>But, since Hamas and Hezbollah describe the captures
>as legitimate military operations--acts of war--they
>can hardly claim that further acts of war, in
>response, are illegitimate.
and
>By contrast, the Israeli response has only a short-
>term aim: to stop the attacks across its borders
I can see why such dishonesty appeals to a slug like Marty Peretz, but I thought Walzer was mindful of being regarded as a serious figure. Wasn't just war doctrine supposed to have a foundational presumption against war and requirement to balance immediate "provocations" against the record of grievances as a whole? This reads like just war doctrine as interpreted by Idi Amin.
I guess you don't have to do the heady work of ethical philosophy when your enemy can be dismissed as regarding each and every of his countrymen (and countrywomen and countrychildren, if that's a word) as "human shields." The major powers of the day aren't even powerful enough to manipulate symbols, it seems. All they can do, pity them, is lob munitions into areas dense with civilians and rely on Western apologists to remind everybody that the victim is in fact an asshole who had it coming.
Walzer's now dismissive of "secularists and pragmatists," I see (didn't Mr. Hitchens assure us that the present twilight struggle in which Israel is now fighting a battle is in fact a battle for Enlightenment values, secularism and pragmatism among them?). What is this fool offering here beside ahistoricism and what can only be termed credulism?
__________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com