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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (111431)8/15/2003 1:00:07 AM
From: Bilow  Read Replies (2) of 281500
 
Hi Nadine Carroll; Re: "Some other posters on this thread claim to be talking about universal rules of morality, a very different ballgame."

It's not that I deny that morality is universal, but instead I am claiming that using morality to analyze foreign policy is useless.

What the Palestinian terrorists do is wrong. But note that I call them "Palestinian terrorists". That's cause I'm not so morally blind that I would think that all Palestinians are terrorists.

Israel's case of moral blindness is to blame all Palestinians for the actions of a few. This is how they justify their weak collective punishment of the Palestinians, but all that weak collective punishment ever does is unify a people against the punisher. And why is Israel's punishment of the Palestinians weak? Simple. Israel is a weak state.

Only strong states can use "strong" collective punishment to mend the ways of recalcitrant foreign nations. And it isn't always politically possible to pull it off. For example, the US can't possibly punish the Iraqis enough to get them to quit fighting. By contrast, Germany was not subject to the political constraints of the US, so they could collectively punish the Jews enough to ethnically cleanse most of Europe of them.

This is not about morality, it's about power.

-- Carl
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