Thomas E. Ricks, Pulitzer Prize winning pentagon correspondent with the Washington Post and author of the recently released book FIASCO, offered this perspective of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict on Howard Kurtz’s Reliable Sources today:
KURTZ: Tom Ricks, you’ve covered a number of military conflicts, including Iraq, as I just mentioned. Is civilian casualties increasingly going to be a major media issue? In conflicts where you don’t have two standing armies shooting at each other?
RICKS: I think it will be. But I think civilian casualties are also part of the battlefield play for both sides here. One of the things that is going on, according to some U.S. military analysts, is that Israel purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they’re being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon. __
KURTZ: Hold on, you’re suggesting that Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of it’s fire power, essentially for PR purposes, because having Israeli civilians killed helps them in the public relations war here?
RICKS: Yes, that’s what military analysts have told me.
KURTZ: That’s an extraordinary testament to the notion that having people on your own side killed actually works to your benefit in that nobody wants to see your own citizens killed but it works to your benefit in terms of the battle of perceptions here.
RICKS: Exactly. It helps you with the moral high ground problem, because you know your operations in Lebanon are going to be killing civilians as well.
Yes, boys and girls. That’s how these things work.
hell, i was beginning to wonder if they weren’t firing them themselves. This is a less tin-foil explanation.
How’s that PR war going, anyway?
He is about as far from tin foil as you can get.
yeah, I’m familiar with him. He’s all business.
I don’t doubt he is hearing that.
Twenty pages into it, I can barely go on. The frankness of it stuns you.
And it’s coming from him. Man.
yes it makes lots of sense to me. how else can the israeli government say woe is we on this shit. they always want to play victim to everything…when in actuality they are the ones who are the perpetrators. sad but true..step back and you can see the forest through the trees here.
After reading the LATimes article this morning on the prevalence of war crimes from Vietnam(not that I was surprised just sickened that this wasn’t made public long ago so the public could deal with what war does to people and why war itself becomes part of the problem) I shouldn’t be stunned at this information yet once again war tactics prove to be a horrifying non solution to any problem.
You know, Ink, that’s been the thrust of most of my writing, fiction and non-fiction, since I retired from the Navy.
War has become a completely counterproductive means of conducting foreign policy.
“…civilian casualties are also part of the battlefield play…”
BATTLEFIELD PLAY? Battlefield PLAY!?
Yes, “…battlefield play….”
Condi sums up U.S. foreign policy pretty well, doesn’t she?
RICKS, not COndi, sorry, but it sounds just like something she’d say… Duhhh, I need to read better before commenting. I feel really stupid.
My point stills stands.
That diary of Janet’s about Hiroshima Day and the Shadow Project has knocked me for a loop. I’m taking the rest of the day off from blogging.
I went to Hiroshima and the International Peace Park three years ago, and I was going to post a photo and a comment on her diary, but I just couldn’t…
My mind is still on that day and that diary. Please excuse my lack of attention.
Keep in mind that Ricks didn’t coin that terminology. He’s parroting what he’s heard from his military sources.
(At least I hope he is.)
Exactly, and while it is possible that Israel is deliberately letting some of its citizens take fire (I personally doubt it), it is even more possible that Ricks is being fed a line by people in the US military who are trying to justify Israel’s failure so far to make much headway against Hizbollah. I think we are seeing sour grapes here. Ricks is just doing steno work here.