[lbo-talk] Amnesty Report: Hezbollah War Crimes

[ravi]

At around 14/9/06 4:16 pm, Dwayne Monroe wrote:
> 
> 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.
> 

Dwayne,

I am afraid I still do not see this viewpoint. Let me list why: we
should not get too carried away with the issue of Hizbullah putting up a
good resistance. They had very limited success (looking at the numbers)
of inflicting damage, especially in comparison to Israel. Joanna gave us
an alternate method of evaluation of "targetting civilians". IIRC of the
200 or so people who died in the Hizbullah response a large majority was
military (44 civilians?), quite the opposite of the scale and ratio for
Israel (1100+ killed, majority civilian). Perhaps with better PR and
less honesty, Hizbullah could have put the accepted notion of
"collateral damage" to good use. While the Hizbullah is said to run a
government within a government, from what I can tell, they do not have
the apparatus associated with conventional governments, including the
ability to build armies for battle, train them in the open, raise taxes
to pay for them, etc. Does anyone doubt what a real all-out war between
Israel and Hizbullah would produce?


> 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.

Hizbullah was effective in the framework of massive international
opposition to Israeli action, not to mention discontent within Israel.
>From news reports I can find on the net, Hizbullah shot down one Apache
helicopter. I can quite easily imagine a Palestinian boy inflicting
similar damage given some weaponry and luck. The effectiveness of
Hizbullah was not in their ability as a conventional fighting force (as
seen in the very limited damage they inflicted, which AFAIK, is the
measure of success in real wars), but in its preparedness (network of
bunkers, food, etc) and willingness to stay and take the pounding, along
with the support they drew from the Lebanese population, and the
international unwillingness to humour Israel. Quite possibly, if Israel
had pursued a low grade war, rather than "shock and awe", the fight
would still be on, and [possibly] Hizbullah would be the worse for it.

	--ravi

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