I had a weird thought this morning about the “crisis in Lebanon”
It seems the Israelis have bombed southern Lebanon into rubble, to at least try to subdue the Hezbollah militia people from lobbing rockets over the border.
I guess the official pretext was the retrieval of these captured soldiers, but since hostilities have ceased and the rocket attacks have stopped but the soldiers remain in captivity, well, the actions speak for themselves.
So Israel achieved the immediate objective of stopping the persistent rocket attacks but they didn’t really succeed in the larger scheme of things, the Hezbollah guerrillas appear stronger, even if they didn’t really accomplish anything, because the expectations are so low, that merely surviving for them is a kind of victory.
And now there’s talk of trying to disarm them.
Seems to me there’s a bit of Sinn Fein thing going on here, what we have is really a guerilla warfare outfit and now they have a political wing and that political wing is officially represented in the Lebanese government and that government itself is relatively weak and Hezbollah has some decent organization going on and they perform some quasi-governmental functions and maybe even some charity work and what have you, for their own at least, and isn’t that really the definition of a political organization?
Putting aside the observation that whatever your opinion of the merits of their position, converting a guerrilla organization into a political organization would seem to be the most deft and desirable strategy to stop the bloodshed and encompass whatever objections to the status quo motivated it in the first place, I have a question.
There’s this talk of trying to disarm Hezbollah, and all the problems that would be attendant on that, and it occurred to me, hey.
You know we in this country we have this thing called the bill of rights, and in there, among some other things that seem to have gone by the way, there’s what we call The Second Amendment to the Constitution, talking about the “right” to keep and bear arms…. Here’s what it says: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
And my thought was: if the right to keep and bear arms is good for Americans, then why isn’t it good for Lebanese? Or whoever? And when we go around the world “fighting for democracy” don’t we mean these concepts that are articulated in our constitution, particularly in the Bill of Rights? We so frequently discuss the freedoms of religion and freedom of speech and of the press, and so on. What about this right to keep and bear arms? Isn’t that part and parcel of the American form of democracy?
Don’t get me wrong — I despise these Islamist bastards. I stand against them and everything they represent. But that’s not the point.
Remember, the second amendment doesn’t say “you have the right to keep and bear arms if your politics are consistent with mine.” Its quite unconditional.
And the rationale for this amendment to the constitution is often misunderstood: it’s not about hunters and recreational gunslingers. It’s about citizen militias…and the idea that an armed and competent militia composed of informed and patriotic citizens is the strongest deterrent against tyranny.
Its not perfectly true any more that a rough militia would be any match for a “real” military, given the asymmetrical capabilities of modern military forces, compared with anything that a citizen’s militia could come up with, although, … one can think of many David and Goliath type encounters from the modern era, going back maybe to various resistance movements you could think of, but most recently in Lebanon itself, actually, I suppose you could say, and ongoing in Iraq, and the various successes guerrilla fighters around the world have had in the past decades show that something like a properly armed, trained and disciplined citizen’s militia can actually be very effective, depending on the circumstances.
Where they have succeeded, I think is in large part due to what Sun Tzu called the ‘Moral Law.’
In the very first chapter of the Art of War, you’ll find the most brilliant and concise analysis of why nations that go to war sometimes succeed and sometimes fail, and chief among these is a sense of the people that they are engaged in what is essentially a righteous struggle.
That sense is essential and without it nothing, nor heaven nor earth can secure victory.
Just a thought…
Sun Tzu.