Kristof: The United States is hugely overinvesting in military tools and underinvesting in diplomatic tools. The result is a lopsided foreign policy that antagonizes the rest of the world and is ineffective in tackling many modern problems.

August 10, 2008 War on Terror as Misguided Metaphor No Comments

Nicholas D. Kristof, Make Diplomacy, Not War, NYTimes.com, August 10, 2008

Iraq and Afghanistan are the messes getting attention today, but they are only symptoms of a much broader cancer in American foreign policy.

A few glimpses of this larger affliction:

¶The United States has more musicians in its military bands than it has diplomats.

¶This year alone, the United States Army will add about 7,000 soldiers to its total; that’s more people than in the entire American Foreign Service.

¶More than 1,000 American diplomatic positions are vacant because the Foreign Service is so short-staffed, but a myopic Congress is refusing to finance even modest new hiring. Some 1,100 could be hired for the cost of a single C-17 military cargo plane.

In short, the United States is hugely overinvesting in military tools and underinvesting in diplomatic tools. The result is a lopsided foreign policy that antagonizes the rest of the world and is ineffective in tackling many modern problems.

Ben-Yishai dines at his Beirut apartment with Israeli officers and hears their suspicions of a massacre in the camps. Ben-Yishai phones Ariel Sharon late at night at his ranch in southern Israel. Sharon thanks Ben-Yishai for calling and goes to sleep.

August 10, 2008 Lebanon's Palestinians No Comments

Gershom Gorenberg, Waltz With Unbearable Memory | The American Prospect, August 7, 2008

In his new documentary Waltz With Bashir, filmmaker Ari Folman explores his own inability to recall the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon as a means of considering how nations go to war, and how we judge what leaders do.

The tank rumbles north into Lebanon. The Israeli commander and another crew member are standing, their heads out of the hatches, singing boisterously. They’re young men out on a road trip. Then the commander goes silent, hit by a bullet, and he dies inside the tank, as his stunned soldiers forget their training and what they are supposed to do next. A missile strikes the tank; flames blossom from it; the young men, naked of weapons, are running, zigzagging through bullets. Only one survives, finds shelter, and watches as the rest of his unit retreats. And this is only the outset of the journey from childhood toward the inferno.Young soldiers lie on a beach, terrified, firing madly, perforating an approaching car with bullets. At last it stops. When they approach it, they find the corpses of a Lebanese family inside. And this, too, is but the beginning of the journey toward Beirut, toward events too awful to remember or to leave forgotten.

These scenes — rendered in dark, realistic animation — are from Waltz With Bashir, a documentary about Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon that is deservedly Israel’s most talked-about film this year. The movie recounts director Ari Folman’s effort to restore his own lost memory of his service in Lebanon, especially of the days when he was deployed in Beirut on the outskirts of the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps, where Israel’s Christian Lebanese allies were massacring Palestinians.