Sunday, August 27, 2006

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Nasrallah sorry for scale of war

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BBC NEWS | Middle East | Nasrallah sorry for scale of war

"We did not think that there was a 1% chance that the kidnapping would lead to a war of this scale and magnitude," Sheikh Nasrallah said.

"Now you ask me if this was 11 July and there was a 1% chance that the kidnapping would lead to a war like the one that has taken place, would you go ahead with the kidnapping?

"I would say no, definitely not, for humanitarian, moral, social, security, military and political reasons.

"Neither I, Hezbollah, prisoners in Israeli jails and nor the families of the prisoners would accept it."
So, the war was because Hezbollah got the calculus wrong? This reinforces the notion that proportionality in war is a mistake.

John Perry Barlow's "Sympathy for The Devil" comes to mind. Barlow was trying to come up with some explanation for what he observed, not endorsing it. Who knows, now maybe he'd endorse it.

1 comment:

jj mollo said...

The problem is that we're acting crazy enough to scare our own people, but not crazy enough to scare the terror organizations. I still think that Israel should have bombed Iranian oil facilities instead. Maybe they're too tied to the Corporate World as well.

Barlow was thinking that the invasion would have been too crazy to actually do. But, now that we've done it, we're looking awfully tied down and vulnerable. Time to do something crazy again, just when they expect us to behave.

I think he gives Cheney a little too much credit. The MX was the logical outcome of an arms race. It was the next step and not something that we could easily avoid doing, not a choice for once person to make. The CW is that Reagan was smart enough to recognize that we could force the USSR to spend itself into collapse. I don't know, but I wish we had a little more trust in our leaders.