This is old news that I missed while at the NewSpace conference, but Lileks has a screed up about Howard Dean and the war that’s still timely. It’s funny, and sad (as Lileks often is):

…the revelatory moment in Dean

Why is this not a functional declaration of war?

Iran awarded Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez its highest state medal on Sunday for supporting Tehran in its nuclear standoff with the international community, while Chavez urged the world to rise up and defeat the U.S., state-run media in both countries reported…

“Let’s save the human race, let’s finish off the U.S. empire,” Chavez said. “This (task) must be assumed with strength by the majority of the peoples of the world.”

This time, Mark Steyn takes on the moronic “chicken hawk” argument:

Aside from anything else, I wonder if the gentleman (if that’s the word) understands how freakish it would strike every previous generation of Americans (and, indeed, almost every other society in human history) to berate a blameless young lady for not grabbing a rifle and heading for the front. And, if the issue is “extraordinary disrespect” to the troops, it’s utterly self-defeating to argue that only active-duty servicemen get proprietorial rights in a war.

In fact, the notion that “fighting” a war is the monopoly of those “in uniform” gets to the heart of why America and its allies are having such a difficult time in the present struggle. Nations go to war, not armies. Or, to be more precise, nations, not armies, win wars. America has a military that cannot be defeated on the battlefield, but so what? The first President Bush assembled the biggest coalition in history for Gulf War I, and the bigger and more notionally powerful it got, the better Saddam Hussein’s chances of surviving it became. Because the bigger it got, the less likely it was to be driven by a coherent set of war aims.

I’m hearing cries of outrage from the world over “Israeli war crimes.” Where are the accusations against the organization that launches rockets from civilian population centers, in the cynical hope that the world will respond to Israel’s predictable actions in exactly the way it is?

I can no longer take seriously any of these so-called human rights organizations.

[Update a few minutes later]

I’m watching video on Fox News of rocket trails (presumably Hezbollah rocket trails) departing from a building that reportedly looks very much like the one that was hit in Qana.

[Update a few minutes after that]

Well, there’s not complete silence:

THE UN’s humanitarian chief Jan Egeland called for a three-day truce to evacuate civilians and transport food and water into cut-off areas…

…Mr Egeland blasted Hezbollah as “cowards” for operating among civilians.

“When I was in Lebanon, in the Hezbollah heartland, I said Hezbollah must stop this cowardly blending in among women and children,” he said.

The accompanying picture is indeed damning, but this denunciation aside, the general asymmetry of the criticism, and the associated media coverage, remains sickening.

It bears repeating: Israelis kill civilians when they miss their targets. Hezbollah (and other terrorist organizations) kill civilians when they hit theirs.

[Update at mid-Sunday morning]

Josh Trevino has further thoughts on the asymmetry:

Let us call the childrens’ deaths in Qana what they are: a horrific freak of war. They were not intended; they were not actively sought; and they were not the product of criminal negligence. In weeks of war and thousands of sorties against a foe that intentionally hides amongst civilians in the active hope of just this manner of carnage, the remarkable fact is that this hasn’t happened before. Contrary to founding advocates of airpower — and unlike its battlefield foes — Israel does not seek the death of civilians for their own sake. Pace the rationalizations extended to Allied aircrews obliterating Western European villagers unfortunate enough to live near a rail junction, Israel does not even regard acceptance of this manner of death — unintended, incidental, and not worth especial efforts to preclude — as acceptable within the moral parameters of war. The uninformed and the insane will react with bitter derision upon being told this, on the heels of the news from Qana: but their emotional self-indulgence does not negate the fact at hand.

Need it be said — and it is a sign of our fallen age that it does need to be said — Israel’s enemy in this war operates under no such constraint. (One assumes that in bygone days, the difference between a Western democracy and a band of murderous savages would not need repeated explanation.) Hezbollah and the average Islamist do not shrink from direct assaults on civilians as such and as an end in itself. Indeed, it has been their sole tactic in this entire war. If they have not produced scenes of masses of dead children, it is not for lack of trying — it is, after all, the only thing they try for. That they have not managed it is indicative of the confluence of blind luck and Israeli battlefield superiority. But give it time: give it infinite time to launch its rockets and try its luck, as the braying proponents of ceasefire would have it, and eventually we’ll see Jewish children, too, incinerated in their sleep. The difference, of course, is that the perpetrators then will celebrate.