[lbo-talk] Amnesty Report: Hezbollah War Crimes

Dwayne Monroe idoru345 at yahoo.com
Thu Sep 14 13:16:26 PDT 2006


Ravi:

When you are herded into ghettos or being marched to the gas chamber, or bombed to smithereens from 10,000 feet, what can you do? Nothing. You flail about. You kick and scream. You throw rocks. You lob rockets. Hezbollah or the Palestinian boys cannot be guilty of war crimes because they are incapable of participating in a war. They can either lie down and take it, or throw tantrums. Much like us leftists in the USA. ;-)

...........................

Focusing on the HezB side of the conflict, action unfolded on two levels: 1.) the (solidly executed) defensive war against Israeli ground incursion - perhaps we could call this the Metis-M anti tank war - and 2.) the surface-to-surface missile war against civilian targets in northern Israel.

Observers in the Juan Cole mold described the first level as legal (troop against troop) and the second as a war crime.

This was based upon a consistent and universally applied standard for defining a "war crime", one which includes both HezB kataushkas and IAF cluster bombs.

HezB can be accused, by this light, of such crimes because it fought the IDF incursion as an army would and thus could be held to the war crimes standard.

In other words, Hez actions weren't the equivalent of Palestinian boys lobbing rocks at Merkavas; the comparison falls apart because of the effectiveness of Hez opposition to the Israeli invasion.

Once you reach a level of effectiveness that enables you to shoot Apaches from the sky, heavily damage missile boats, dispatch Merkavas to Valhalla and compel Israeli civs to flee to smelly bunkers war crimes rules apply.

.d.

What is the brain? If you don't know the answer to that, you've forgotten how to think.

Look Around You: Episode No. 8 ...................... http://monroelab.net/blog/



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