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A Heavily Armed Militia Attacks Your Territory. What Are You Meant to Do?

[Times-UK] David Aaronovitch - Why did the G8 countries take such a unanimously hard line against Hizballah when framing their joint reaction to the violence? Because what Hizballah has done - what Hizballah is doing - is intolerable to sovereign governments. An autonomous heavily armed militia, working from the territory of a state, has - without agreement from its own government (of which it is a part) - launched its own attacks on the territory of a neighbor. There is a whole cottage industry devoted to the reweaving of Hizballah as a kind of unique mixture of cool guerrillismo and charity organization, and its leader Hassan Nasrallah as the turbaned love-child of Gerry Adams and Bob Geldof. The closeness between the Iranian government and Hizballah can be judged by who supplies Hizballah's munitions. But why Iran judges that a party with 14 MPs in the Lebanese national parliament might require medium-range high-explosive missiles is a matter for some serious thought. Do we think that Israel's response is "proportionate"? By the way, if it isn't, then the Falklands campaign, in which deaths actually exceeded the population of the contested area, can only be described as grossly disproportionate.
2006-07-18 01:00:00
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