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August 12, 2006 12:51pm by David Farrar

A solution to the Israel/Lebanon conflict

Scott Adams has a number of innovative suggestions for how to solve the Israel/Lebanon conflict.

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Guest Post: Response to Max Harris
You need Palestinian peace before peace with Israel
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Armoured Passionfruit

Turkey
Syria
Iraq
Iran
Egypt
Sudan
Chad
Algeria
Lebanon
Saudi Arabia
Pakistan
Yemen
Oman
Aden
etc etc
Israel

END THE UNJUST OCCUPATION OF MUSLIM LAND
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August 12, 2006 1:41pm
neil morrison

The UN scurity council has finally passed a resolution to form the basis of a long term solution to the conflict –

http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,,1843019,00.html

Good news. Should have happened about 6 years ago, that would most likely have saved a lot of lives. A lesson for the UN – don’t make promises you’re not willing to keep/enforce.

Hopefully Hezbollah will setlle down to running hospitals and schools which the seem to do quite well.

And for those of a Fiskian mindset, Olmert went into this being against a beefed-up UN force as a solution to the Hezbollah problem. So if it helps to see this as some sort of poke in the eye for Israel, rather than “imperialism”, then that’s probably at least more constructive.
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August 12, 2006 2:11pm
Danyl Mclauchlan

The first comment, and Scotts reply to it made my day:

Oh crap. Scott is spouting his geopolitical garbage again. Israel can’t win, Israel is trying to kill random civilians, the US went into Iraq for no reason.

Christ on a crutch.
Get your Johnson caught in your underwear again, will ya?

Blistering moron.

[What’s it like to have hallucinations and then get really mad about them? That must suck. — Scott]
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August 12, 2006 2:12pm
New Zeal

What about a really good playstation game called Grand Smash Israel and free playstations for all Middle Eastern males between the ages of 12 and 28?
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August 12, 2006 2:54pm
Paulinem

its to pathetic to comment on – Scott needs locked up to get a brain draft to me.

But there is good news just been revealed that the Security council at last has shown some teeth and formed a peace plan…which Lebanon has accepted and Israel will tell us tomorrow ..I just hope while they are at they could formulate a leave me alone to live in peace etc. plan for the Palestine people as well.
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August 12, 2006 4:34pm
Logix

Scott makes an interesting point:

It’s a strange little war in the sense that neither side can win, and they both know it. Hizbollah can’t destroy Israel and Israel can’t destroy Hizbollah. And neither side can afford to give up. So in the meantime, since no one can win or lose, they settle for killing as many random civilians as possible because that’s one thing they can do. The thinking, I gather, is that killing random people and never winning is still better than doing nothing and looking weak.

What Scott is alluding to is that war has become a very inefficient means of policy. Just as murder has been outlawed as a means of settling disputes between individuals, and tribal groups are generally discouraged from going out on “summer war parties”, the global landscape we live in nowadays has rendered militarised warfare largely obsolete.

While I accept that we are not quite ready to consign all our military toys of death to museums just yet, if we wish to imagine that the human race has a future beyond the next few decades…such a thing is inevitable. What do we need to do to bring about “the end of war”? What beliefs and obstacles are preventing us from embarking on such a clear path?

Questions of this nature are roughly of two types:

1. Dealing with our “hallucinations”, the mass delusions and ignorances of humanity. Only with knowledge and courage are we able to set aside our fears.

2. The ordinary person needs some sense of being able to participate, however indirectly, in the global body-politic. Unless the peoples of the earth have some sense that they will be ultimately be treated justly, we never willingly set aside our legitimate grievances.
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August 12, 2006 4:40pm
SPC

The only purpose to this war for Israel was to bring in peacekeepers. They had the Resolution 1559 – they just wanted it enforced. Lebanon said they could not, but would not ask for international help to implement it.

So when Hizbollah attacked (their purpose was to improve pan Arab solidarity – Lebanon/Syria/Palestine and divert attention on the end of August UN deadline on Iran), Israel had 3 choices.
Pure diplomacy insisting on belated action to enforce 1559, pure military (the IDF hitting to the Litani within a few days and an occupation in which Hizbollah would be taken out in this area over months) or a combination of military moves and diplomacy to incite an international intervention and Lebanese government policy to end the Hizbollah threat to the northern border.

They chose the third option, because they realised that the long term option was a non Israeli non Hizbollah force controlling the area south of the Litani.

So while the Israelis would have preferred a NATO force and a directive to support Lebanon in the realising of Resolution 1559, they are achieving their essential goal.

They still need Lebanon to take/accept responsibility for any future actions by Hizbollah (after all the Taleban paid a much higher price for hosting a group which did less COMPARATIVE damage to the USA and NATO and other countries now assist in the regime change made).

Security on this border would enable Israel to continue with their intent to withdraw from settlements beyond the security fence.

At present, because of the attacks by Hamas and Hizbollah into Israel (military and rockets) after the withdrawals from Gaza and Lebanon, the support for withdrawal from West Bank areas is diminishing.
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August 12, 2006 5:49pm
tim barclay

Israel could shut down Hizbollah by bombing the crap out of Iran and taking out those nuclear reactors to boot. You heard from me first.
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August 12, 2006 7:37pm
Psycho Milt

Oh yes, that’d work, bombing the crap out of Lebanon having achieved such excellent results an’ all. Stunning logic – if you can’t defeat a few guerrillas in a small country, extend the war dramatically by attacking a large country, unprovoked. Why is it that history’s great military geniuses never thought of this themselves?
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August 12, 2006 8:16pm
Ed Snack

What must really suck for Scott, is to be soooo lame as to have to have the “last word” on comments.

FWIW, the first commenter has it right, it is a piece of racist slander to state that Israel targets and attempts to kill “random civilians”. That is simply not supportable by facts. However Hezbollah must be pleased, yet another “prominent westerner” clearly regards Israel at the same level as Hez, as a murderous genocidal organisation.

Scott’s suggestions are nearly as hilarious as his cartoons, now some 10-15 years past their “best by” date.

Logix, that is a surprisingly intelligent analysis in parts, but I think you do not grasp what a sense of being treated fairly means to various groups. To an Islamist, being treated fairly means being able to establish a world-wide caliphate under Sharia law, and their minds what non-muslims want is immaterial. You cannot tackle that problem by appearing to treat others fairly.
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August 12, 2006 9:03pm
Logix

Ed,

To an Islamist, being treated fairly means being able to establish a world-wide caliphate under Sharia law,

I think that falls under the category of “irrational fears and delusions”. And I mean that kindly, not as a put down. In times of stress and uncertainty one of the most common human delusions is to fantasise about some lost “golden age” that we have lost in the past. Goodness me this is the very first story in Genesis, the story of paradise lost, and our exile from it. Our emotions are always more important than our ability to reason, and there is always within us a sense that if things are not good now, they must have been better before….like they were in our childhood before we became adults with awareness and responsibilities.

A man lost in strange land is faced with a dilemma, does he press forward into greater unknowns, or does he turn back and attempt to regain familiar paths? In a forest there is a reasonable expectation that the old path can be regained, but not so with history…we are forever compelled to forge forward into an unknown future. There never was some “golden age” to return to, no paradise we can ever re-create. Yet the sense of this runs very deep in our collective psyches.

Writing this has made me aware of the power it holds for me. I have spent much of this evening reading journals from the website I read every day:

http://www.trailjournals.com/journals.cfm?sort=&year=2006&trail=Pacific%20Crest%20Trail

or if I really want to indulge in pure escapist “nirvana seeking” I go here:

http://www.remotehuts.co.nz/index.html

Us nomads spend all our inner lives running from reality and seeking some sort of answer “just over the next ridgeline”. As firmly as my life is embedded in the routines of family and business, my soul rebels every mm of the way. This materialistic world is deeply alienating. Just Thursday I walked through the new Westgate Lower Hutt in the middle of the day…and emerged catatonically depressed; everything about the place screamed “highly calibrated wallet vacuum cleaning device”…every sight and sound with only one purpose, to appeal to vanity, greed and umoderated desire. This sense of alienation triggers within me a deep desire to be “somewhere else”. As a New Zealander I have the very great luxury of knowing that I can if I truly need, get to that “somewhere else” for a week or more if I truly need. I can travel to any place in the world, I can spend a summer in the Southern Alps…I can find a tropical retreat or a very quiet bach to rediscover my integrity.

But consider the billions who cannot. The last 150 years has seen Islam undergo profound political reversals and destabilisation. Much of the Islamic world is trapped in a medieval social and political amber, neither able to participate fully in the modern world (and repelled by it’s excesses) nor able to reform itself into an alternate model. The 1.4 billion people of the world, most born into the religion are for the most part ordinary people just like you and me…with exactly the same emotional wiring. They too feel doubly alienated by the Western world, at once a crass violation of their sense of ethics, and yet at the same time a world that disdains them with the casual arrogance that comes with wealth and power. Is it so hard to see why many Muslims want to be “somewhere else”.

Christianity too went through much the same crisis in the 14th to 16th centuries… the struggle between those who wanted to preserve the status quo, or regress to an earlier era of supposed “purity”, and the unstoppble flow of history…was both protracted and very bloody. Islam as a is undergoing similar convulsions, but with the added complication of the rest of the world similutaneously engaged in a massive transition of it’s own towards a wholly new form of global culture.

Fanatics are very fearful people. Both full of fears themselves, and dangerous to the rest of us because their chronic fright causes them to reject any abstract reasoning that poses any challenge to the delusional amour they erect about themselves. This begs the question, what is the useful way to deal with frightened people? “The beatings will continue until morale improves?”.

I agree Ed that there are elements of Islam who cling to the delusion of “being somewhere else”, of living in a worldwide caliphate operating under medieval sharia law. As much as we deplore their fantasy, we can acknowledge it’s cause….our age-old enemies… fear, delusion and paranoia.
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August 12, 2006 10:38pm
Simon

There is no difference between the Hezbollah thugs and the airline plotters arrested this week yet on the surface their environments are so different. They are though part of the same mass movement.

Mass movements are the same the world over. At the core there are people with a lack of self esteem seeking to compensate their inadequacies with a self righteous oppression with the outside world and the lives of others.

A lot of hard work ahead and it will get worse before it gets better as the cold war ended with the defeat of a mass movement lasted 80 years shows.
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August 13, 2006 9:51am
Danyl Mclauchlan

Ed Snack:

FWIW, the first commenter has it right, it is a piece of racist slander to state that Israel targets and attempts to kill “random civilians”. That is simply not supportable by facts. However Hezbollah must be pleased, yet another “prominent westerner” clearly regards Israel at the same level as Hez, as a murderous genocidal organisation.

Maybe for his next post Ed could write us a piece on how other peoples farts smell bad but his own are pleasantly fragrant and refreshing.
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August 13, 2006 4:06pm
Ed Snack

Oh the biting wit of the left, oh I’m wounded, oh, oh, oh. The odd thing is, I happen to believe what Hez themselves say are their goals and objectives. Danyl seems to believe what he wants to believe about them instead, perhaps because he seems so anally obsessed ?

Logix, Islamists may well be a paranoid group of delusionists, but a paranoid group with the ability to do a great deal of damage. The trouble is, I suspect that attempts to deal with them as rationalists by pandering to their fantasys is possibly one of trhe worst ways to deal with them. There is, sadly, no easy answer. I do see many of their “grievances” as unsupportable, the mess that is the middle east has plenty of faults on all sides, but when one side has the declared aim of a genocidal destruction of another, at what point can you engage ? Are you sure that by appeasement that we wouldn’t fall into the “Munich Agreement” trap ? Much of what you say could be applied to Germany in the 1930’s, different to be sure in many ways as well. Interesting to note there too, that there was much German resentment to the clause in the Versailles treaty that fastened the blame for WW1 on them, but IMHO, that claim is reasonably well founded. Should that grievance have been acknowledged ?

Continuing with the thread, is the critical question that of whether Israel has a right to exist ? I think it is, and if you answer yes, then you are almost bound to support it against the likes of Hezbollah and Hamas until they change their stance on that matter. It’s not Israel right or wrong, but taken on the balance, Israel is generally more offended against than offending. The major exception being, and here I expect to be with the great majority, is over settlements in the West Bank. It may seem difficult, but I hold to the view that the best way to get the Israelis out of the WB is by giving them peace.
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August 13, 2006 8:58pm
Danyl Mclauchlan

Much of what you say could be applied to Germany in the 1930’s . . .

Doesn’t anyone on the internet know anything about human history other than Modern Germany 1933-45?
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August 13, 2006 10:21pm
sonic

“There is no difference between the Hezbollah thugs and the airline plotters arrested this week”
Except for the small fact that the “plotters” had no weapons (or airline tickets or passports)
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August 14, 2006 9:43am
phillipjohn

“on the balance, Israel is generally more offended against than offending”.

You really have to be joking here. Whenever Israel engages in a conflict against one of its Arab neighbours the kill ratio is about 7/1 in favour of Israel.

Also Hammas, as a democratically elected government has a right to exist. The fact that Israel has kidnapped 8 of its cabinet ministers, and supplies automatic weapons to the Palestinian opposition party “Fattah” shows that democracy is, for them, a mere word to be conveniently thrown about. Next to the US, the Israeli government is the largest and nost dangerous terrorist organisation on the face of the planet.

If Israel ended its occupation of Gaza, the Golan Heights and Palestine, how much support would these extremist Islamic organisations get? But if Israel did this it probably wouldn’t get its annual US “military aid” donation of $2 billion. After all, what good is an attack dog that has lost its will to attack?
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August 14, 2006 12:09pm
reid

To answer the question you need to understand the problem, which is: why did Olmert invade Lebanon? Anyone who thinks it was because of the captured soldiers I suggest is mistaken because of the massively disproportionate nature and extent of the reaction.

There are many reliable press and internet reports on the possibility the soldiers were captured inside Lebanese territory. I believe personally this was a planned campaign waiting for an incident to trigger it. Obviously it didn’t go to plan, but what was the purpose?

I suggest it was to provoke Syria and thereby Iran into a response and some of the early bombings were very close to if not inside of the Syrian border. Those two nations however inconveniently refused to react – had they done so, Israel and the US would have launched against Iran. (This may have prompted a US military revolt since the military can’t stand the neocons over what’s happened in Iraq, but the neocons in this administration would have tried it on regardless.)

However against all expectations neither Syria nor Iran reacted and Hezbollah successfully defended its home territory.

It was always clear that Olmert was an idiot and now he’s also a loser – he won’t last long. Israel however is left with her invincible image shattered, and about the same amount of friends an aggresive home invader would have. She can’t trust the US anymore, so what is she going to do?

I suggest her best course is to act in terms of her heritage and become once again a beacon of light toward God, from which she has turned since the 1948 and 1967 miracles. And guess which nations are showing by their actions the most dedication to YHWH? Islam. And guess which of these is the most faithful (not being ruled by corrupt leaders)? Iran.

The reason why Israel can’t trust the US is that an Iranian attack and subsequent Chinese response (China is committed to protecting Iran) would have meant the destruction of Israel.
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September 16, 2006 10:51am
candida

This world will not rest until the Islamic extremists are wiped off the face of the earth. They insist on killing civilians simply because they don’t have the guts to confront any military. Since 911 they continue to target civilians in every Western country.
The solution is to refuse them entry into every western country. They make very little contribution in any case. Let them plot and plan as much as they like, but in their own country. They will soon get bored, or run out of virgins.
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September 16, 2006 7:03pm
candida

This world will not rest until the Islamic extremists are wiped off the face of the earth. They insist on killing civilians simply because they don’t have the guts to confront any military. Since 911 they continue to target civilians in every Western country.
The solution is to refuse them entry into every western country. They make very little contribution in any case. Let them plot and plan as much as they like, but in their own country. They will soon get bored, or run out of virgins.
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September 16, 2006 7:05pm
candida

This world will not rest until the Islamic extremists are wiped off the face of the earth. They insist on killing civilians simply because they don’t have the guts to confront any military. Since 911 they continue to target civilians in every Western country.
The solution is to refuse them entry into every western country. They make very little contribution in any case. Let them plot and plan as much as they like, but in their own country. They will soon get bored, or run out of virgins.
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September 16, 2006 7:06pm
Danyl Mclauchlan

This world will not rest until the Islamic extremists are wiped off the face of the earth. They insist on killing civilians simply because they don’t have the guts to confront any military.

I hate to be a pedant, but don’t the Israeli military and the US military count as militaries?
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September 17, 2006 7:09am
Danyl Mclauchlan

This world will not rest until the Islamic extremists are wiped off the face of the earth. They insist on killing civilians simply because they don’t have the guts to confront any military.

I hate to be a pedant, but don’t the Israeli military and the US military count as militaries?
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September 17, 2006 7:09am
candida

Hate to burst your bubble mate but Hez crossed the border into Israel, killed a couple of soldiers and kidnapped two, then high-tailed it back to Lebanon as quick as their tiny legs would carry them. Then, they fired over 2000 missile INTO Israel to kill civilians. This while the Israeli forces were right in front of them spoiling for a war. Cowards. Please explain to me where the military was for the 911 attack, Spanish and British train bombings, Bali restaurant bombing….. need I go on?
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September 17, 2006 5:34pm
Andrew Bannister

This world will not rest until the Islamic extremists are wiped off the face of the earth

Funny, the Islamic extremists are saying the same thing about Israel. So are you right, are they right, are you both right or are you both wrong?

Tricky!!
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September 17, 2006 5:53pm
candida

Andrew, consider this. Israel was not involved in flying hijacked civilian aircraft with civilians onboard into the Twin Towers, nor were they involoved in killing hundreds of civilians on trains in Spain and Britain. Not to mention killing scores in Bali in the restaurant bombings. The list is endless. No doubt, the Islamic extremists will still kill innocent civilians in the days and years to come. Islam is a threat to the West, not Israel.
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September 18, 2006 10:29am

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