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Is Israel's Response Disproportionate? No, It's Survival

[Washington Post] Richard Cohen - Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness. For Israel, a small country within reach of a missile launched from any enemy's backyard, proportionality is not only inapplicable, it is suicide. The last thing Israel needs is a war of attrition. It is not good enough to take out this or that missile battery. It is necessary to reestablish deterrence: You slap me, I will punch out your lights. The only way to ensure that babies don't die in their cribs and old people in the streets is to make the Lebanese or the Palestinians understand that if they host those missiles, they will pay a very steep price. These calls for proportionality rankle. They fall on my ears not as genteel expressions of fairness, some ditsy Marquess of Queensberry idea of war, but as ugly sentiments pregnant with antipathy toward the only democratic state in the Middle East.
2006-07-25 01:00:00
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