Category: Politics (explicit)

Everybody lives in a coccoon. If you can laugh at yours, it’s a good sign.

Bernhard-Henri Levy wrote an excellent essay from and about Israel in the NYTimes last Sunday:

Zivit Seri is a tiny woman, a mother, who speaks with clumsy, defenseless gestures as she guides me through the destroyed buildings of Bat Galim — literally “daughter of the waves,” the Haifa neighborhood that has suffered most from the shellings. The problem, she explains, is not just the people killed: Israel is used to that. It’s not even the fact that here the enemy is aiming not at military objectives but deliberately at civilian targets — that, too, is no surprise. No, the problem, the real one, is that these incoming rockets make us see what will happen on the day — not necessarily far off — when the rockets are ones with new capabilities: first, they will become more accurate and be able to threaten, for example, the petrochemical facilities you see there, on the harbor, down below; second, they may come equipped with chemical weapons that can create a desolation compared with which Chernobyl and Sept. 11 together will seem like a mild prelude. For that, in fact, is the situation. As seen from Haifa, this is what is at stake in the operation in southern Lebanon.

Israel did not go to war because its borders had been violated. It did not send its planes over southern Lebanon for the pleasure of punishing a country that permitted Hezbollah to construct its state-within-a-state. It reacted with such vigor because the Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map and his drive for a nuclear weapon came simultaneously with the provocations of Hamas and Hezbollah. The conjunction, for the first time, of a clearly annihilating will with the weapons to go with it created a new situation. We should listen to the Israelis when they tell us they had no other choice anymore. We should listen to Zivit Seri tell us, in front of a crushed building whose concrete slabs are balancing on tips of twisted metal, that, for Israel, it was five minutes to midnight.

As a bonus, he also manages to bring kaballah and rocketry together (a little easier at that permeable border than Pynchon’s merkabah mysticism).

There’s also a neat article by Barry Rubin in the current ish of Foreign Affairs about Israel’s security strategy (reg. required), written before the kidnappings by Hamas and Hezbollah. While it doesn’t predict the very current events, it does help explain the political and military evolution of Israel’s strategy of withdrawing from southern Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank.

F*** Ralph Reed!

I bet Rep. McKinney will come out swinging.

I haven’t written about the war that broke out between Israel and Lebanon this weekend because I don’t know what to say.

I feel like I did in the months after 9/11: tracking all the wheels-within-wheels, trying to understand who stands the most to gain from which actions, whose decisions may backfire, which groups will break from their traditional responses.

As you can guess, I’m paralyzed. All I can do is hope for the safety of my family and friends (including my buddy Mitch, who’s reporting from Beirut), and for a quick, decisive end to hostilities.

I don’t think that’s going to happen, but the status quo hasn’t been around for years.

With all the heaviness out of the way, I offer you proof that I’m still a retard who goes for cheap laughs.

Official VM buddy Mitch Prothero has an article on the meanest Palestinian camp in Lebanon in this week’s U.S. News and World Report.

In any Palestinian camp or neighborhood, the walls are adorned with posters depicting “martyrs” of the fight against Israel. But in Asbat’s neighborhood, the Iraq battlefield is evident: The main road has been renamed “Martyrs of Fallujah,” and the signs glorify men killed fighting alongside Zarqawi or in suicide attacks against U.S. troops or Iraqi Shiite Muslims.

No word on why Lebanon never tried to assimilate the refugees into its population, of course. Read more.