Crime and punishment

Nobody is really objective. Some people don’t try to be, but listening to CNN while on the treadmill this morning, there was little to be heard other than the carnage in Lebanon. Of course it’s real, it’s horrible and it’s infuriating, but does that make CNN objective? Collateral damage, our usual euphemism for civilian casualties, from the US invasion of Iraq was far higher, although I am fairly certain that US weapons were not deliberately aimed at housing blocks, hospitals or markets. We were often reminded that this was the case while the Shock and Awe was shocking and awing. Still some military targets were hard by civilian structures and when we attempted to bomb a restaurant that we thought held Saddam Hussein, we didn’t phone ahead for a reservation.

Of course the carnage continues in Iraq and is reported as one isolated event after another and presented as the work of outsiders or extremists without reference to the fact that such things were impossible before we destroyed the country, removed all leadership and opened the borders. It’s just more collateral damage that we regret cannot be avoided. The rogue troops who rape, loot and pillage, torture and kill are a fringe element that will be dealt with and they do not reflect on leadership or policy at all. Such things just happen. If we do disagree, we’re traitors, or worse: Liberals who don’t support the troops. Objectivity is relative.

Artillery rockets are not guided, they are fired over the horizon on a ballistic trajectory, like the Nazi Vergeltungswaffen; the V1 and V2, to land where they may in a certain area. When launched by Hezbollah or Hamas, they are as likely to hit an Arab child as an Israeli government building and serve to promote an atmosphere of terror as much or more than to damage infrastructure. Not much more than a dozen Israeli civilians have so far been killed from these random rocket attacks and not much coverage has been given. Perhaps the death toll would be higher if Hezbollah had weapons that could be accurately aimed and perhaps higher still if Israel put munitions caches in apartment buildings and parked rocket launchers next to buildings where people work and live and go to school, but the death toll in Lebanon is certainly quite a bit higher than in Israel and coverage of civilian carnage is relentless, emotional and filled with pictures of empty bassinettes and scattered toys. Rightly or wrongly, the incidents; the attacks that launched a thousand planes have been obscured by the blood of the innocent and the guilty.

Some years ago, I was excoriated by a German national in an internet forum because while I was being born, Dresden was in flames and the civilian death toll was enormous. The fellow went on an on, invoking the screams of old men, women and children, until I asked him about what noise those millions who died in Hitler’s gas chambers and ovens and death camps made? I asked who was responsible for the deaths of 50 million people; those who started it, or those who defended against it? As you can imagine, no such discussion can have a conclusion, and I fear that the current conflict will have no conclusion, much less will any discussion of it. Yet to my way of thinking, no discussion is relevant or objective or pertinant unless one question is answered: Does Israel have a right to exist or is it's existence an act of provocation?