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Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Islamunists are evil - and that's good enough for Kathleen Parker

Shakira's 2005 hit song "Don't Bother" features a narrator who's giving her ex-boyfriend her assessment of his new flame. It begins:

She's got the kind of look that defies gravity
She's the greatest cook and she's fat-free

Reading conservative columnist Kathleen Parker's current piece (Hezbollah's 'Twilight Zone' Orlando Sentinel 08/02/06) on why killing A-rab civilian noncombatants is a good and vituous thing to do, a variation on those lines came to mind:

She's got an outlook that defies sanity
She's a rightwing flack and she's fact-free

If the ex-girlfriend in Shakira's song is making snide suggestions about her replacement having had surgical enhancements, I wouldn't mind suggesting that Parker's mental software shows some signs of having undergone some sort of liposuction, as well.

Parker is a good example of why "neosegregationist" is an appropriate adjective for today's Republican Party. Her kooky reasoning is the kind that white Southerners constantly made to each other to justify the old system of legal segregation. Parker has expressed great sympathy, for example, for those poor persecuted white guys at Duke who have been accused by a black woman of raping her.

I suppose before I wade into her highly propagandistic treatment of the Israel-Lebanon War that I should state my own basic view of the conflict. My main concern in the conflict is how Israel's battle with Shi'a Hizbullah in Lebanon will affect the already-precarious situation of the 130,000 or so American troops in Iraq.

Along with a Sunni insurgency and a sectarian civil war, there are now signs of intra-Shi'a rivalries that made spill over into violent actions. Plus, the Shi'a religious leadership are hinting that they are ready to withdraw their support from the American-backed Shi'a-majority government in Iraq. All the sophomoric arguments in the world don't change the fact that Israel's bloody war with Hizbullah affects how Shi'a in Iraq look at the American troop presence; it's already become common for Iraqis to refer to Americans there as "the Jews". (More on my general view at the very end.)

Parker's argument is that the civilian deaths at Qana are Hizbullah's fault, no matter what actually happened.

And she explains it employing the posture of whiny victimhood on the part of the dominant group that was a prominent feature of segregationist ideology and attitudes. And one that has been passed on in a virulent form to today's authoritarian Republican Party:

We are expected to join in vilifying Israel while Hezbollah enjoys a bounce in popularity.

Obviously, the anguish of the Lebanese people is heartfelt, and no one celebrates the loss of innocent life. Wait, correction. No one except Hezbollah, which pioneered that nihilistic addition to modern warfare, the suicide bomber. The suicide bomber's purpose, of course, is to kill as many civilians as possible. Hezbollah excels at that sort of thing. The "Party of God" is also a proud innovator in the use of human shields, especially women and children.

I haven't yet ceased to be dazed and confused at times about Republican Party postmodernism, where reality is cast adrift and the writer just types what fits the argument she wants to make. "We are expected to join in vilifying Israel ..." It's not clear who the "we" is supposed to be there. Or who is doing the expecting. The Liberal Press? The Great International Arab Conspiracy? I wouldn't expect journalists, including pundits like Parker, to join in any villification; I do wish we could expect them to try seriously to at least present basic factual information clearly.

Parker says that Hizbullah "pioneered that nihilistic addition to modern warfare, the suicide bomber." Actually, the current type of suicide bombing was pioneered by the Tamil Tigers guerrilla group in Sri Lanka.

Is suicide bombing a "nihilistic" tactic whose purpose "is to kill as many civilians as possible"? No, on both counts, with the obvious stipulation that some attacks might fit one or both classifications. The value of suicide bombing as a guerrilla tactic is that it works. As Robert Pape explains at some length in Dying to Win (2005) a human being strapped with explosives is the ultimate "smart weapon". The bomber can react to changing conditions immediately, position himself with a very close view of his target(s) or abort the mission if the goal isn't likely to be achieved.

Suicide bombing may be lots of things undisirable and evil But it's neither nihilistic nor irrational to select this as a terror tactic. Pape's studies of suicide bombers also did not find any trend of suicide bombers being nihilistic or suffering from any particular clinic disorders. Since this has become an often-used terrorist tactic, and because it is effective and particularly difficult to deter, doesn't it make sense that we should try to understand as much as possible what it actually is? Conservatives like Parker seem content to sneer at the evil nature of the sucide bombers and leave it at that.

Using sucide bombing "is to kill as many civilians as possible" has certainly been done. Hamas is one group that is notorious for using it that way. Hizbullah, though, started using suicide bombers during the previous Israeli occupation of Lebanon. And their attacks were focused on Israeli military targets. The tactic is only meant "to kill as many civilians as possible" when doing so is actually set as the aim. If something else is targeted, the "something else" becomes the target.

I suppose we should be thankful that she uses "suicide bomber" instead of the FOX News favorite "homicide bomber". At least we have some vague idea of what she's talking about.

The notion that it's celebrating the loss of life to use civilian death or wounds or damage to civilian facilities as war propaganda is also strange. Hasn't every side in a war since, oh, the beginning of warfare done that?

It's true that Hizbullah celebrates sucide bombers as martyrs. Both sides in the Iran-Iraq War celebrated soldiers lost in battle as martyrs, too. We Americans treat soldiers killed in combat as people who have made a sacrifice to be honored in a particular way. Bush, like many a war leader before him, also uses the memory of the sacred dead to justify continuing the Iraq War and to justify his particular policies for doing so.

Do we have to just toss out the obvious to write a column with a point of view? Apparently Kathleen Parker does.

She continues:

Indeed, Hezbollah relies on the civilized world's outrage as part of its strategy. By bringing the war to suburbia in violation of the Geneva Conventions and launching rockets from villages such as Qana, Hezbollah virtually ensures that civilians will die.

War propaganda is war propaganda, I guess. But this is more-or-less true. Hizbullah is violating the laws of war in targeting cities for random strikes. It's klind of odd for Parker to describe that as "bringing the war to suburbia", but, who knows why?

But does Hizbullah rely "on the civilized world's outrage"? It seems to me that they want to use images of Israeli atrocities, real and alleged, to generate outrage on the part of the Muslim world. And since Parker doesn't specify who she means by the "civilized" world, we don't exactly know if the Muslim world is what she meant. (It's doubtful.)

In targeting Israeli cities with their rockets, Hizbullah is probably making the same miscalculation that Western "air power" advocates chronically make: that targeting civilian areas will break the Will of the enemy. The fact that it never really works like that hasn't seemed to stop air power enthusiasts from thinking that it will do so in the next war. But I would guess that Hizbullah means to invoke more fear than outrage in the Israelis with those rocket attacks, although outrage is what they're producing.

She then goes on to type up the Israeli propaganda suggestion that it was really Hizbullah who had blown up the apartment building in Qana where so many women and children were killed. The Israeli press within a few hours were casting major doubt on that claim, for which apparently no evidence whatsoever has been produced in public. But it's good enough for Parker.

And she trots out the favorite arguments of the real-men-kill-civilians crowd:

Whatever the case, Israeli Defense Forces had dropped leaflets into Qana a week beforehand, warning residents to evacuate. Although international humanitarian law forbids the deliberate targeting of civilian areas, exceptions are tolerated under certain circumstances.

Uh, no, dropping leaflets does not absolve an attacking force from recognizing the distinction between combatants and civilian noncombatants. But it's good enough for Parker.

Parsing the language of "dual use" [areas] when bombs are killing sleeping children seems absurd when measured against such senseless loss. But it is also necessary if we are to maintain perspective against a cowardly enemy that hides among women and children, then relies on emotion to gain traction on the battlefield of public opinion.

Why some residents of Qana didn't leave given fair warning is a point of speculation, but Hezbollah reportedly has blocked residents from evacuating other areas. Proportionality is a trickier question, but let's be clear on the issue of moral equivalence. There is none. Hezbollah aims to kill civilians; Israel aims not to. But by firing rockets from civilian areas, Hezbollah forces Israel to return fire, thus inciting the condemnation of civilized nations and fueling the reliable outrage of the Arab street.

Is there any independent evidence that Hizbullah systematically positions their fighters among civilian noncombatants? Robert Fisk found that in their previous battles, Hizbullah fighters generally stayed away from civilian noncombatants.

Mitch Prothero even calls it The "hiding among civilians" myth I 07/28/06, with particular reference to Israeli claims that Hizbullah commonly fires rockets from civilian house and civilian neighborhoods.

Throughout this now 16-day-old war, Israeli planes high above civilian areas make decisions on what to bomb. They send huge bombs capable of killing things for hundreds of meters around their targets, and then blame the inevitable civilian deaths - the Lebanese government says 600 civilians have been killed so far -- on "terrorists" who callously use the civilian infrastructure for protection.

But this claim is almost always false. My own reporting and that of other journalists reveals that in fact Hezbollah fighters - as opposed to the much more numerous Hezbollah political members, and the vastly more numerous Hezbollah sympathizers - avoid civilians. Much smarter and better trained than the PLO and Hamas fighters, they know that if they mingle with civilians, they will sooner or later be betrayed by collaborators - as so many Palestinian militants have been. ...

So the analysts talking on cable news about Hezbollah "hiding within the civilian population" clearly have spent little time if any in the south Lebanon war zone and don't know what they're talking about. Hezbollah doesn't trust the civilian population and has worked very hard to evacuate as much of it as possible from the battlefield. And this is why they fight so well - with no one to spy on them, they have lots of chances to take the Israel Defense Forces by surprise, as they have by continuing to fire rockets and punish every Israeli ground incursion.

And the civilians? They see themselves as targeted regardless of their affiliation. They are enraged at Israel and at the United States, the only two countries on earth not calling for an immediate cease-fire. Lebanese of all persuasions think the United States and Israel believe that Lebanese lives are cheaper than Israeli ones. And many are now saying that they want to fight. (my emphasis)

So the charge Parker faithfully types out and passes on has not really been established by independent reporting in this war. And it would be a notable departure from Hizbullah fighting methods of the past. But, hey, it's good enough for Kathleen Parker.

I view the Israel-Lebanon as a war with rights and wrongs on both sides. Israel had the right to defend itself in response to Hizbullah's July 12 incursion, even if "right to defend itself" has become a slogan to justify much more than that. From the evidence currently available to us, it appears that both Hizbullah and Israel are deliberately targeting civilians, violating both morality and international law in doing so. American interests would be best served by an immediate ceasefire and an active pursuit of meaningful settlements to address outstanding territorial and security questions. Whatever Israel's interests real or perceived are, American interests are not being advanced by the Cheney-Bush administration's virtually uncritical backing for Israel's policies in the war, a backing that is so perceived by the rest of the world.

(I picked up the valuable neologism "Islamunist" from Jesus' General.)

posted at 6:56:00 PM by Bruce Miller

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