James makes an important point:

So I suppose I’m less concerned about Obama’s support for that mess of a war than the dignity-promotion principle — which, in a judgment I share with Daniel, remains a cipher at best.

Certainly, the idea that it is the U.S. government’s job to promote “dignity,” which is potentially even more nebulous and manipulable a concept than democracy, can lead to an endless number of pledges of support and funding.  It represents not so much a recognition that democracy promotion is inherently flawed, destabilising and counterproductive as it does a belief that Mr. Bush and company have been too limited in their willingness to intervene in other countries at every level.  Team Obama’s problem with the “freedom agenda” is that it has been too superficial, and they intend to go much deeper, which in turn implies that they apparently intend to get us stuck much deeper in the conflicts and problems of all those countries to which we are supposedly “inextricably” tied.  Forget nation-building or building institutions, which are hard enough in the best of times–Team Obama calls for dignity-building, which is almost infinitely more open-ended and aimless.  To repudiate the policies of hubris, they offer hubris cubed.   

I would add that in the specific case of Lebanon the “human shields” aspect of the conflict has been disputed by Amnesty and others, but even if it were true that would not explain why so much of Beirut was reduced to rubble or why Lebanon’s infrastructure was systematically destroyed (or why civilians fleeing the south were repeatedly targeted by the IAF).  It is not simply that the war killed many civilians and displaced a vast number, but that the campaign was conducted almost from the first day with a reckless disregard for the civilian population of Lebanon.