The Never Ending Story?

I took about a month off to work on another project, anything exciting happen while I was gone? Exxon posted over 10 billion in profit for the 2nd quarter. Great. There’s a war going on between Israel and Lebanon. That’s probably because of all the stability we’ve brought to the region after the toppling of Saddam.

I’ve been watching the war since it started, mostly online news feeds. I have to admit I didn’t really know what my feelings were (besides dread) about Israel attacking Lebanon in an effort to crush Hezbollah. A country has the right to defend itself from attacks, not even I would deny that. I wish America had responded similarly to 9-11. Yeah, we attacked the Taliban in Afghanistan and toppled their regime, but we stopped short of capturing Osama and severely crippling Al-Qaeda and moved on to Iraq (fortunately the terrorist followed us there). However, would it have even made a difference if we had gone after Al-Qaeda till the bitter end?

Israel has always had a sort of “they pull a knife, you pull a gun. They put one of yours in the hospital you put one of theirs in the morgue” mentality to attacks on itself. And you would assume that people would realize that they shouldn’t fuck with Israel, but they do. If Israel were a person and you bumped into them without saying “sorry”, they would punch you in the face and kick you in the stomach. If you were a person you would learn quickly never to bump into Israel, or at least to apologize. Why doesn’t this happen on the world stage? For the same reason people continue to attack the U.S. and U.S. forces abroad: Ideology.

Belief that what you are fighting for is Just, Right and God’s Will. Belief that you are fighting the Great Satan. Belief that your enemies must not only be defeated, but exterminated will keep most of the world at war for most of the foreseeable future. There are people who would fight to see their enemies eradicated, even if it meant the death of everyone else, including themselves, their families and even all their people. How do you combat that? Strong shows of force don’t work; in fact, it only helps strengthen their resolve. And is the answer really to just try to kill everyone who hates us? That’s a whole lot of killing, and while we’re killing those people more people start to hate us. Will we just have to live in a world with war? I don’t know, but I now know what my feelings are: Hopelessness.