Wednesday, July 26, 2006
Zero-Sum Solution
I haven't had much good to say about anything that Richard Cohen of WaPo has written since he boarded the Bush bandwagon in the run-up to Junior's Misadventure in Mesapotamia™ - that changes today. Cohen summed up the problem and the solution about as succinctly as anyone could possibly do with a pen and paper - keyboard and mouse, if you will. Richard Cohen said:
"The dire consequences of proportionality are so clear that it makes you wonder if it is a fig leaf for anti-Israel sentiment in general. Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness. For Israel, a small country within reach, as we are finding out, of a missile launched from any enemy's back yard, proportionality is not only inapplicable, it is suicide. The last thing it needs is a war of attrition. It is not good enough to take out this or that missile battery. It is necessary to reestablish deterrence: You slap me, I will punch out your lights."Zero-for-zero - no dead Jews, no dead Arabs/Chaldeans/Persians. Seems like a reasonable idea to me - any takers?
"These calls for proportionality rankle. They fall on my ears not as genteel expressions of fairness, some ditsy Marquess of Queensberry idea of war, but as ugly sentiments pregnant with antipathy toward the only democratic state in the Middle East. After the Holocaust, after 1,000 years of mayhem and murder, the only proportionality that counts is zero for zero. If Israel's enemies want that, they can have it in a moment." (emphasis mine)
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yeah yeah...i get all that.
I guess I even agree. But the idea of just sitting by while Israel tees off on Lebanon...makes me uncomfortable. Not uncomfortable enough to tell them to stop...but Im not about to reach for the pom pons, either.
If it were only that simple...something tells me this current offensive....bodes of further destruction to come.