Month: December 2008

Montesquieu-Volvestre, France, 8.03 pm.

"He became vice president well before George Bush picked him. And he began to manipulate things from that point on, knowing that he was going to be able to convince this guy to pick him, knowing that he was then going to be able to wade into the vacuums that existed around George Bush — personality vacuum, character vacuum, details vacuum, experience vacuum," – Lawrence Wilkerson on the protectorate of Dick Cheney.

The battle for the Hewitt Award in 2008 remains a tie with 29 percent each for Victoria Jackson for this and Kim Crawford for this. The first ever Hewitt Award is a great honor. It takes Hewittian levels of dishonesty, extremism, agitprop and bile to win it. But you can break the tie here. You have till midnight.

Normal blogging will resume on Monday, but the Gaza siege and bombardment brings the new year early. Here’s a big round-up from the left, right, and various parts of the center. Goldblog’s various posts are worth checking out. Here he is talking about whether Israel can break the will of Hamas:

Maybe momentarily. But Hamas will find ways to regain its "honor." Usually, this means exploding buses. The even deeper question: Can Israel force the overthrow of the Hamas government in Gaza? I’m not sure why Israel would want to — it won’t be replaced by the Palestinian Authority, but instead by a situation similar to Somalia — but I think this is impossible, for the moment. The ideal situation, of course, is that the people of Gaza, realizing that Hamas has delivered them hardship, overthrow their government. But Hamas also alleviates the hardship it creates. The group has thoroughly penetrated the social fabric of Gaza. Its schools, orphanages, hospitals and soup kitchens serve the entire population. Hamas is not al-Qaeda. It delivers services, and because it delivers services, the population of Gaza depends on Hamas. I don’t see the removal of Hamas as a near-term possibility.

Thomas P.M. Barnett:

Israel can always cite cause, but you have to wonder if Tel Aviv isn’t simply getting its licks in while it can in order to set the table to its liking vis-a-vis the new administration.

Noah Pollak:

It is interesting that cycle-of-violence fetishists, who are absolutely certain that military action is part of the problem, do not recognize the problem of the cycle of cease-fires. There is an opportunity right now to deal a crippling blow to Hamas, and it will require ground combat, more air strikes, and the maintenance of the IDF’s violence of action. There is indeed a cycle between Israel and its enemies, but the problem is not the cycle of violence. The problem is that every time the IDF is poised to strike a decisive blow against the enemy, the David Grossmans of the world emerge to plead for restraint exactly at the moment when restraint is the last thing that should be considered.

Greenwald:

Anyone minimally objective and well-intentioned finds Hamas rocket attacks on random Israeli civilians to be highly objectionable and wrong, but even among those who do, one finds a wide range of views regarding the Israeli offensive.  But not among America’s political leadership.  There, one finds total, lockstep uniformity almost more unyielding than what one finds among Israeli leaders themselves — as though Israel’s wars are, by definition, America’s wars; its enemies are our enemies; its disputes and conflicts and interests are, inherently, ours; and America’s only duty when Israel fights is to support it uncritically.

Tim F.:

The idea that Israel should always answer violence with violence is a pernicious mistake because it effectively puts any small group of radicals in charge of Israel’s foreign policy.

Totten:

The “disproportionate response” crowd doesn’t seem to mind that Israel struck back at Hamas per se. They aren’t saying Israel should only be allowed to negotiate with its enemies or that any use of force whatsoever is wrong. They’re clearly saying Israel should use less force, inflict less damage, or both. […]

But how would that work in practice? A single Israeli air strike is going to kill at least as many people as Hamas can kill in twelve months. Does that mean Israel should be given a “license” of one air strike per year to use in the war? If IDF commanders want to take out a target where they expect five Hamas leaders or fighters to be killed, do they have to wait until five Israelis are killed first? If the Israelis endure rocket fire until one civilian is killed, do they get a “kill one Palestinian terrorist” coupon?

Freddie DeBoer:

I know this with a certainty that I feel in my heart and my bones: if you support this assault, and justify its collateral damage, but will not come out and state the actual logical conclusion of what you are saying– that you justify the killing of innocent Palestinian children– then you are an intellectual coward, in the most damning and complete sense. If you justify the attack and its collateral damage you justify the consequences. So all of you, have the courage to stand for what you mean. Have the basic integrity to stand behind what you are saying. Look me in my face, so to speak, and tell me about the justice of another dead Palestinian child.

Robert Dreyfuss:

In Israel, the bloody holocaust they’ve unleashed is an election game, wherein Netanyahu and his slightly more moderate rivals in the Olmert-Livni bloc compete with each other to show who is best at slaughtering Palestinians. In Palestine, a similar election dynamic is underway.

Michael Weiss:

[W]hy is it that the corollary is never asked: namely, how does Hamas radicalize Israeli sentiment? A much remarked-upon fact of the last 72 hours is that Israel’s ultra-left-wing party Meretz has endorsed Operation Cast Lead, a development that should concern partisans of both sides. If there is merit to the "root causes" argument, then surely it applies to the decisions undertaken by a Jewish policy as much as it does to those undertaken by a Muslim one. Or does a belligerent Israeli consensus form in a vacuum?

Michael Moynihan:

Hamas’s popularity was on the decrease but ticked up again the following month when it breached the border wall with Egypt. And the Hamas leadership clearly believes that more radical provocations and acts of "resistance" resonate will Gazans. One can hope that the more moderate Fatah movement will see a boost in popularity, but anecdotal evidence suggests the airstrikes are having the opposite effect.

Michael Goldfarb:

…most of the world’s democracies are irrelevant in this fight. Israel has the support of the United States, and it will, presumably, continue to have such support in the wake of Obama’s inauguration. If Hamas is not neutered, at least temporarily, then how can this be spun as a success, and how can Kadima hold on to power?

Aaron Mannes:

A true peace agreement with Hamas is not realistic. A quick scan of clips from Hamas’ al-Aqsa network or of statements by Hamas leaders from the Middle East Media Research Institute – particularly horrible are these scenes from Hamas produced children’s television – should disabuse all but the most useful idiots of any notions of a moderate Hamas.

Fatah is theoretically an alternative to Hamas, but has been eliminated from Gaza and has little credibility or capability.

Military options also do not offer definite solutions.

Spencer Ackerman:

How and why was Hezbollah able to claim victory in Lebanon? Because Israel invaded with the exact same kind of all-out-war and final-battle and once-and-for-all rhetoric, when it could never possibly have erased Hezbollah from the face of the earth. When you do that, you give your enemy the means to win: his unbroken will. That’s why the rhetoric out of Israel is counterproductive — in these types of wars, it’s never just rhetoric. It’s the definition of the strategic terms.

Now, given that initial blunder, is it better for Israel to simply accept a ceasefire and accept the taunts of Hamas that Israel couldn’t defeat the people of Gaza, etc? Absolutely.

Ezra Klein:

You really can’t get away from the political logic of the strikes. Hamas is healthiest when it is a symbol of guerrilla resistance against a brutal and murderous Jewish state. Kadima is likeliest to win the February elections if it is demonstrating sufficient toughness to neuter Likud’s appeal. And so here we are. The Israeli and Palestinian politicians are both well-served by the strikes in Gaza. The Israeli and Palestinian people less so.

Dion Nissenbaum:

Reporters from every major news organization, from the BBC and CNN to The New York Times and The Washington Post to NPR and McClatchy to AP and Fox News, are being barred by Israel from going into Gaza to cover the deadliest military campaign there since Israel seized the area from Egypt in the 1967 war.

The Foreign Press Association, of which McClatchy is a part, has called the Israeli closure "insufferable" and asked the Israeli Supreme Court to take immediate action to lift the ban.

Yglesias:

Under the circumstances, throwing up our hands and saying “it’s too hard!” isn’t an option. We can decide we don’t want to be involved, which would mean unwinding the ties of collaboration and assistance between the US and Israel, or we can try to play a constructive role in bringing an end to the conflict. I’m not personally sure of how you do that. But I’m quite certain that the first step would be pressing Israel — hard — to stop expanding settlements in the West Bank and start dismantling them. To show to Palestinians interested in a two-state solution (perhaps including some Hamas people or perhaps not) that there’s credibility on the other side. I think Israelis wouldn’t welcome such action by us, but ultimately it would be in their own best interests. On the other hand, those who really do think the best thing for the United States is to just wash our hands of the whole mess have an obligation to really stand behind that belief and urge us to wash our hands of the situation. But just proclaiming a pox on both houses while in practice heavily subsidizing one side isn’t a viable option.

I’ll be posting myself on the thorny question of proportionality soon.

(Photo: An Israeli soldier is wrapped in a Tallit, a Jewish prayer shawl, as he recites his morning prayers at an advance deployment area December 30, 2008 near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. Israel continues to reinforce its troops in advance of an expected ground invasion of the Gaza Strip. By David Silverman/Getty.)

"Observe good faith and justice towards all nations; cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be, that good policy does not equally enjoin it? . . .

In the execution of such a plan, nothing is more essential than that permanent, inveterate antipathies against particular nations, and passionate attachments for others, should be excluded; and that, in place of them, just and amicable feelings towards all should be cultivated. The nation which indulges towards another a habitual hatred or a habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest . . .

So likewise, a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification," – George Washington, cited by Glenn Greenwald.

The latest twist in this ancient and hopeless struggle is hard to address without equal measure of distaste for Hamas’s religious barbarism and dismay at Israel’s apparent determination to commit slow suicide. Gershom Gorenberg captures the agony as well as anyone I’ve read:

Israelis don’t see the effects of the siege in Gaza, or the way it was maintained during the six-month “calm.” Israeli journalists have a far easier time covering Mumbai than covering Gaza. What Israelis saw during the “calm” were Palestinian violations. Israel claimed that Hamas wasn’t keeping the agreement. That was true. It was also true that the Israeli government continued hoping, against all evidence, that the siege would provoke popular uprising against Hamas rule. Hamas regarded the calm as a failure in relieving siege conditions. When the six months ended, Hamas decided that those Israelis would only understand force.

To a man with a hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a nail – especially to an angry man. With a little careful thinking, anyone on the Hamas side could have figured out that no Israeli politician wanted to agree to reduce the siege in response to rocket fire. That would be giving in. So brinkmanship led to both sides rushing over the brink into the abyss. Olmert, Livni, Barak and the collected generals apparently think that Hamas will agree to reduce violence as a result of the onslaught. A ten-second exercise in trying to imagine how Hamas leaders – or Gaza residents – see the situation leads to the opposite conclusion.

It is possible that the new offensive will shatter the Hamas government. In that case we’ll have a collapsed state in Gaza, where there is absolutely no one interested in stopping rocket fire. Will Israel occupy the Strip again then? Does our triumvurate think that NATO will want the job? Outside of showing that we have a bigger hammer, what will the operation accomplish?

Outside of the hammer, actually, Hamas did have some delicate tools in its tool chest. It could, for instance, have proposed indirect negotiations aimed at a two-state solution.That would have caught Israel’s leaders totally off guard, and undermined the political rationale for the siege. I guess that no one in the Gaza leadership considered this for 10 seconds.

(Photo: Palestinian mourners carry the body of Haya Hamdan during her funeral in Beit Hanun in the northern Gaza Strip on December 30, 2008. A fresh Israeli air strike on the Hamas-run Gaza Strip today killed Haya and her sister Lama, aged four and 11, Palestinian medical sources said. Lama and Haya Hamdan were killed in a raid targeting a donkey cart in Beit Hanun, the sources said. Warplanes pounded Gaza for a fourth day as the Palestinian death toll rose to at least 360. By Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty.)

Ross’s response to Hitch is pitch-perfect:

Of course a philosopher could have come up with the formulation that God is Love without the assistance of the Gospel According to Saint John, just as Aristarchus of Samos could draw up the heliocentric hypothesis without the assistance of a telescope. But the telescope made a pretty big difference in our understanding of the heavens – and the Gospels, with their claim to bring the nature of God into clearer focus, likewise had a revolutionary impact on how human beings thought about the divine, by making the idea that the Author of the universe actually cares about individual human lives seem much more plausible to first hundreds, then thousands and then millions of people than it had before the evangelists put pen to paper.

I don’t think it’s possible for a reasoning Christian to take all the contradictory facts, myths and symbols of the various Christmas narratives as literally true. In fact, one test of how serious a Christian is, to my mind, is whether she does or not. But the event of the Incarnation, far greater than any of the obviously mythical details, remains literally awe-some. My attempt to describe my own faith in this regard is in Chapter Five of The Conservative Soul:

The reason I call myself a Christian is not because I manage to subscribe, at any given moment, to all the truths that the hierarchy of my church insists I believe in; let alone because I am a good person or a "good Catholic." I call myself a Christian because I believe that, in a way I cannot fully understand, the force behind everything decided to prove itself benign by becoming us, and being with us. And as soon as people grasped what had happened, what was happening, the world changed for ever. The Gospels – all of them, including those that were rejected by the early Church – are mere sketches of a life actually lived, and an experience that can never be reduced to words or texts or doctrines. And the world as it was – as it still is – was unable to tolerate this immense occasion; and so Jesus was executed and the life more in touch with divinity than any other life was ended abruptly, when it was still achingly young. The existence of such a life was both so wondrous that it changed everything; and also so terrifying it had to be snuffed out.

The point of this incarnation was surely not to construct a litany of offenses by which we are to judge our own lives at any moment, to force us to thrash and writhe in a constant ordeal of self-criticism and guilt. The point was merely to be with us; and by being with us, to show us better how to be human, how better to embrace our lives by accepting the divine around us and inside us. By letting go, we become. By giving up, we gain. And we learn how to live – now, which is the only time that matters.

(Painting: Geertgen tot Sint Jans.)

My final three. The cool:

US Democratic presidential candidate Illinois Senator Barack Obama gestures as former candidate Senator Hillary Clinton (D-NY) speaks during a rally in Unity, New Hampshire, on June 27, 2008. By Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty Images.

The joyful:

A girl smiles as she plays around near temporary shelters at a camp for Internally Displaced People in Kibati, just north of the North Kivu provincial capital city of Goma on November 20, 2008. Hundreds of thousands of people living in the region have been displaced from their homes due to armed clashes in the region. This particular camp houses some 60,000 refugees. By Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty.

And the cozy:

A young Meishan pig takes a nap on some adult ones on June 11, 2008 at the Tierpark Friedrichsfelde zoo in Berlin, where the piglets were born on May 3, 2008. The animals are domestic pigs originating from China. By Barbara Sax/Getty.

So this time, I get to pick. First off, the faces of war. There are three that I cannot quite get out of my head this year: a mother; a child; and a wounded.

The mother:

Linda Barnett, mother of of slain U.S. Army Sgt. Jon Stiles, clutches a U.S. flag during Stiles funeral at the Fort Logan National Cemetery November 21, 2008 in Denver, Colorado. Stiles, 38, of Highlands Ranch, Colorado, was killed in action in Jalalabad, Afghanistan November 13 when a roadside bomb detonated near his vehicle. He had survived a suicide bomb attack just the month before and had refused medical leave in order to rejoin his unit. By John Moore/Getty.

The child:

The body of five-month old Mohammad Naser Al-Buri lies in the morgue at the Al-shifa hospital before during his funeral February 28, 2008 in Gaza City, Gaza. Al-Buri, who is the son of the UNRWA of Al-shati primary school doorkeeper Naser Al-Buri, was killed while he was sleeping at his home following an Israeli aircraft strike on the home of his family’s neighbor belonging to the Hamas Government’s Interior Minister, Palestinian medical sources said. By Abid Katib/Getty Images.

The wounded:

Army medics and US soldiers from the 2nd Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment of the 10th Mountain Division carry a wounded Iraqi man after they arrive at their base combat hospital to give him medical treatment on May 16, 2008 in Baghdad, Iraq.