Centerblue.org

Reporting a number that boggles the mind, a new study says that 655,000 Iraqis have died from violence and illness since 2003 that would not have died had the invasion not occurred.

It is more than 20 times the estimate of 30,000 civilian deaths that President Bush gave in a speech in December. It is more than 10 times the estimate of roughly 50,000 civilian deaths made by the British-based Iraq Body Count research group.

That much death, accounting for 2.5% of Iraq’s total population, is difficult to comprehend and even more difficult to imagine being linked to our own country’s aggression. To put the number into perspective, 2.5% of America’s population is 7.5 million people. Could we imagine what our society would look like if 7.5 million of us died in the course of three years above and beyond deaths from natural causes? It’s unimaginable. No wonder the Iraqis don’t seem too thrilled by their “liberation.”

All this blood is on Bush’s head. The Left Coaster blog points out that normally when someone launches a war that ends up killing 2.5% of a country’s population he is considered a war criminal. I have to agree.

Charles Krauthammer is practically foaming at the mouth in his vociferous defense of Israel’s offensive, striking all the right tones of righteous indignation. He is lived–livid!–that the rest of the world (well, except for the US) is united in its condemnation of Israel’s disproporationate invasion of Lebanon. Let’s take a few turns at bat, shall we?

“What other country sustains 1,500 indiscriminate rocket attacks into its cities — every one designed to kill, maim and terrorize civilians — and is then vilified by the world when it tries to destroy the enemy’s infrastructure and strongholds with precision-guided munitions that sometimes have the unintended but unavoidable consequence of collateral civilian death and suffering?”

Um, you’re confusing cause and effect, Mr. Krauthammer. Israel is being showered with rockets because of the invasion; the invasion was not caused by the rockets.

The “enemy” is not the Lebanese people whose infrastructure you would so wantonly destroy. The so-called precision guided missiles you describe have also been witnessed repeatedly targeting fleeing Lebanese civilians and even a UN government outpost that came under fire for hours while Israel was implored repeatedly to stop.

The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is “disproportionate,” as in the universally decried “disproportionate Israeli response.”

I’m sorry, but invading a country, displacing almost a million Lebanese residents, and flattening infrastructure is a disproportionate response to the kidnapping of two soldiers.

When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel “proportionate” attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cinders, and turned the Japanese home islands into rubble and ruin.

Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right — legal and moral — to carry the fight until the aggressor is disarmed and so disabled that it cannot threaten one’s security again.

What a ridiculous analogy. During the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Japan sank two battleships; put eight battleships, three destroyers, and three cruisers out of commission; destroyed most of the planes on Oahu; and killed 2,323 US servicemen. How can you possibly compare that to kidnapping two soldiers?

It is also precisely because these Middle East combatants and their neighbors could potentially wield weapons of mass destruction not available until Hiroshima that makes it especially urgent that cooler heads prevail. Gone are the days of World War II type battles where armies and fleets destroyed each other in a way that had limited effects outside their battlefields, thus making the analogy doubly irrelevant.

The perversity of today’s international outcry lies in the fact that there is indeed a disproportion in this war, a radical moral asymmetry between Hezbollah and Israel: Hezbollah is deliberately trying to create civilian casualties on both sides while Israel is deliberately trying to minimize civilian casualties, also on both sides.

While I agree that Hezbollah is using Lebanese citizens and urban areas as pawns and human shields, I don’t see how anyone could say that Israel is going out of its way to minimize casualties. Israel has not one iota more of moral authority than Hezbollah in this invasion, and both sides have blood on their hands.

Israeli innocents must die in order for Israel to be terrorized. But Lebanese innocents must also die in order for Israel to be demonized, which is why Hezbollah hides its fighters, its rockets, its launchers, its entire infrastructure among civilians. Creating human shields is a war crime. It is also a Hezbollah specialty.

Undoubtedly Hezbollah is playing dirty, and both sides are engaging in war crimes. But did Israel expect that Hezbollah would just be sitting ducks and not employ every tactic at their disposal to resist a superior invading force? That’s the risk you take when you conduct urban warfare–the risk of military casualties and of condemnation for civilian casualties.

Had Israel wanted to destroy Lebanese civilian infrastructure, it would have turned out the lights in Beirut in the first hour of the war, destroying the billion-dollar power grid and setting back Lebanon 20 years.

It may not have done so in an hour, but it has done so regardless. Tens or hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of damage has been inflicted on infrastructure. Countless people’s homes have been destroyed. Someone will have to repair it all, and it will probably be the international community. Will Israel help pay for the damage it caused?

Israeli soldiers die so that Lebanese civilians will not, and who does the international community condemn for disregarding civilian life?

It condemns Israel because Israel was the aggressor in the invasion. You could say “well yes, but Hezbollah kidnapped the soldiers,” then Hezbollah would say “well yes, but we did that because Israel did X,” then Israel would respond with “well yes, but we did that because Hezbollah did Y,” and so on and so on, ad infinitum, ad nauseum. These two sides remind me of children who have gotten into trouble with their parents: “he did it!” “No HE did it first!” “No HE did it before me!”

The truth of it is that each side has inflicted countless insults and injuries on the other. Focusing on who did what to whom first is not going to solve the problem. Both sides need to drop their weapons, stop fighting, come to the table, and work out their grievances. Israel buys nothing by refusing to do that, and in fact only ends up making more enemies than before. Hezbollah buys nothing by refusing to do that as well, and risks itself and Lebanon being destroyed–if it cares.

Mr. Krauthammer, please take a deep breath and relax. Foaming at the mouth ill becomes you.

This article from the Guardian Unlimited sums up the humanitarian catastrophe in Lebanon to date:

*800,000+ people displaced from their homes;

*Enormous damage to residential areas and civilian infrastructure like power plants;

*Hundreds of bridges and nearly all road connections destroyed, making entire regions of the country inaccessible to relief workers;

*Skyrocketing prices for basic goods;

*Many unsanitary conditions, such as 1000 people hiding in a school with only six toilets;

*Critical fuel shortages that threaten basic needs like sanitation and food supply,

Human rights watchers and UN monitors continue to condemn Israel for its bombing of purely civilian targets. Those targets have included vehicles full of fleeing Lebanese people, a UN outpost and even clearly marked Red Cross ambulances.

Meanwhile the world just keeps fiddling away…

While Bush continues to support Israel’s heavyhanded tactics despite pleas by allies like Saudi Arabia to broker a cease-fire, the British appear to have grown some spine.

British Foreign Office Minister Kim Howells last night denounced Israel’s tactics and urged America to understand the heavy price being paid by innocent Lebanese civilians, placing Britain’s position at odds with the US. While Downing Street holds Hezbollah responsible for initiating the crisis and supports Israel’s right to defend itself against missiles, it had no quarrel with the Foreign Minister’s condemnation of Israel’s tactics.

‘The destruction of the infrastructure, the death of so many children and so many people: these have not been surgical strikes. If they are chasing Hizbollah, then go for Hizbollah. You don’t go for the entire Lebanese nation…I very much hope that the Americans understand what’s happening to Lebanon.’

We understand perfectly well what’s going on in Lebanon, Mr. Howells. We are unfortunately led by a war-mongering and hypocritical president who is quick to “preserve the human life” of embryos headed for a dumpster by vetoing life-saving stem cell research funding while turning a blind eye to the thousands of innocent people killed in places like Iraq and Lebanon.

In our government’s view, Mr. Howells, unfortunately some lives are worth more than others.

Why the hell is Israel targeting Lebanese civilians? Articles such as this CNN piece on burned children and this Washington Post article on targeted fleeing civilians really call into question Israel’s moral authority for conducting this operation. The descriptions of what is happening to innocent civilians who appear to be in no way near or associated with Hezbollah are outrageous. Here’s an excerpt from the Washington Post article:

TYRE, Lebanon, July 23 — The day ended in Tyre as it began, with a desperate cry of grief.

“Where’s my father? Where’s my father?” asked Mahmoud Srour, an 8-year-old whose face was burned beyond recognition after an Israeli missile struck the family’s car Sunday. His mother, Nouhad, lurched toward his hospital bed, her eyes welling with tears.

“Is he coming?” he asked her.

“Don’t worry about your father,” she said, her words broken by sobs.

Barely conscious, bewildered, he lay with his eyes almost swollen shut. His head lolled toward her. A whisper followed.

“Don’t cry, mother,” he told her.

Mahmoud’s father, Mohammed, was dead. An Israeli missile had struck their green Mercedes as they fled the southern town of Mansuri, where the family had been vacationing. The boy’s uncle, Darwish Mudaihli, was dead, too. The bodies were left in the burning car. Mahmoud’s sister Mariam, 8 months old, lay next to him, staring at the ceiling with a Donald Duck pacifier in her mouth. Her eyes were open but lifeless, a stare that suggested having seen too much. Her hair was singed, her face slightly burned. Blisters swelled the tiny fingers on her left hand to twice their size. In other beds of Najm Hospital were their other brothers, 13-year-old Ali and 15-year-old Ahmed.

“What happened?” Ahmed shouted to no one in particular.

It was a question asked often Sunday in Tyre and its hinterland, a bloody day for civilians, even by the standards of this war. Israeli forces repeatedly struck cars on southern Lebanon’s already perilous roads in attacks that victims said were indiscriminate. Seven people were killed, three of them when an Israeli helicopter fired a missile at a white minibus carrying 19 people fleeing the village of Tairi, which Israeli forces had ordered residents to evacuate. The missile tore through the roof of the vehicle as it sped around a bend in the road. Layal Najib, a 23-year-old photographer for the Lebanese magazine al-Jaras, was killed when Israeli forces struck near her taxi outside the town of Qana to the northwest. She was the first journalist killed in the 12-day conflict.

“Are there any armed men here? Is there any resistance here?” asked Ali Najm, a physician helping to treat the injured in Tyre. He surveyed the wounded, struggling to maintain the detachment of a medical professional and suppress the anger of a neighbor watching a war that he said he did not understand. “There is no aim to this,” he said. “They are innocent people. They are carrying white flags, and they’re trying to escape.”

Absolutely disgusting. I understand Israel is a strong ally, and I understand its security concerns and its need to be free of suicide bombings and border attacks, and I understand that it too is being shelled by Hezbollah rockets…but this simply goes beyond the pale, and you have to call a spade a spade.

The UN’s top human rights official has gone on the record as saying that both Israel and Hezbollah are engaging in atrocities and war crimes in their ongoing conflagration.

Louise Arbour is a former justice of Canada’s Supreme Court who served as chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Tribunals on Rwanda and Yugoslavia (including the indictment of Slobodan Milosevic.) She believes the case for war crimes on both sides is crystal clear:

“The scale of killings in the region, and their predictability, could engage the personal criminal responsibility of those involved, particularly those in a position of command and control.
…

“International humanitarian law is clear on the supreme obligations to protect civilians during hostilities…Indiscriminate shelling of cities constitutes a foreseeable and unacceptable targeting of civilians…Similarly, the bombardment of sites with alleged innocent civilians is unjustifiable.”

These two combatants are so consumed with their hatred for the other that they will stop at nothing to destroy each other. In so doing they place innocent people and children in harm’s way, undermining whatever moral justice each side may claim.

The killing must stop.