are the weak and the losers reduced to a mere muffled cry? Plenty of wisdom: plenty of blood. Is Lebanon’s cry audible?

Audible, but falling on deaf ears.

A brief word on vitriol. I mentioned in my last post that I sent a note to Josh Marshall the other day, objecting to a point he’d made about the Israeli incursion into Lebanon; and then, incredibly, I accused him of being in favor of murdering civilians.

Every time I read over my note, that nasty bit of unsubstantiated, outrageous meanness reaches out and slaps me in the face; and the more I read it, the harder it slaps. It’s punching me now, full roundhouse punches, nose crunching blood-spattering punches. Really, I can’t believe i said it.

I sent him an apology, of course, but the fact remains that the words dribbled out of my fingers and onto the screen without first passing through my decency filter, which I like to think stretches across the aperture of my mind like the Great Wall of China: unporous, impassible, absolute. Don’t know how it got through, but it did.

I agree with what Kevin Drum said recently, about why bloggers — and in particular, liberal bloggers — are so reluctant to post anything about the Middle East:

1. It sparks unusually vicious comment threads, something this blog hardly needs since comments here spin out of control often enough anyway. Needless to say, this phenomenon is fairly universal …

2. As with the conflict itself, punditry is heavily dominated by extremists on both sides. I normally take my cues on subjects I’m inexpert in from people whose sensibilities are similar to mine, but it’s nearly impossible to figure out who those people might be in this case.

Is this me? Is he describing me? One of my policies in life it to always approach a mirror prepared. Know where they are, don’t let them sneak up on you, and when you do look into one, make sure your face is composed into the person you expect to see. Firm up those jowls. Smile pleasantly, or glower handsomely. Don’t slouch.

Reading my note to Josh is like being surprised by a mirror, over and over again, and over and over again seeing someone you’d really rather not be.

I don’t think I’m wrong about what’s going in Lebanon right now. I don’t think I’m wrong about the basic injustice of the Israeli bombardment. I don’t think I’m wrong in my assessment of Bush’s stance on this whole issue.

But still: I wish I could be less unattractively right.

Josh Marshall, the brains behind Talking Points Memo, is one of the best things about the blogoverse. He’s smart, deeply knowledgeable, well-spoken, and just way cool. I often trust him to make up my mind for me.

But, in a recent post about the Israeli attack on Lebanon, he said this:

I think it is correct to see a good part of this as the soundings of groups allied with Syria and Iran, and to a degree acting in concert with him, to strike a new balance of power in the region … With that said, I think Israel is entirely within her right to react strongly to these provocations. [emphasis mine]

He goes on to say that invading Lebanon isn’t a wise thing to do, strategically — which is true. But it’s more than just unwise. It’s reprehensible, nonsensical, indefensible. I just can’t understand the argument that what Israel’s doing is ok, and I doubly can’t understand it coming from Mr Marshall.

I wrote a note to tell him that. Here’s some of what I said:

Lebanon is a sovereign nation, with a functional government that has very little control of the terrorist organization that lives within its borders, and a 3-million strong population of everyday people who have even less to do with them. Israel’s attack on the government and infrastructure of Lebanon isn’t just an overreaction — it’s a complete non-sequitur. It’s unhinged, and it’s almost guaranteed to accomplish the exact opposite of its aims …

I hope I don’t sound unhinged myself here. I lived in Beirut in the 70’s, so I know what it is to be caught in the middle of a larger battle — to be, in every important sense, a battlefield. I certainly don’t mean to trivialize or over-simplify this situation: I know that there are larger forces at play there, historical animosities and political realities expressing themselves through this latest conflict. All I’m saying is that the people of Lebanon are blameless here, and they don’t deserve to have this happen to them. Again.

He wrote back, and very civilly refuted a couple of my more facile arguments, while tactfully failing to mention that, early in my note, I’d essentially accused him of being a fan of murdering civilians. I feel very bad that this is my first correspondence with him. I’m sure he thinks that I’m a crackpot and an asshole, which I probably slightly am, on both counts.

Nevertheless: I don’t think I’m wrong here. Lebanon is triply cursed: they have to contend with Syria’s despotic regime to the North and East, Israels paranoiac jingoism to the South, Hizbullah’s uncompromising extremism within. But no matter what the geopolitical realities are here, the fact remains that Lebanon, and its people, are innocents, and they need someone to stand up for them. Specifically, they need us to stand up for them.

That’s not going to happen, of course. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Bush has no problem with what Israel’s doing, because, you know, the terrorists. His position seems to be “don’t bomb the fuck out of those innocent civilians too much.” Beirut was supposed to be Bush’s big success in the middle east, the first glimmerings of the promised wave of democracy emanating from the carnage in Iraq. Now he’s calmly standing by and watching all of that getting blown to pieces.

Who speaks for Lebanon?

This is being blogged everywhere, but I just can’t resist mentioning it here. Ted Stevens, Senator from Alaska, took it upon himself to describe the Internet to us, in the course of explaining why he’s against Net Neutrality:

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

[...]

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

[...]

Now I think these people are arguing whether they should be able to dump all that stuff on the internet ought to consider if they should develop a system themselves.

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it’s not using what consumers use every day.

It’s not using the messaging service that is essential to small businesses, to our operation of families.

This is possibly one of the funniest, most pathetic displays of proud, wilful ignorance I’ve seen since … well, since Bush last said something, about anything. But it’s hard to laugh too long here, because Stevens and people like him are making actual policy based on their ludicrous misapprehensions.

I don’t have anything against not knowing stuff, because that would make me a hypocrite. You could drive a universe through the vast, ragged holes in my understanding of pretty much everything. But still … I wouldn’t legislate based on my ignorance, and neither should Stevens.

So, yeah, I don’t want or expect him to grasp all the details of how the Internet works. But if he’s going to be making important decisions about the future of what’s arguably the most important communications medium in the world, he should fucking ask somebody.

I met an angel today, in Target.

I was there on important business, toaster over business. The only thing I know how to buy in Target is Advil and Tostitos, so I wondered disconsolately around the first floor for a while, failing to find toaster ovens. This was annoying because I had very important Frappuccino business to transact at the Starbucks down the road, and didn’t have time to fritter away on fruitless appliance expeditions.

So I rode the escalator up to the second floor, and passed a stocky Asian kid loitering at the top, blocking traffic. He didn’t get out of the way, so I had to squeeze around him. This additional annoyance settled on top of the trouble with the toaster oven, propelling me gently into the realm of mild pissiness.

I wondered around the second floor for a while, peering down aisles that didn’t have toaster ovens in them, then spun on my heel and went the other way. I was going past the escalators, lost in speculative Target schematics, kitchen appliance location probability graphs, Frappucino acquisition heuristics, when the Asian kid stepped out in front of me.

“Excuse,” he said, and took my hand. I stopped short, and looked at him, and all of a sudden I couldn’t breathe.

He had soft hands, a round, pleasant face, a placid, serene smile. He looked at me, but not quite at me, his eyes fixed on a point just over my head, radiating friendship, love, peace.

I froze. I couldn’t move. I didn’t know if he needed help, or if he was messing with me, or if he just wanted to hold my hand for a while. I didn’t ask. I didn’t smile. I didn’t do anything.

But he went on holding my hand. The bright fluorescent bustle of Target fell away, and we were in a bubble, the kid’s quiet serenity mixing with the ugly miasma of uncertainty leaking out of me. I was paralyzed, but the kid never stopped smiling.

And then it was over. He let go of me and stepped onto the escalator. I watched him ride down, watched him step off at the bottom and hang around there, studying the moving rubber handrail, letting it slide by under his hands. The whole episode couldn’t have lasted more than a couple of seconds.

After a while, I got on the escalator too. I didn’t know what my motives were, exactly. I didn’t know whether I’d stop and see if he needed help, or take him to wherever you take kids who’ve become detached from their parents … or what. And I’ll never know: before I got down there, a woman came up and touched his arm, and they walked away together, the kid looking around at racks of shorts, folded t-shirts, banks of sunglasses, with a kind of gentle, curious innocence.

I think we each of us meet angels at least once in our lifetimes. They come to us unannounced, when we’re vulnerable and naked, and strip us of the encrustations of adulthood, of all the callused artifice and cynicisms of age. They present themselves to our tenderest, truest selves, and ask: are you ready for this? Are you worthy of it?

I met my angel about an hour ago, at the top of the escalators, in Target, and couldn’t even find the voice to tell him that I wasn’t.