I’m really enjoying the periodic forays I’ve been making into Leftie land regarding the current Israeli/Hezbollah war (you can see my previous posts here and here), so I thought I’d keep going.
No survey would be complete without checking in with Howard Dean. I know it’s already old news (two days old already), but you’ve just got to love it when Howard Dean, the Chairman of the Democratic National Committee comes out with these words of wisdom regarding the Middle East:
“If you think what’s going on in the Middle East today would be going on if the Democrats were in control, it wouldn’t, because we would have worked day after day after day to make sure we didn’t get where we are today. We would have had the moral authority that Bill Clinton had when he brought together the Northern Irish and the IRA, when he brought together the Israelis and the Palestinians.”
I assume that when Dean talks of “bringing together the Israelis and Palestinians” in a Clinton-designed Utopia, he’s factoring in the unending Qassam rockets the Palestinians fire on Israel. Or maybe he’s talking about the more than 70 suicide bombings in just the five years from 2000 to 2005 (a definite Clinton legacy). Or maybe he’s talking about Israeli’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, which had nothing whatsoever to do with Clinton, and which sparked a new cycle of violence culminating in Cpl. Gilad Shalit’s kidnapping from Israeli soil. In any event, all his talk is not only stupid on its face, it’s irrelevant, since I haven’t heard anything about Clinton’s peace making with Hezbollah, which is the real face of this war. Many have said it, but I’ll say it again — Howard Dean is God’s gift to Republicans. And now to the blogs….
The Daily Kos front page yesterday finally got around to tackling what’s going on in Southern Lebanon. The man who fancies himself a king-maker had this to say:
Kevin Drum explains his reasons for steering clear of this morass of a mess of a disaster of a quagmire of a sinkhole of a clusterfuck that is completely FUBAR.
Me? I grew up in a war zone. And there was one clear lesson I learned — there will never be peace unless both sides get tired of the fighting and start seeking an alternative.
It’s clear that in the Middle East, no one is sick of the fighting. They have centuries of grudges to resolve, and will continue fighting until they can get over them. And considering that they obviously have no interest in “getting over them”, we’re stuck with a war that will not end in any forseable future. It doesn’t matter what we bloggers say. It doesn’t matter what the President of the United States says. Or the United Nations. Or the usual bloviating gasbag pundits.
When two sides are this dead-set on killing each other, very little can get in the way.
And I, for one, sure as heck have no desire to get sucked into that no-win situation. I just hope that war-fatigue sets in at some point.
Wow, that’s deep. If I understand correctly (and I may be missing something in his positively Zen-like simplicity), Kos is saying they — that is, both sides of the battle lines — like to fight over there. That’s just staggeringly ill informed. As Dennis Prager pointed out today, the Israelis want to do anything but fight:
As a lifelong liberal critic of Israeli policies, the New York Times foreign affairs columnist Thomas Friedman wrote just two weeks ago: “The Palestinians could have a state on the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem tomorrow, if they and the Arab League clearly recognized Israel, normalized relations and renounced violence. Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know Israel today.”
Give Israel peace, and Israel will give you land.
It is the Arabs surrounding Israel, and their Iranian (Persian) masters who like to fight, and who embrace Israel’s destruction as their guiding principle. For Kos to equate the two sides as equally culpable in spoiling for a fight betrays an ignorance so vast and deep its tremendously scary when one thinks of the Democratic politicians courting him.
The Huffington Post, showing that it understands the significance of what’s going on, has expanded its coverage. It doesn’t take sides, offering blogging perspectives from all over, another bit of moral equivalence that irks me. Nonetheless, it gets points for taking the whole thing seriously and at least grappling with the deeper issues.
At Crooks & Liars, Amato takes Tony Snow to task for taking Helen Thomas to task (you go, Tony!); points to a story about James Woolsey calling for an attack on Syria; and cites Juan Cole approvingly when the latter criticizes Bush. In other words, at Crooks & Liars, it’s politics as usual. Amato gives no indication that he understands, or even cares about, what’s going on in the Middle East. In this, he’s taking precisely the same passive view as Kos, although not stating so explicitly. Again, from someone who has leveraged himself to a point of power where he is one of the primary liberal volices in a new political medium, this ignorance is downright scary.
It doesn’t get any better at Wonkette, whose mystique continues to elude me. Her blog plays out as a mere political gossip rag. I give her big points, though, for pausing to trash both Hillary and John Kerry along with her bad-mouthing of everyone else. If you’re going to be perpetually and shallowly mean, at least do it in an equal opportunity way. Because Wonkette has been assiduous in avoiding any mention of the Israeli/Hezbollah war, I’m going to remove her from future surveys and congratulate her for knowing her limitations (which seem to be many).
Eschaton, whose cryptic posts are too much work for me to link through and decipher, is also utterly silent about events in the Middle East. He, too, gets crossed from my list.
AMERICAblog against shows itself to be the blog with the most depth — although, I think, it reaches incorrect conclusions — when it comes to the current war against Hezbollah. It links to news stories about big events in the region, and even attempts some analysis of the situation. This analysis, however, misfires from the get go, by asserting that what we’re seeing is just more of the “cycle of violence” (or, as the analysis says, “tit for tat”). There is no cycle of violence. There is an organization that aims to obliterate Israel (that would be Hezbollah) and a country that wants desperately to be left alone, and will react to defend herself (that would be Israel). Only someone detached from reality could see those situations as equivalent.
Still, AJ, writing for AMERICAblog, figures out, as Howard Dean did not, that there fight with Hezbollah is different from the “same old, same old” fight with the peace-loving Palestinians. Thus, says AJ:
The current conflict is between Hezbollah and Israel, and in this fight Israel has more legitimacy than some give it credit for. This position is further supported by the remarkable and unprecedented recent reactions from other Arab states, which have criticized Hezbollah rather than the usual approach of blaming everything on Israel. A decent analogy is (the old) Afghanistan, a sovereign nation wherein a terrorist group operated with impunity. Virtually everyone agreed that the U.S. had the right to invade Afghanistan to get at al-Qa’ida because the Afghan government wouldn’t (and really couldn’t) control them itself.
So far, so good — and then the analysis collapses into the usual “disproportionate force” garbage. Apparently American liberal rules of fair play dictate that you should only fight a way if you’re pretty sure you’ll lose (that is, it’s unfair for a good army to fight a bad army). And if you actually have an advantage, you shouldn’t use it, so that you won’t run the risk of winning against the bad Army. Certainly, AJ’s underlying point in this regard is consistent with what I’ve heard on the radio lately from people sahing America and Israel are bullies because they’re fighting wars that they can actually win and, worse, they have the temerity when fighting these wars actually to try to win. The chutzpah! I really don’t think this ludicrous definition of “sportsmanship” is the type of thing Wellington was thinking when he talked about the playing fields of Eton, and their role in Britain’s ultimate victory over Napoleon at Waterloo.
Anyway, I’m probably beating a dead horse by now. It just disturbs me deeply that the blogs that have garnered the most support on the liberal side of the blogosphere, and that have positioned themselves most closely to Democratic politicans, are so abysmally ignorant about and disinterested in what I think is one of the most pressing and far-reaching issues of our day.
I’d be interested in your comments. Am I overreacting? Is there a real problem here? If I’ve correctly identified a problem, will it at least have the beneficial consequence of harming Democrats in November, when the American public starts thinking about whether liberals or conservatives will best be able to protect American interests in a changing world?
Talking to Technorati: Hezbollah, Hizbollah, Lebanon, Israel, Bloggers, Liberal blogs
Filed under: Arabs, Democrats, Hezbollah, Iran, Islam, Israel, Liberal blogs
I think what Kos is saying is that he is going to wait until Israelis and Palestinians kill each other to the last man, woman, and child, then he is going to go there and declare victory for his side. It’s not anything new after all. Two guys fight, fresh new guy comes in and claims the spoils after finishing the two fatigued fighters. Kos is like that, or at least he believes that it is justified to goad people into mutual annihilation.
After all, the Left likes cycles of violence. If the cycle of violence was broken, what would they exactly salve their guilt on any ways if there is no oppressed peeps to pity?
Of course Israelis want to get out of the fight. That’s the problem, as Kos sees it. War will not end and utopia will not begin, if both sides don’t get tired of fighting. This requires that Israelis suffer as much damage as Palestinians. This means both sides must be immolated in hate. It’s pure annihilation style anarchy and nihilism. There’s various degradations and modules depending on who on the Left you’re talking about. Kos is more pure than most. As they say, the weapons runners get rich from selling weapons to both sides. Kos pushes the weapon of ideology, and the fury of false righteousness. Jews, Judaism, Jihad, Muslims, all must be incinerated in the fires of purity for the Left to create real, lasting, peace.
Does anyone really believe that Howard Dean would not use nuclear weapons to purify the Middle East, and claim that he has made perpetual peace on earth? Of course they would, the Democrats are the war party, in world history only a Democrat, Truman, used nuclear weapons on civilian and industrial cities of an enemy nation. Don’t be fooled by Democrat propaganda about “peace” and whatever. Look deeper. Religious fanaticism isn’t something the Islamic Jihad has a monopoly on.
In actual fact, it isn’t ideology or even bloodthirstyness that causes people to committe attrocities against humanity. No, it is the inherent belief that what they are doing is righteous, that it will lead to a better world, this justifies in people’s mind the destruction of life. The Democrats may have the “ideology” of something they call pacifism or whatever, chickenhawk little perhaps, but this is not the model you should use to predict their actions when they gain power.
It all comes down to the mental and spiritual health of the person, the individual. It seems that happens a lot these days.
http://www.blackfive.net/main/2006/07/on_limits.html
That link describes the real path to peace, without mutual destruction. All other paths lead to complete, utter, annihilation, of one or the other side in this war amongst humanity unleashed. The Democrats would love the excuse to fight. I say again, the Democrats would love the excuse to purge humanity of its weaknesses. I do not doubt this, because even after making this statement with only my memory to back it up, I can go find something to support it. Clintons’ letter in 1969 for example.
From my work I came to believe that the draft system itself is illegitimate. No government really rooted in limited, parliamentary democracy should have the power to make its citizens fight and kill and die in a war they may oppose, a war which even possibly may be wrong, a war which, in any case, does not involve immediately the peace and freedom of the nation.
The draft was justified in World War II because the life of the people collectively was at stake. Individuals had to fight, if the nation was to survive, for the lives of their countrymen and their way of life. Vietnam is no such case. Nor was Korea an example where, in my opinion, certain military action was justified but the draft was not, for the reasons stated above… - Clinton in a letter to ROTC
I ask, what is the best way to threaten the lives of the American people collectively, and therefore justify the destruction of an entire race and demographic? You would know the answer from Grim’s intel brief if you read it. What is the best way to ensure that things immediately involve the peace and freedom of the nation? What happened right after Clinton left office? Do you see the meta-strategy of the Philosophy of the Left? It appears, again and again, if you know what patterns to look for.
If you’re going to be perpetually and shallowly mean, at least do it in an equal opportunity way.
Indeed, such is Wonkette that she is not particularly partisan, except on screen of course. You cannot be partisan with that level of perspective.
And if you actually have an advantage, you shouldn’t use it, so that you won’t run the risk of winning against the bad Army.
And what do you think the natural logical conclusion of this “tactic” is? Someone mentioned it before here or at neo’s site. The natural logical conclusion is what Winston said. Don’t fight now when you can win with little cost? Okay, you can fight latter when you have to sacrifice your wife and children. Is the Democrats on the Left suicidal then? Absolutely not. You mistake and underestimate the power of self-righteousness and religious zealotry when you believe such leads to a suicidal belief. Their logic is unshatterable concerning this point. You remember all those Hollywood movies where the cops catch the bad guy, but he can’t shoot the bad guy cause he surrendered or whatever? Do you remember what actually happens to these bad guys that we know should be killed? The Hollywood mofos kill them. But the special part is how they kill them. They don’t kill them via assassination and instantaneous fatality strikes with gun or blade. No, what they do is have the “hero” lower his weapon, turn his back, and show mercy. Then suddenly the bad guy has this instant hidden weapon in hand and is about to use it, but low and behold our hero is the master mofo cracker and shoots dead the sota. Really. Again, their logic is unshatterable on this score. Religious zealots never believe they will lose, how can they, ain’t Allah on their side? Ain’t the righteousness of the Rule of Law, and the Separation Between Church and State, on the side of the Democrats? Every side believes God is on their side, military psychology has already recognized this and taken measures to correct the bias.
This is not a philosophy from the world. The citizens of the world know too much cruelty and hopelessness to ever believe in the infallibility of their “heroes”. No, this is a philosophy from the decadent core of America, something called Hollywood. Dumb, ignorant, fools are a dime a dozen. Dumb, ignorant, fools with bigazillions in money, however, are not so common.
Again, to be fair to the enemies of humanity, is to be cruel to the weak, whom has never been shown one iota of fairness from the strong of this world. Grim’s intel brief highlights this. We are cheating by occupying Iraq and building democracy there. We are cheating in the hopes of altering the odds in our favor, so that we are not attacked at home. If we are not attacked at home, we will never be required to retaliate with nuclear or even massive conventional weapons like the MOAB or Air Fuel Bomb. There will be NO immediate threat to the freedom or safety of the nation, we will prevent it from getting to that stage. This means waging unpopular wars.
The Democrats would love an excuse to purify this world. I would prefer not to give them one. Oh, they aren’t disinterested, they’re waiting for the bodies to decompose. The field must be prepared for purification after all.
Am I overreacting? Is there a real problem here?
Well, after reading what I wrote, am I overreacting? You decide if there is a real problem here. I know what I believe, and what I’ve seen, and the psychological profile of people on Left, both Democrats like Clinton and the grassroots/netroots version.
If I’ve correctly identified a problem, will it at least have the beneficial consequence of harming Democrats in November, when the American public starts thinking about whether liberals or conservatives will best be able to protect American interests in a changing world?
As for local politics, that’s a toss up between personal motivations. There’s too many motivations for individuals that I can’t predict who they will vote for. It is not even a Presidential election. I mostly study the polls about Iraq, not the US. And certainly not a state/federal election cycle. I leave that to politicians and those who work for them.
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The Left has always confused promoting peace with enabling war. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were prime example of this.