It is now apparent that the US’s policy towards violence in the Middle East has been created on a boardgame version of the world and is played out by the administration on a Big Board of the situation room. The Bush administration believes that for a sustainable peace to exist between Israel and its neighbors, terrorist organizations like Hezbollah and Hamas, even if they operate legitimate civil and political support infrastructures, must be destroyed. The cessation of terrorist activities will undoubtedly promote peace in the Middle East, but the Bush administration’s position seems to be built on two faulty premises.

First, the conflict against terrorists and terrorist organization does not take place in a static system. It is not the case that Israel must kill x Hezbollah members and doing so will eliminate the problem. Support and association with a terrorist organization is not static. The actions Israel (or the US) take against Muslim states is influences the number of people supporting these groups, thus the way in which campaigns against Hezbollah or other terror groups are perpetrated has real-world impact on the support for these groups.

By refusing to call for an immediate cease-fire, even in the face of the Qana bombing, Ms. Rice was teetering on the edge of a public relations disaster, particularly in the Arab world. All day on Sunday, scenes of dead children being pulled out of the wreckage at Qana dominated the airwaves.

But American officials continued to say that, despite the civilian death toll, an immediate cease-fire would do little good unless underlying issues were first addressed, including the ultimate disarmament of Hezbollah.

While bombing continues to kill more Lebanese civilians than Hezbollah guerillas, support for Hezbollah in the Muslim world grows. This plays into the second faulty premise. Hezbollah cannot be fought in a vacuum and thus how the fight is handled has a far greater impact on the the end result of eliminating Hezbollah than the death of any number of Hezbollah fighters. The battle between Israel and Hezbollah is not played out on a Risk board game or the digital screen of a war room. Ever blip on the map representative of a tank or rocket launcher is surrounded by civilians, civil infrastructure, and places that simply cannot be justified as targets of Israeli bombing. It is simply not possible for Israel to conduct wide-scale bombings of Lebanese cities and not inflict major damage against non-Hezbollah targets. That is why the strategy of trying to bomb Hezbollah out of existence cannot work and will, more than likely serve to bolster their ranks and turn the world against Israel.

Looking at the geopolitical problems standing between today’s conflicts between militant Muslim groups and Israeli and American interests, it must be clear that a solution cannot come by moving pieces against one another on a Big Board. Popular militant groups gain support with every civilian casualty and the Risk board game mentality of waging war against them is to address a complicated problem with a simplistic solution and thus fail to solve that problem.

Alexander Cockburn, writes about the perils of this simplistic mentality in The Nation (subscription link):

With Bush and Rice and the policy-makers and intellectual courtiers surrounding them, crackpot realism is the prevailing mode. “Crackpot realism” was the concept defined by the great Texan sociologist C. Wright Mills in 1958 (the year Dwight Eisenhower sent the Marines into Lebanon to bolster local US factotum President Camille Chamoun), when he published The Causes of World War Three: “In crackpot realism, a high-flying moral rhetoric is joined with an opportunist crawling among a great scatter of unfocused fears and demands. The expectation of war solves many problems of the crackpot realists…instead of the unknown fear, the anxiety without end, some men of the higher circles prefer the simplification of known catastrophe…. They know of no solutions to the paradoxes of the Middle East and Europe, the Far East and Africa except the landing of Marines…. they prefer the bright, clear problems of war–as they used to be. For they still believe that ‘winning’ means something, although they never tell us what.”

In the current situation, both Bush and Olmert have defined winning as the complete destruction of Hezbollah. The crackpot side of this notion is that the realities of bombing play out in greater detail than those who order them care to think about. Looking at the problem as part of a zero-sum game only allows the rhetorical slippage by the likes of John Podhertz were openly advocating the mass murder of Muslims is acceptable. That is, the simplified and naive view by the Bush administration that the world can be made safer by bombing an elusive enemy’s surroundings into dust can effectively bring peace on the small scale (Hezbollah in southern Lebanon) is naturally extended by war hawks to include any and all Hezbollah sympathizers.

The biggest problem that underlies Israel’s strategy and America’s continued support for it is that it forgets that it warring parties are not allowed to kill civilians. Period. It’s not acceptable and though it may happen accidentally at times, widespread targeting is criminally wrong. Supporting policies that seem to ignore the existence of civilians on the field of conflict will only grow resentment for America and Israel in the Middle East, thus promoting terror groups and undermining the very hope for peace that this bloodshed is erroneously based on.

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