UNDERSTANDING HEZBOLLAH - Please read Op-Ed Contributor in today's NY Times following my mini diatribe
Mary, you insist on treating my comments as a political statement and then trying to refute some strawman you've created, all of which is irrelevant to the point.
I'm not making a political statement. My point is one of simple logic, logic that for some reason you can't or won't recognize: if you want a cease fire, you have to get the guys who are firing to stop firing, not someone else, but the guys who are firing.
If you want cecession of the banging coming from the family room, you have to deal with the kids who are banging, not the kids who are playing Monopoly.
If you want cecession of the leak that's coming from your hot water heater, you have to fix the hot water heater, not the clothes dryer.
And if you want cecession of shooting, you have to negotiate with the shooters, not the victims or some third party. Either that or you have to thwart the shooters' shooting some way other than negotiation. Negotiation of a cease fire demands negotiating with those who are firing.
You can not take it for granted that the people in power understand what they are doing.
I don't take any of that for granted. Actually, I think it's less likely rather than more likely that any of them know what they're doing. But that's all beside the point. You still have to negotiate with Hezbollah if you want to negotiate a cease fire. That is not in any way a political statement. That is simple, intuitively obvious, logic. |
