Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Daniel Larison
Time after time, Israel strikes at civilian homes and civilian vehicles attempting to flee the besieged southern border zone, killing families without any military objective in sight.
In an extraordinary, and extraordinarily revealing comment, the Israeli Justice Minister, Haim Ramon, reportedly said, “All those now in south Lebanon are terrorists who are related in some way […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy, Near East
Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Daniel Larison
I’ve always maintained that the “pro-Israel” position of the Bush administration, formulated and influenced by hardline American Likudniks (whom, it must be said, are hardly representative of mainstream Israeli thinking) is actually fundamentally bad for Israel. Its infantile, aggressive maximalism precludes Israel from doing what it will take to live at peace with its surroundings, […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy, Near East, hegemonism
Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Daniel Larison
Andrea Kirk Assaf has a couple other posts worth looking at: she cites an article from Christianity Today by the dean of the Arab Baptist Theological Seminary, Martin Accad, who makes an impassioned plea on behalf of the people of Lebanon and does not accept the easy justifications of any party to the conflict. She also […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy, Near East, Christianity
Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Daniel Larison
I was talking today with a former U.S. diplomat and a Washington “insider” who made the following comment: “I’m beginning to suspect that the Israeli military has been ‘Americanized.’ They seem to repeating our mistakes in Iraq. Very discouraging for them and for us.” This is coming from someone who is a critic of the […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy, Near East
Posted on July 31st, 2006 by Daniel Larison
This blindness on the part of “conservative” American Catholics is partly ignorance; even many of those who have heard the words Melkite and Maronite have no particular interest in trying to learn anything about either rite, must less trying to grapple with the history of these Christian populations or even being bothered to find out […]
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Filed under: politics, religion, foreign policy, Near East, Christianity
Posted on July 28th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
The newest issue of The American Conservative has brought together thirty short articles from a number of prominent, primarily traditional conservative and libertarian writers and scholars on whether the terms conservative and liberal and the modern Right/Left opposition have any meaning and, if they do have any meaning today, what that meaning might be. Rod Dreher has excerpted from a number […]
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Filed under: philosophy, politics
Posted on July 28th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
How, exactly, publicly humiliating Maliki and making him look like an American and Israeli stooge would enhance his “leadership” was never explained in the missive. But of course Reid’s letter wasn’t really about strengthening the Iraqi government at all; that’s George W. Bush’s problem. It was about appearing more pro-Israel than the White House and […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy, Near East, hegemonism
Posted on July 28th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
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 […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy, Near East
Posted on July 27th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
The Turkish military, for example, is a defender of Turkish liberalism - flawed though it may be — against the threats it faces from, among other things, democratic Islamic populism. ~Jonah “Lie For a Just Cause” Goldberg
The Turkish military is a defender of Kemalist secular republicanism, which is not necessarily anything like liberalism (in the Continental […]
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Filed under: philosophy, politics
Posted on July 27th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
By bombing all of Lebanon rather than merely the concentrated Hezbollah strongholds, Israel is putting extraordinary pressure on Lebanese society at points of extreme vulnerability. The delicate post-war democratic culture has been brutally replaced, overnight, with a culture of rage and terror and war. Lebanon isn’t Gaza, but nor is it Denmark.
Lebanese are temporarily more […]
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Filed under: politics, Near East
Posted on July 27th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
We forget easily that natural rights theory, depending as it does on postulates concerning an anterior “state of nature,” is the worst enemy of human freedom yet to be devised by the mind of man. Liberty is precious to most of us, particularly to a people who have learned from their frontier heritage to connect […]
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Filed under: philosophy, politics
Posted on July 27th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
Man’s bodily existence is also the basis of his social existence. This may grow quantitatively from the family, to the labor-dividing small society, to that size in which ordering consciousness finds the material basis for the unfolding of the eu zen, the good life, Aristotle’s criterion of the eunomia, the good social order. No matter […]
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Filed under: philosophy, politics
Posted on July 26th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
A rare exception to the talk-for-talk’s-sake norm of recent years is Washington’s approach to the Israeli conflict with Hizbollah. But all signs point to a weakening of resolve inside the Bush administration. Earlier this week, trial balloons began floating from Ms Rice’s mission to the Middle East: perhaps talks in Rome could bring a call […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy, Near East, hegemonism
Posted on July 26th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
The Prime Minister’s views and even more inflammatory statements by other Iraqi officials — including a parliamentary resolution branding Israeli attacks “criminal aggression” — prompted 20 congressional Democrats to call for the cancellation of Mr Maliki’s invitation to address a joint session of Congress overnight, Melbourne time.
While Republican leaders refused, they also expressed concern at […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy, Near East, hegemonism
Posted on July 26th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
There’s practically a holy consensus right now that the war in the North is a just war and that morality is on our side. The bitter truth must be said: this holy consensus is based on short-range selective memory, an introverted worldview, and double standards.This war is not a just war. Israel is using excessive […]
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Filed under: politics, Near East
Posted on July 25th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
In time of war, people tend to lose all sense of proportion. This is true when it comes to the kinds of domestic government measures they are willing to endorse during the “emergency,” which always overreach and violate fundamental legal protections to the general indifference of the masses, or when it comes to the latitude they are […]
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Filed under: philosophy, politics, religion
Posted on July 25th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki? ~John Podhoretz, New York Post
Via Rod Dreher
Since the acts Mr. Podhoretz cites are remarkable for being 1) massive war crimes and 2) entirely irrelevant […]
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Filed under: politics
Posted on July 24th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
On a couple different occasions, I have drawn parallels between the American response to the limited Yugoslavian anti-terrorist campaign of 1998-99 (NATO bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days in 1999 for having the audacity to fight terrorists on their own territory) and the official response from Washington to Israel’s wide-ranging strike against Lebanon that came in response […]
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Filed under: politics, Near East
Posted on July 24th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
“Bleeding Lebanon” is the ripest fruit of the Bush administration’s catastrophic foreign policy. In similar crises, previous administrations at least pretended to make diplomatic efforts to arrange cease-fires and find grounds on which a tenuous peace might be maintained. As my friend Ron Hatchett points out, in a Dallas Blog article posted on this site, […]
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Filed under: politics, Near East
Posted on July 24th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
The same is true of “World Trade Center.” It is undeniably powerful, an immensely affecting and well-meaning real-life tale of two Port Authority policemen trapped in the rubble underneath the collapsed concourse between the North and South Towers.
Nonetheless, because “World Trade Center” tells a story of joyous survival rather than a story of death, it […]
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Filed under: miscellaneous
Posted on July 24th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
A selfishly American foreign policy need not stand in opposition to Israeli aims. It would simply recognize that the United States might, on occasion, need to look to its interests and merely be indifferent to how securing those interests might impact Israel.
For evidence that the Bush administration is reluctant to do this, look no further […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy
Posted on July 24th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
The Bush administration’s plan to bring democracy to the Middle East is now in ruins. In a nation where political responsibility still counted for something, the architects of that strategy would be forced to resign.
Remember the argument for the Iraq war — that the overthrow of Saddam Hussein would lead to a stable, democratic Iraq […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy, hegemonism
Posted on July 24th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
Hey everybody. Sorry for the hiatus. I’m currently in Oklahoma City — at the Biltmore Hotel no less. We’ll be on the road by early morning, heading off to New Mexico. ~Jonah Goldberg, The Corner
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Filed under: miscellaneous
Posted on July 24th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
Global free trade talks, billed as a once in a generation chance to boost growth and ease poverty, collapsed on Monday after nearly five years of haggling and resuming them could take years.
The suspension of the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) Doha round came after major trading powers failed in a last-ditch bid to overcome differences […]
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Filed under: politics, economics
Posted on July 24th, 2006 by Daniel Larison
The British did it to the Scots Highlanders after the 1745 rising, and to the Acadians of Canada after the Seven Years’ War; Ataturk did it to the Greeks of Asia Minor in 1922; and the Czechs did it to the Sudeten Germans after 1945. It seems to be happening again, as half or more […]
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Filed under: politics, foreign policy, Near East, hegemonism
