Ney and Ahmadinejad

by Cliopatria

A few years ago, Ohio congressman Bob Ney attracted widespread ridicule after he used his position as chair of the House Administration Committee to demand that all House restaurants change their menus to sell"Freedom Fries" and"Freedom Toast," as a way to express displeasure with French opposition to the Iraq war. Congressman Ney, obviously, now has bigger things to worry about than the House restaurant menus.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has followed the Ney model; the wire services report that he has banned the use of Western words in Iran. Pizzas are now to be"elastic loaves";" chat" rooms on the net are now"short talk" rooms. Always reassuring to have further signs of Ahmadinejad's instability.

More seriously, the New Republic has a compelling article this a.m. on proportionality in warfare. Joshua Brook, an attorney and former research assistant to the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan, takes Amnesty International and the UN to task for distorting, or ignoring, international law in their zeal to condemn Israel. (A.I., Brook notes,"seems to be defining a war crime as any military action of which Amnesty International disapproves.") Human Rights Watch, on the other hand, seems to see no distinction between its mission and enunciating traditional standards of international law.

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Barry DeCicco - 7/31/2006

"My sense is this isn't the Israeli motive, simply because such a tactic would be foolhardy."

It's amazing how stupid people can be, in assuming that hitting somebody will alter their actions, in a predictable manner.

Barry DeCicco - 7/31/2006

'Dual use' is a *great* slogan. I imagine that the apologists for suicide bombers are kicking themselves for not using themselves, earlier.

Ralph E. Luker - 7/29/2006

I don't pretend to understand Ahmadinejad, but it seems to me to be a mistake to treat him with scorn. For one thing, unlike Ney, Ahmadinejad is defending a local language and culture from Anglo-intrusions. What he's done is no more or less foolish than the French struggles against English intrusion in their language. They may both misunderstand the way languages change or resist change, but the constant mocking of Ahmadinejad feels like propaganda to me.

Robert KC Johnson - 7/29/2006

There seems to me no easy answer to this question: all of these rules have as one of their bases the idea of sovereign states or actors associated with a sovereign state. So what happens with a parasitic group like Hezbollah that has access to many of the trappings of a sovereign state (its own military, embassies in some countries, control over certain portions of the Lebanese government) but isn't a state? One option is to do what Bush did in G'mo and just pretend that international law doesn't apply, which is clearly unacceptable.

The Jenin affair showed that the Israelis were willing to absorb increased risk for their forces to minimize civilian casualties in a serious military campaign. But this is a much more complicated conflict.

To me, one of the issues here is evaluating Israeli motives. If some of this bombing is designed to "encourage" the Lebanese government to reign in Hezbollah, it would seem to me to violate international law. My sense is this isn't the Israeli motive, simply because such a tactic would be foolhardy.

Oscar Chamberlain - 7/29/2006

Interesting article on the human rights groups. I particularly appreciated looking at Human Rights Watch statement. It made me realize that Brook has a good point.

However, hewing too close to legalisms in analyzing the situation can have its own problems. As the Human Rights Watch report suggests, Israel may have used "dual use" in a way that allows it to target anything it wants, regardless of proportionality.

Consider today's report of Israels damaging an oil storage facility which is not fouling Lebanon's beaches. Israel will likely claim that hitting oil supplies is important in slowing down the movement of material to Hezbollah, but that relationship is so tenous as to laughable.

Yet before I jump up and down on Israel too much, I should point out that while it is playing fast and loose with international law, Hezbollah is ignoring it entirely in its missile attacks.