Optimistic About the War

I just ran across Nine Reasons to Be Moderately Optimistic about the War at Truth Laid Bear. Let me give you the first reason. Then go read the rest, for it is good.

1. The exposure of UNIFIL. A good proportion of the hundreds upon hundreds of rockets Hezbollah has been raining down on us from southern Lebanon are being shot off from relatively small launchers. There’s small and there’s small, though. You can get some of these launchers onto the back of a pickup truck, but you can’t, say, hide them in your breast pocket or under your hat. You can’t, in other words, install hundreds of rocket launchers in civilian backyards without anyone ever seeing any of them.

UNIFIL (UN Interim Force in Lebanon), which has always protested that its only function is to observe (a point it demonstrated by quietly watching the abduction in 2000 of three Israeli soldiers by Hezbollah), has somehow managed to miss a long-term, wide-scale deploying of these weapons all over civilian areas throughout south Lebanon. Even if you absolve UNIFIL of moral bankruptcy and willful blindness here (although I’m hard pressed to imagine why we should, considering the decades of sanctimonious moral grandstanding we’ve had to put up with from the UN), they surely give new dimension to the terms “incompetent”, “inept”, and “useless”. As we have seen, the deployment of huge quantities of weaponry all over Lebanese civilian areas placed those civilians in the ultimate line of fire. We all know the UN is not on the Israeli side in any conflict, but UNIFIL has demonstrated the UN’s inability even to protect those civilian populations it does give a damn about. Israel has agreed that UNIFIL can have a role in maintaining a cease-fire, but only if it is issued a new mandate and is given the power to take action.

Update: 07 Aug '06 1916z

Broken link fixed. Thanks to Carol Herman. One of my favorite commenters here and around the net.

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