1. From yesterday’s AP, a comment by the UN’s Jan Egeland on Hezbollah’s use of human shields:
“Consistently, from the Hezbollah heartland, my message was that Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending… among women and children,” Egeland said. “I heard they were proud because they lost very few fighters and that it was the civilians bearing the brunt of this. I don’t think anyone should be proud of having many more children and women dead than armed men.”
Human Rights Watch rightly concludes that Hezbollah’s behavior does not diminish Israel’s culpability for civilian deaths:
[Israel] is not relieved from this obligation [to spare civilians] on the grounds that it considers Hezbollah responsible for having located legitimate military targets within or near populated areas or that Hezbollah may be using the civilian population as a shield. Even in situations of Hezbollah’s illegal location of military targets, or shielding, Israel must refrain from launching any attack that may be expected to cause excessive civilian loss in comparison to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.
2. At the outset of this war, Hezbollah took Israeli soldiers captive for the express purpose of using them in a prisoner exchange. There’s been confusion among some on the left about the legitimacy of this. According to Human Rights Watch, it is categorically illegitimate:
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nassrallah has stated that the captured soldiers will be used to negotiate the release of Palestinian, Lebanese and other Arab prisoners from Israel. The use of captives who are no longer involved in the conflict for this purpose constitutes hostage-taking. Hostage-taking as part of an armed conflict is strictly forbidden under international law, by both common Article 3 and customary international law, and is a war crime.
Hezbollah’s apologists on the left need to stop being selective.
3. On Iraq — remember Iraq? — John McCain, appearing last night on The Daily Show, perpetuated the myth that Iraq is mired in an insurgency. In fact it is mired in a civil war. (I’m not sure this has entered the collective consciousness of the street-protest left either.) McCain reiterated the need for capable Iraqi military and police units to take over for U.S. troops, but capability is not the issue. Massacres are being carried out by people wearing military and police uniforms, sometimes as a disguise, sometimes not. The sole justification for the continued U.S. presence is to provide order, but this has become a bad joke. There is no order to speak of, and there never was.
4. Is it World War III? Previous world wars have involved Europe’s major powers fighting each other almost to the point of oblivion, which is all but inconceivable today. The character of today’s global conflict is very different. But it’s hard to deny that the world is at war.
[P.S. Bill Weinberg and WW4 Report have dealt with this question, of course. Was it Fred Halliday who distinguished between two cold wars, the Reagan era being the second? If that’s the case, then it’s World War 5.]
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