Winners

The interesting thing about following a war that your country isn't in is that for once you can see it, if not dispassionately, at least more objectively than one might if it's your country. Our involvement (what a euphemism!) in Iraq is so politically laden, and each American watches it through the prism of his own domestic politics. In the current war, especially for people like me who are neither Arab-American, Muslim, nor Jewish, one can take a step back. What do we see?

War sucks. War is bad. War is messy. War is death. No one can say how many Hezbollah fighters have died, the Israelis have lost something like less than 50, but civilians die by the hundreds. Civilians, civilians, I just keep hearing that word and seeing small feet poke out from dusty blankets, from a pile of blankets all alike.

All the things man has created, strong bridges and sleek buildings and gleaming airports, gone. A world made up of ideas and designs and construction and effort and pride reduced to meaningless rubble. And even if we find a way to stop the fighting, if the sun came out tomorrow, the mess left behind is worse than 10 Katrinas. The life's work of so many people, building homes and careers and families, torn apart and blown into the wind like dandelion seeds.

And as Israel moves farther into Lebanon, and the rockets keep hitting Israel, it seems somehow like the Israelis are "worse" (this is what we've been talking about in the past couple of posts) because they are causing more damage and death-- but today it dawned on me, this is just what it looks like when one side is winning. When one side in a war is more successful, it means they are doing more damage. Hitting critical routes, airports, buildings. Trapping people in their villages. And Israel is really winning on that score, although the rockets keep hitting Israel in record numbers so this may in fact be the old adage you've used a thousand times-- winning the battle but losing the war (or at least keeping it at a draw). The horror of war means that whoever is better, who is succeeding, who is riding a rocket trail of glory, they are in fact the Huns, the Mongols, the Spartans, the Thing To Be Feared, The Bad Dudes. And of course nice people like us don't like The Bad Dudes, so the tide of public opinion turns away from Israel.

I asked myself, "What is Israel supposed to do?" and I still don't have an answer that satisfies me, but I do have one word: win. (I mean, I don't want Hezbollah to win and "eliminate the Zionists from the earth", so I guess I do want Israel or at least the wider world to prevail.) They're supposed to win, and that's what they're doing. This is what winning looks like. We're not used to seeing this in the US because when we are winning, we don't show the damage we leave in our wake on our media. But take a good look kids, before you shout your jingoistic slogans and yell "Sic 'em" to our military and send them out to win. This is what it looks like.