| By tacitly allowing Hizballah to control the border region with Israel and by including the group in the then-cabinet, the Lebanese government could no longer readily disavow the terrorists. The Hizballah action was "not a terrorist attack but the action of a sovereign state that attacked Israel for no reason and without provocation"—in other words, a pure casus belli. Hence, we concluded, "So war it is—a war of self-defense against unlawful Lebanese aggression in which the Israeli government has the obligation to its citizens to inflict maximum damage to the infrastructure of those who have attacked them" in order to quickly push the latter to their limit and end the conflict. |
Best of all, perhaps, is that this nifty sophist and thug fan thinks his neoteric stuff is impeccably traditional, at least if Herr General von Clausewitz be accounted so:
| Our legal analysis was predicated on an essentially Clausewitzian view of war as the continuation of politics by other means. Statesmen ought to do everything possible to prevent the outbreak of hostilities, but, once it is clear that diplomacy has failed or one of the parties initiates hostilities (casus belli), warriors are allowed to deliver what diplomats failed to produce: a definitive resolution of the conflict by determining a winner and a loser so that the outlines of the peace to follow might respect the comparative strengths and other realities on the ground—and thus be more stable than the status quo ante bellum. Precisely because war is a bloody business, however, the traditional doctrine carried strong sanctions which discouraged bellicose leaders from pushing their nations into conflict: [o]nce they unleashed the dogs of war, they faced dire consequences, including debellatio, the ending of their belligerency through the complete destruction of their state. The unconditional surrenders of the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire precipitated by their aggression are prime examples of this principle. However, I underestimated the ability of asymmetric warfare and anti-war "humanitarians", who claim exclusive ownership of the laws of war, to eclipse this traditional doctrine. Human rights advocacy and other groups operating under the "humanitarian" rubric have long eschewed questions of the jus ad bellum. |
But fortunately Professor Clever of Wombschool Normal University knows a trick worth two of that! He doesn't merely "eschew" all that obsolete jus in bello jazz, he annihilates it and then mendaciously passes the buck for the annihilation to the celebrated Prussian theorist.
If "mendaciously" doesn't apply to Dr. Clever, that can only be because "incompetently" applies. Perhaps Clever doesn't know that poor Clausewitz didn't say anything of the sort, but then, perhaps he ought to know?
The only authentic tradition that can be appealed to in favor of Cleverism is the proverb "All's fair in love and war," which is interesting enough in its own humble way, although that way is scarcely the Path of Aquinas. J. Yoo, Esq., and A. Gonzales, Esq., and G. Weigel, S.J., are, for all that appears to the contrary, the first toney intellectuals ever to start neotheorizin' about War on the popular and proverbial level, this nifty neolevel of his that Prof. Clever of WNU lyingly or ignorantly attributes to Gen. Clausewitz. (The tone of our intelligentsia sure ain't what it used to be, O Western Civistanis!)
Still, let's not exaggerate. Despite his best efforts to suggest otherwise, probably Clever more or less knows what casus belli (and maybe even debellatio!) really used to mean to all those negligible benighted pre-neos who perforce thought their thoughts de bello in very late Latin rather than in the native New High Party Chinese of Yoo and Gonzales and Weigel and Clever. In the latter tongue, it appears that any conflict that is not about "unconditional surrender" doesn't really count as "war." Not surprisingly, Clever's own instances are very, very recent: "The unconditional surrenders of the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire precipitated by their aggression are prime examples of this principle." Apart from perhaps Cato vs. Carthage, it looks almost as if the "tradition" of Wombschool Normal University began in 1939 or 1941 and ended in 1945. The "Great Generation" they like to claptrapize their favourite period as, I believe, the only generation in all the recorded annals that was ever capable of committing True WAR! (Except maybe that of the Catones and the Scipiones).
Still, let's not exaggerate. Let's only temperately note that "unconditional surrender" hasn't flourished much better since 1945 than it did before 1939. The most striking human event of my own time, who was born exactly three months after Hiroshima Day, can only be the collapse of the Lenin-Gorbachev Racket, which had nothing to do with True War, or even with false war. Dr. Perestroika didn't ever "surrender" with or without conditions, and how could he have? To whom should he have tendered the sword of Stalin?
Now if only the Boy-'n'-Party crew, the Yoos and Gonzaleses and Weigels and Clevers, did not harp so extremistically hard themselves on a "war against terror" that requires to be "aggressively" pursued, one might almost, always moderately and temperately, suppose them to be at bottom far more interested in régime-changin' than in war-makin'. In that case the Path of Aquinas might quite reasonably be eschewed and the militant neocomrades would very properly go back to their drawin' boards to deliniate for an interested world both ius AD mutationem alieni ordinis and ius IN mutatione alieni ordinis entirely from scratch and without any special privileging of sword-wielders. In the vernacular: both WHEN it is fitting and just to sally forth to change other peoples' regimes for them, and WHAT GUIDELINES must be observed in the course of such sallyings-forth. These matters would ideally be expounded with both an Aquinatan (or better, it's been eight centuries now, after all!) transparency of Principle and a Jesuit finesse of Principle application.
A lovely dream. But of course if the Big Management Party's extremist Yoos and Gonzaleses and Weigels and Clevers, or (m)any of their inferiors in that motley GOP mob of wombscholars and neo-downdumbees, have anything like THAT program in mind, Mr. Bones, why I am Marie of Roumania, and you are the Emperor of Ice Cream, sir.
Back down here on Planet Kennebunkport-Crawford, back in the real world, the best one can say -- always moderately and temperately, though one's blood boil as it may -- about Prof. Clever of Wombschool Normal U. is that he has worked up part of the available material in such a way that good guys can see from it what we go up against. "Relentless twistification," Mr. Jefferson of Virginia might have labeled Prof. Clever's performance, being a scholar well aware, for his own day and age, of what the pre-twist originals of these matters were like. I'm not quite sure that Mr. Jefferson would have properly relished the technical ingenuity of Clever's twistifying, however, considering his own rather too short way with Col. Hamilton.
Let we ourselves then, Mr. Bones, carefully note and decently respect the technical ingenuity, how Prof. Clever of WNU disappears the whole mainstream diplomatic tradition of Old Europe that was always aiming at "balance of power," and never even for an instant at the "unconditional surrender" or "régime change" of 2007 Boy-'n'-Party neoterics. There is, to be sure, one big apparent exception, yet what happened to poor Poland was rather "régime annihilation" than any Yoo-Gonzales-Weigel-Clever-Bush-Wolfowitz-Chalabí "régime change." The apparent exception thus at least does not contradict the general rule, even if it does not positively reinforce it.
Our mainstream tradition has for five hundred years been basically to go along with other people's régimes and get along with them. Decent Westistani wars are always about other folks' outlying provinces, they are never what neo-solecism likes to call "existential."
If Prof. Clever of Wombschool Normal University thinks he knows a better plan than that one of ours, let him expound it frankly and we genuine traditionists will listen to his exposition willingly enough. Probably we international retards shall reluct to adopt his Cleverism, probably we'll think that what has worked well enough for so very many years and generations and centuries ought not to be rashly abandoned for some dubious mess of colonial neopottage from Grant's Old Party, whose innate BigManagerial skills have recently been prominently put on display in the former Iraq
That's all as may be, the one radically non-negotiable point is that some cheapjack Prof. Clever of Wombschool Normal University is not to be allowed to sneak his conceptual contraband through the customs controls of Reason and Enlightement, to airily pretend that "we" have always agreed with his Party neo-Endarkenment, as if that had been an agreed-to pact ever since the days of Thomas Aquinas. Let Master Clever go change other people's régimes, if he must, and abstain from mucking about with our tradition. To suppose our own tradition retrospectively reformable, why, what is that but Orwellism?
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