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NokX wrote:

Fried Chicken wrote:

I smurfing hate israel.  Now they have just crossed a personal line with me.  They are smurfing idiots.  Half my family is from lebanon, and a lot of people who I care deeply about live in California, and work in major technological firms that are scattered about there.

then maybe the lebanese should stop firing rockets into israel, hmmm?

Gunmen in Lebanon shelled northern Israel fired at Israeli border troops on Wednesday

i'm not surprised by a lot of your alls reactions, though...  if a country is attacked they should just stick their head in the sand and forget about it.  this was expected of america after 9/11 as well.

India should seriously consider attacking America's ally, Pakistan, then. Those train bombings are considerably more provocative than three kidnapped soldiers and some mostly ineffective rockets.

Last edited by Ribtorus (2006-07-14 10:17 am)

Another option would be for the Lebanese government to invite the Syrians back in to the troubled south to get a grip on Hezbollah.

Wouldn't that be something.

Last edited by Ribtorus (2006-07-14 10:28 am)

Chickenhawk wrote:

You're just pissed off because this time, Christains are involved in the conflict. Boo hoo.

It's not that simple.  George Bush loves his christians, and he supposedly wants democracy everywhere, now christians are affected but he continues to support Israel.
And you cannot blame an incompentant government for not doing something about terrorists in the region that are supported by Syria and Iran.


And these boo hoo christians are my family.  Right now because of this bullsmurf Israel conflict I cannot even speak with my Grandma, or some close family friends, who btw are American citzens.

Thomas Friedman wrote a good opinion piece on this:

The Kidnapping of Democracy
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

When you watch the violence unfolding in the Middle East today it is easy to feel that you’ve been to this movie before and that you know how it ends — badly. But we actually have not seen this movie before. Something new is unfolding, and we’d better understand it.

What we are seeing in Iraq, the Palestinian territories and Lebanon is an effort by Islamist parties to use elections to pursue their long-term aim of Islamizing the Arab-Muslim world. This is not a conflict about Palestinian or Lebanese prisoners in Israel. This is a power struggle within Lebanon, Palestine and Iraq over who will call the shots in their newly elected “democratic’’ governments and whether they will be real democracies.

The tiny militant wing of Hamas today is pulling all the strings of Palestinian politics, the Iranian-backed Hezbollah Shiite Islamic party is doing the same in Lebanon, even though it is a small minority in the cabinet, and so, too, are the Iranian-backed Shiite parties and militias in Iraq. They are not only showing who is boss inside each new democracy, but they are also competing with one another for regional influence.

As a result, the post-9/11 democracy experiment in the Arab-Muslim world is being hijacked. Yes, basically free and fair elections were held in Lebanon, the Palestinian territories and Iraq. Yes, millions turned out to vote because the people of the Arab-Muslim world really do want to shape their own futures.

But the roots of democracy are so shallow in these places and the moderate majorities so weak and intimidated that we are getting the worst of all worlds. We are getting Islamist parties who are elected to power, but who insist on maintaining their own private militias and refuse to assume all the responsibilities of a sovereign government. They refuse to let their governments have control over all weapons. They refuse to be accountable to international law (the Lebanese-Israeli border was ratified by the U.N.), and they refuse to submit to the principle that one party in the cabinet cannot drag a whole country into war.

“Iraq, Lebanon and the Palestinians all held democratic elections,’’ said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi, “and the Western expectation was that these elections would produce legitimate governments that had the power to control violence and would assume the burden of responsibility of governing. ... But what happened in all three places is that we [produced] governments which are sovereign only on paper, but not over a territory.’’

Then why do parties like Hamas and Hezbollah get elected? Often because they effectively run against the corruption of the old secular state-controlled parties, noted Mr. Ezrahi. But once these Islamists are in office they revert to serving their own factional interests, not those of the broad community.

Boutros Harb, a Christian Lebanese parliamentarian, said: “We must decide who has the right to make decisions on war and peace in Lebanon. Is that right reserved for the Lebanese people and its legal institutions, or is the choice in the hands of a small minority of Lebanese people?”

Ditto in the fledgling democracies of Palestine and Iraq. When cabinet ministers can maintain their own militias and act outside of state authority, said Mr. Ezrahi, you’re left with a “meaningless exercise’’ in democracy/state building.

Why don’t the silent majorities punish these elected Islamist parties for working against the real interests of their people? Because those who speak against Hamas or Hezbollah are either delegitimized as “American lackeys’’ or just murdered, like Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister.

The world needs to understand what is going on here: the little flowers of democracy that were planted in Lebanon, Iraq and the Palestinian territories are being crushed by the boots of Syrian-backed Islamist militias who are desperate to keep real democracy from taking hold in this region and Iranian-backed Islamist militias desperate to keep modernism from taking hold.

It may be the skeptics are right: maybe democracy, while it is the most powerful form of legitimate government, simply can’t be implemented everywhere. It certainly is never going to work in the Arab-Muslim world if the U.S. and Britain are alone in pushing it in Iraq, if Europe dithers on the fence, if the moderate Arabs cannot come together and make a fist, and if Islamist parties are allowed to sit in governments and be treated with respect — while maintaining private armies.

The whole democracy experiment in the Arab-Muslim world is at stake here, and right now it’s going up in smoke.

Honestly, I would hope a respected columnist would actually differentiate between "democracy" and notions such as "rule of law" and "independent government institutions" just plain "proper governance."

JakeTheTall wrote:

Honestly, I would hope a respected columnist would actually differentiate between "democracy" and notions such as "rule of law" and "independent government institutions" just plain "proper governance."

I'm sure the pre-emption war apologists will find a way to sell what they regard as the deficiencies of democracy. They do it at home, so why not take it on the road?

Some things that would be worthwhile to contribute to the discussion:

1. I watched the CBC newsworld interview with a Lebanese authority (forget the name, the advisor the Prime Minister). When he was asked whether he believed that the Hezbollah must hand over the two soldiers, he avoided the question and instead talked about how disproportionate Israel's actions are and how much they are crippling Lebanon. This goes well with the theory some suggested here that the Lebanese government is UNWILLING to put the reins on Hezbollah. In addition, he also stated that Lebanon's army is no match for the IDF and as such Lebanon will try to avoid military confrontations. This looks to me as if they're inviting either Syria to step in or are trying to get as many countries condemning Israel for attacking a "defenseless democracy". In any case, there has been no cessation of bombing of Northern Israel by Hezbollah militants.

2. The "some" rockets (Katyushas) fired by Hezbollah actually number over 300 and are mostly directed at the northern towns and villages, with a couple of rockets hitting Haifa, one in the center. There are lots of casualties, and 2 dead. It is a general consensus that there will be more deaths as time goes by if current bombardment levels are maintained by Hezbollah.

3. When asked about the high toll of civilian casualties, Israel's ambassador to the UN answered that Israel targeted no civilian locations. The reason for a high death toll after the bombing of southern Lebanon is that a lot of the launching pods for the Katyushas are located in small homes with, in some cases, entire families as hosts. In most cases, the casualties are because of military targets being so close together to civilians. In addition, before bombing an area, Israeli planes drop notices of the impending bombing so that the inhabitants will have enough time to evacuate. The ambassador also added that he agrees with countries like China and Argentina about the response being disproporionate as he believes those countries would have deployed much more force if provoked the way Israel was.
If we are to believe what Israel's ambassador to the UN said about the disproportionate number of Lebanese civilian casualties, then the fault lies at the hands of the Hezbollah who install military targets among civilians and commit acts of war against sovereign countries. However, I would take caution before believing this entirely.

One question I want to ask is: Why are the Lebanese gov't, and pretty much all the other countries condemning Israel, asking Israel to stop its' bombardment at once, yet they don't choose to condemn Hezbollah for doing the same thing and kidnapping Israeli soldiers in the first place??

In addition, why do governments with terrorist parties (ie Hamas and Lebanon w/ Hezbollah) get more sympathy than governments that... you know.. build schools and factories instead of buying weapons and suicide belts for their "citizens" (granted, Lebanese government is not as much at fault as the Hamas)? Why are those governments worrying about civilian life anyway??

Seems to me a large reason why countries dislike Israel is because this conflict raises oil price and because they want to appease Iran. Stupid IMO.

What do you think?

Last edited by mig174 (2006-07-14 1:10 pm)

Yeah, we really should have just given them North Dakota, instead.

Last edited by user (2006-07-14 2:06 pm)

Is Israel trying to provoke more violence here? They're blowing up a ton of civilian infrastucture all over Lebanon, and plenty of civillians as well. How are they justifying bombing the suburbs of Beirut? The Hezbolla militants shooting the rockets are doing so from southern Lebanon, definately not Beirut. Israel is certainly justified in responding to this, but I think they're going way overboard here.

[Tycho?] wrote:

Is Israel trying to provoke more violence here? They're blowing up a ton of civilian infrastucture all over Lebanon, and plenty of civillians as well. How are they justifying bombing the suburbs of Beirut? The Hezbolla militants shooting the rockets are doing so from southern Lebanon, definately not Beirut. Israel is certainly justified in responding to this, but I think they're going way overboard here.

I guess Israel wants to punish the Lebanese for tolerating Hezbollah. It probably makes more sense to try to get rid of Hezbollah by going after its support structure rather than the relatively small and difficult to target concentrations of fighters in the south.

Of course the magic of democracy promoted Hezbollah to some electoral legitimacy in Lebanon, as it did Hamas in Palestine.  This sort of legitimises Israel's fight against Lebanon in a more general sense.

bedstuy wrote:

What do I think?  I think the entire idea of Israel in the first place in 1948 was a bad idea,  that's what I think.

Why?

I think this is a good opinion piece on the situation.

After Hezbollah guerrillas captured Israeli soldiers Wednesday, a furious Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz warned that the Israeli army would "turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years." Unfortunately, that statement was truer than he may have intended.

By pounding the Beirut airport and other civilian targets yesterday, the Israelis have taken a step back in time -- to tactics that have been tried repeatedly in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories without much success. Many Lebanese will be angry at Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah for provoking the crisis, but that won't translate into new control on the militia's actions. Instead, the outcome is likely to be similar to what has happened in Gaza over the past several weeks: Israeli attacks to free a captured soldier further weakened the Palestinian Authority without much damaging the terrorists.

A second point -- obvious from Gaza to Beirut to Baghdad -- is that the power of non-state actors is magnified when there is no strong central government. That may sound like a truism, but responding wisely can require some creative diplomacy. The way to blunt Hamas is to build a strong Palestinian Authority that delivers benefits for the Palestinian people. The way to curb Hezbollah is to build up the Lebanese government and army. One way to boost the Lebanese government (and deflate Hezbollah) would be to negotiate the return of the Israeli-occupied territory known as Shebaa Farms. That chance is lost for now, but the Bush administration should find other ways to enhance Siniora's authority.

Those are just excerpts....but the whole thing (it's not long) is worth reading.