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[Tyrone Slothrop]

In an effort to repair what Penske broke, a few thoughts from John Quiggin:

• The terrible war in Lebanon has been discussed from all sorts of ethical and legal perspectives, but the simplest way of judging war is to look at its consequences.
  
  After weeks of bloodshed, with the vast majority of victims being ordinary people (mostly in Lebanon thanks to the use of airstrikes as a weapon of terror, but with many killed and wounded in Israel as well) whose only crime was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, it’s hard to believe that anyone could claim that any good consequences are going to come out of this for the people of either Israel or Lebanon (though of course this is precisely the claim being made not only by the belligerents but by their outside backers, from Bush on one side to the Iranians on the other). But as we’ve seen time and again, the logic of war, once started, is remorseless. However obviously wrong the initial decision to go to war, the consequences of ending it always seem almost worse, at least to those who have to admit that the death and destruction they have wrought has been pointless.
  
  And all this was not only predictable, but predicted by nearly everyone who looked at the situation objectively.
  
  Whether all this is put in terms of just war, consequentialism or some other way of thinking about things, a central problem is that the parties act as judges in their own cases, and, at times when war is brewing, are bad judges even of their own interests, let alone of the justice of their claims or the effect on others.
  
  At best, war is doing evil that good may come, and most of the time the indirect consequences are also evil. The great majority of wars, revolutions and insurgencies have done more harm than good, and in most cases, everyone involved has been worse off than if they had made peace on the basis of the status quo ante at the earliest opportunity. This is obvious as a general proposition (the fact that the same handful of exceptions is quoted over and over again only goes to sharpen the point). But everyone thinking of making war sees themselves as one of the exceptions.

eta: I'd add that there are people who stand to gain from conflict, and they often play a crucial role in spurring the fighting on. E.g., the head of Hezbollah has seen his stature increase around the Arab world, even while the war has been a disaster for Lebanon.

eatft