Israel's March of Folly
Harpers
Across the Middle East, Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, are more popular than ever. According to a New York Times story filed from Gaza, "the best-selling items for the past couple of weeks have been posters, T-shirts, buttons and coffee mugs featuring" the image of Nasrallah. Last Friday, a huge crowd of marchers took to the streets of Baghdad to show support for Hezbollah, and many smaller rallies have been held in the region.
From just about any vantage point - not least that of public relations - the war has been a disaster for Israel (and for its chief sponsor, the United States). The military campaign has displaced about a quarter of Lebanon's population, caused billions of dollars in damage to infrastructure, and, as of Sunday, killed as many as 900 people, overwhelmingly civilians, many of them children. "Israeli forces have systematically failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians in their military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon," said a report issued by Human Rights Watch last week. "[T]he failures cannot be dismissed as mere accidents and cannot be blamed on wrongful Hezbollah practices. In some cases, these attacks constitute war crimes." The report cited a July 13 Israeli air strike that "destroyed the home of a cleric known to have sympathy for Hezbollah but who was not known to have taken any active part in the hostilities. Even if the IDF considered him a legitimate target (and Human Rights Watch has no evidence that he was), the strike killed him, his wife, their ten children and the family's Sri Lankan maid."
Hezbollah for its part is firing "terrorist shells and rockets," to cite a story that ran on the Fox News website, while Israel is said to be seeking to avoid civilian casualties with its use of more virtuous American-supplied "smart" bombs. But Hezbollah's attacks thus far have killed about the same number of Israeli soldiers as civilians, while the Israeli Defense Forces are killing about ten Lebanese civilians for every Hezbollah militiaman. Read more
Across the Middle East, Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, are more popular than ever. According to a New York Times story filed from Gaza, "the best-selling items for the past couple of weeks have been posters, T-shirts, buttons and coffee mugs featuring" the image of Nasrallah. Last Friday, a huge crowd of marchers took to the streets of Baghdad to show support for Hezbollah, and many smaller rallies have been held in the region.
From just about any vantage point - not least that of public relations - the war has been a disaster for Israel (and for its chief sponsor, the United States). The military campaign has displaced about a quarter of Lebanon's population, caused billions of dollars in damage to infrastructure, and, as of Sunday, killed as many as 900 people, overwhelmingly civilians, many of them children. "Israeli forces have systematically failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians in their military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon," said a report issued by Human Rights Watch last week. "[T]he failures cannot be dismissed as mere accidents and cannot be blamed on wrongful Hezbollah practices. In some cases, these attacks constitute war crimes." The report cited a July 13 Israeli air strike that "destroyed the home of a cleric known to have sympathy for Hezbollah but who was not known to have taken any active part in the hostilities. Even if the IDF considered him a legitimate target (and Human Rights Watch has no evidence that he was), the strike killed him, his wife, their ten children and the family's Sri Lankan maid."
Hezbollah for its part is firing "terrorist shells and rockets," to cite a story that ran on the Fox News website, while Israel is said to be seeking to avoid civilian casualties with its use of more virtuous American-supplied "smart" bombs. But Hezbollah's attacks thus far have killed about the same number of Israeli soldiers as civilians, while the Israeli Defense Forces are killing about ten Lebanese civilians for every Hezbollah militiaman. Read more
posted by exoplanet at 4:31 PM
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