Soros on the War on Terror

Soros criticizes the war on terror in an article. He argues that the war on terror has three essential weaknesses. The first weakness is that “even if the targets are terrorists, the victims are often innocent civilians, and their suffering reinforces the terrorist cause.” The second is that “it relies on military action and rules out political approaches.” The final weakness is that the war on terror “lumps together different political movements that use terrorist tactics.” Soros is implying that the war on terror is not only an erroneous concept, but that more importantly it is a limited one, which doesn't identify the issues of the world and therefore cannot help leaders to address them. It is an interesting article, but the problem is that Soros doesn't offer an alternative vision to the war in terror, which has the advantage of being easy to understand and being easy to remember. For more, you can read Steve Clemons take on Soros's article or Brian Vogt from the Partnership for a secure America. President Bush promised victory in the War on Terror in a speech to the American Legion National Convention and Martini Republic contrasts it with some of his other speeches on the war on terror.

Comments

[Ed Watters]

Re: "Israel was justified in wanting to destroy Hizbollah".

Hezbollah's kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers that allegedly initiated the conflict (reports indicate that an invasion of Lebanon had been in the planning for over a year) was not an act of war. It was a border incident, no different than what Israel has been routinely doing along that border for years - over 400 Lebanese being held in Israeli dungeons could attest to that if they ever get thier day in court.

If Soros believes the Israeli response to kidnapped soldiers was justified then he should have no problem If Hamas begins lobbing shells into Israel in response to the IDF kidnapping of two citizens from Gaza on the day before Hezbollah's kidnapping.

Re: "Israel should have taken greater care to minimise collateral damage".

The term 'collateral damage' implies inadvertant damage to surrounding civilian objects when targetting a military object. Just hours into the Israeli response, thier aircraft were bombing civilian targets in Beirut. This isn't collateral damage, it is war crime, no different than Hezbollah's firing of shells at Haifa.

Once you get past Soros' pro-Israeli bias, he makes some good points: responding to terror with more terror is counter-productive. Fair enough (though quite facile), but by ignoring the real Israeli motives for invading Lebanon, and acting as if the Gaza pull out was anything more than a pragmatic move (Using 10,000 IDF troops to guard a few thousand settlers just wasn't worth it anymore) and by not mentioning that Israel has since intensified its 'cantonization' of the West Bank, Soros' objectivity is severely compromised.

[Kiki]

Ed, it seems that we are never going to agree so we are going to have to agree to disagree even though I have to keep insisting that you can't make Israel the boogeyman and the culprit on this situation and argue that they are responsible for everything because it is not only wrong, but it is injust. I think that you have to read Bernard-Henri Levy article in the New York Times to understand that although Israelis aren't angels, they aren't evil and their fight for their survival by doing their est to avoid horrors and destruction and when they are not able to they struggle with their conscience. Conscience that is the key world. Israel is a state, with a conscience and my argument to you is that you can't deny and you can't point to Israel and there it is the evil nation responsible for the problems in the Middle East because it isn't true. It doesn't mean that you can't criticize Israel, but that you cannot be unjust and forget history, forget the fact that there is debate in Israel, and more importantly, ignore the fact that the goal of most Israelis isn't to continue to live like this, but to live in a region where there are accepted and where the Israeli-Palestinian question is solved.