Here's the thing about war: there's plenty of fault to go around. You can say that Israel is far from blameless here and I will agree. You can say that Hezbollah supports widows and orphans and has thereby built goodwill through the Arab world. On the other hand neither of those things wipe out that fact that Hezbollah has vowed to pursue both the destruction of the nation of Israel and the entirety of world Jewry, in so many words. That's not the sort of threat Israel can afford to ignore; it's also a level of shrill hatred that is unlikely to be in the least affected by diplomacy. Israel had to take action. Does that make killing civilians OK? No. Was there another way to reach peace once Syria and Iran instructed Hezbollah to step up the attacks? I don't know.
Here's the other thing about war: sometimes there are no good answers.
That false dichotomy problem is actually a major issue of illogic. Black and white are opposites. Light and heavy are opposites. Good and bad are opposites. If a thing is more of one, it is less of the other. One thing those examples have in common is that they're all pairs of adjectives. Nouns are very rarely opposites. If I say that Israel isn't blameless, it doesn't take one jot of fault away from Hezbollah. Or, for a common US example, if I call George Bush an immoral, sophomoric, hypocritical slave of big money, that doesn't mean I'm praising Bill Clinton by extension.
it takes a long, long time for me to get tired of arguments usually, but I get tired of stupid ones pretty quick.
Posted by dichroic at August 8, 2006 01:03 PM