Chapomatic

Remember Jan Egeland, the UN functionary who called the United States “stingy” for our post-tsunami governmental response?

He’s at it again, making a difference–and not a clueful or useful one.

Israeli bombing of a Beirut neighborhood where Hizbullah had its headquarters has breached humanitarian law, a senior UN official said on Sunday. “It is horrific. I did not know it was block after block of houses,” Jan Egeland, the UN emergency relief coordinator, told reporters as he toured the shattered Haret Hreik district. “It makes it a violation of humanitarian law.” “It’s bigger, it’s more extensive than I even could imagine,” he said, surveying a pile of rubble.

A couple of blocks? More extensive than he could imagine? I wonder what he thought the tsunami was. And thanks for that outstanding misinterpretation of jus in bello, thankyewverymuch.

But let’s let him continue:

We are setting up a major relief operation but the violence has to stop,” Egeland said, calling for a halt to the war. “The rockets going into Israel have to stop,” he said. “The enormous bombardment that we have seen here with one block after another being leveled has to stop.”

Oh, good. That will certainly do it.

“It is costing too many lives and it will not lead to a solution in the south. There is no military solution to these things, it is only a political solution.”

Heinlein’s Mr. DuBois was apparently not his teacher in class (as typed in here)…

The girl told him bluntly: “My mother says violence never solves anything.”

“So?” Mr. Dubois looked at her bleakly. “I’m sure the city fathers of Carthage would be glad to know that. Why doesn’t your mother tell them so? Or why don’t you?”

They had tangled before–since you couldn’t flunk the course, it wasn’t necessary to keep Mr. Dubois buttered up. She said shrilly, “You’re making fun of me! Everybody knows that Carthage was destroyed!”

“You seem to be unaware of it,” he said grimly. “Since you do know it, wouldn’t you say that violence had settled their destinies rather thoroughly? However, I was not making fun of you personally; I was heaping scorn on an inexcusably silly idea–a practice I shall always follow. Anybody who clings to the historically untrue–and thoroughly immoral–doctrine that “violence never solves anything” I would advise to conjure up the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk, and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedom.”

Always.

But if you’re the loser in the war, especially when you win going very slowly and lobbing rockets at homes and bombing Mike’s Place every once in a while, such talk certainly helps.

This Egeland. I’m sure he is well respected in the U.N. bureaucracy.