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Public Opinion on Lebanon
by Christopher Chantrill
July 24, 2006 at 4:34 am
AFTER THE SHOCK of the new Mideast War we are beginning to see public opinion forming in the pronouncements of the opinion makers. In Europe, of course, the watchword is “disproportionate” as in Israel’s response to border violations and rocket attacks on its citizens.
But in the US there is a different dynamic developing. There is the “arc of Shia radicalism” argument, suggested by Walid Phares, in which the Iranians are building an arc of Shia radicalism from Tehran to Beirut with Hezbollah holding down the right flank.
Then there is Michael Barone observing that the rules have changed in this Mideast War because there is now, after the withdrawal from South Lebanon and Gaza, no excuse for the “land for peace” argument. Israel’s two enemies want to destroy it. Period.
A lot of people are panicking about the strength of Iran and Hezbollah. But Peter Brookes wonders if it is Syria that is panicking. “Syria,” he writes, ”will not be invited to attend this Wednesday's Rome conference on Lebanon.”
Damascus is, in actuality, desperate. It is becomes increasingly marginalized in this Middle East crisis by both the United States and other Arab nations, and may have little to no say in resolving the current Lebanese conflict. This would be a serious blow to Damascus' interests-and more painfully, its ego.
Imagine that. Condi going to the Middle East with cards to play against Syria and Iran.
Suppose that Israel succeeded in defanging Hezbollah, and suppose Syria actually offered substantial concessions to get into the game.
Well, you never know. Justs because CNN and Al-Jazeera are showing mayhem and disaster 24/7 doesn’t mean that, behind the scenes, there really is mayhem and disaster. It just means that they are filling the TV screen with ruined buildings and frightened, wounded children. Because that is what they do.
Sphere: Related Content | | printChristopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.
Racial Discrimination
[T]he way “to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis,”
Brown II, 349 U. S., at 300–301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop
discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Roberts, C.J., Parents Involved in Community Schools vs. Seattle School District
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
Sacrifice
[Every] sacrifice is an act of impurity that pays for a prior act of greater impurity... without its participants having to suffer the full consequences incurred by its predecessor. The punishment is commuted in a process that strangely combines and finesses the deep contradiction between justice and mercy.
Frederick Turner, Beauty: The Value of Values
Pentecostalism
Within Pentecostalism the injurious hierarchies of the wider world are abrogated and replaced by a single hierarchy of faith, grace, and the empowerments of the spirit... where groups gather on rafts to take them through the turbulence of the great journey from extensive rural networks to the mega-city and the nuclear family...
David Martin, On Secularization
Conservatism's Holy Grail
What distinguishes true Conservatism from the rest, and from the Blair project, is the belief in more personal freedom and more market freedom, along with less state intervention... The true Third Way is the Holy Grail of Tory politics today - compassion and community without compulsion.
Minette Marrin, The Daily Telegraph
Moral Imperatives of Modern Culture
These emerge out of long-standing moral notions of freedom, benevolence, and the affirmation of ordinary life... I have been sketching a schematic map... [of] the moral sources [of these notions]... the original theistic grounding for these standards... a naturalism of disengaged reason, which in our day takes scientistic forms, and a third family of views which finds its sources in Romantic expressivism, or in one of the modernist successor visions.
Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self
Drang nach Osten
There was nothing new about the Frankish drive to the east... [let] us recall that the continuance of their rule depended upon regular, successful, predatory warfare.
Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion
Government Expenditure
The Union publishes an exact return of the amount of its taxes; I can get copies of the budgets of the four and twenty component states; but who can tell me what the citizens spend in the administration of county and township?
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America
Living Law
The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
Action
The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness...
But to make a man act [he must have]
the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove
or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Holy Families
Revelations cannot be sustained and transformed into successful new religions by lonely prophets... Indeed, new religious movements based on revelations typically are family affairs.
Rodney Stark, Exploring the Religious Life
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