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On Lebanon (V)

The nadir may have come in February 2003, during the agitation before the invasion of Iraq, when Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein’s deputy prime minister, was brought to Italy to be feted at St. Francis’s church in Assisi and treated to an audience with John Paul II in Rome. But you can see the same impulse […]

The nadir may have come in February 2003, during the agitation before the invasion of Iraq, when Tariq Aziz, Saddam Hussein’s deputy prime minister, was brought to Italy to be feted at St. Francis’s church in Assisi and treated to an audience with John Paul II in Rome. But you can see the same impulse in the Vatican’s current secretary of state, Cardinal Angelo Sodano, who announced on Vatican Radio last week: “As it has done in the past, the Holy See condemns the terrorist attacks of one side as well as the military reprisals of the other. In fact, the right to defense of a state is not exempt from respect for the norms of international law, especially as regards the safeguarding of civilian populations. In particular, the Holy See now deplores the attack on Lebanon, a free and sovereign nation.”

The moral equivalence between terrorism and the response to terrorism was troubling–and, indeed, Sodano was indulging in more than moral equivalence, for he singled out the Israelis for blame “in particular.” The problem Israel faces is precisely that Lebanon is not “a free and sovereign nation,” but a weak and captive nation, unable to assert its sovereignty over areas dominated by a terrorist organization. ~Joseph Bottum, The Weekly Standard

Via Rod Dreher

I do enjoy how flexible international law can be for some people.  Apparently, “free and sovereign nation” is not a legal definition that invokes protections of the U.N. Charter, making aggressive war against it illegal, but a matter of perspective.  Apparently obligations under international law to safeguard civilian populations are all relative.  Isn’t it also convenient that the terrorist guerrilla movement of Hizbullah, now being held up as the reason to circumvent the protections Lebanon is owed under international law, is a direct product of the original, illegal invasion of Lebanon 24 years ago?  To strip a neighbour of his rights, the trick is to invade his territory once, stir up a violent resistance movement and then use that movement’s continued existence as a pretext to invade the territory again.  

There is something very slippery and inconstant about the way Mr. Bottum and some of the other supporters of Israel’s attacks on Lebanon have been making their arguments.  As it appears to me, it has gone something like this:

Israel Supporter: Israel is targeting Hizbullah in retaliation for its attacks and Israel is trying to free Lebanon from its grip.

Critic: But if Israeli is trying to free Lebanon from its grip, why does it seem to bombing primarily the civilian infrastructure and displacing the civilian population of poor, captive Lebanon?  Isn’t that against international law?

Israel Supporter: Weren’t you paying attention?  Hizbullah is part of Lebanon’s government, so all of Lebanon is complicit!  Israel has a right to self-defense!

Critic: So what Israel going to do to complicit Lebanon?

Israel Supporter:  Well, Israel’s going to pummel it into the ground, of course.  That’s what you get for being complicit in terrorism. 

In other words, supporters of Israel will pretend they’re doing Lebanon a favour when it is rhetorically useful and will otherwise care not a whit for the fate of the people of Lebanon, who have all somehow become guilty of Hizbullah’s crimes by dint of being Lebanese and nothing more.  You don’t have to be a cardinal at the Vatican, much less an editor of a religious journal, to see something profoundly wrong with that.  

As I see it, there has never been anything the ‘hostage’, Lebanon, could have done to avoid getting shot up in the process of its own ‘rescue’.  So far the ‘hostage’ has been the one taking most of the damage, while the ‘hostage-taker’ suffers least of all.  Perhaps I am not as learned as some folks, who can perceive justice in aggressive, preventive wars and discern charity in the dropping of cluster bombs on civilian villages, but the response to date seems not only disproportionate (a word neocons and their friends typically dislike partly because it was applied–again by that surly Vatican–to one of the best of all good wars, the first Gulf War) but so far largely misdirected.  It is as if Britain were supposed to be taking aim at the IRA and started bombing Dublin instead.  

Update: The war in Lebanon appears set to widen, which will delight the War Party here and unleash hell on hundreds of thousands of innocents.  Here is a report from Haaretz:

Syria will enter the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah if Israel Defense Forces ground troops enter Lebanon and approach Syria, Syrian Information Minister Mohsen Bilal said in an interview published on Sunday.

“If Israel invades Lebanon over ground and comes near to us, Syria will not sit tight. She will join the conflict,” he told “ABC” newspaper.

Second Update: For the benefit of Mr. Bottum, when the Vatican says it condemns both sides, well, it means exactly what it says.  From Catholic World News:

Pope Benedict said that in his view, the G8 statement “indicates the path” that should be taken toward peace in the Middle East. That statement had called for the safe return of Israeli soldiers who have been captured in Gaza and Lebanon; a halt to the rocket attacks and terror bombings on Israeli territory; the end of Israeli military operations in Lebanon; rapid withdrawal of Israeli forces from Gaza; and the release of Palestinian parliamentary leaders who have been arrested by Israeli forces.

“I have nothing to add,” Pope Benedict said, “except the importance of prayer that God will help us.”

The American cheerleading section’s solution of eliminating Hizbullah through mass military action is not on this list.  The Vatican’s lack of enthusiasm for the militarism of some circles in this country should not be counted as the Vatican’s failure, despite Mr. Bottum’s entreaties to do just that.

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