If the enemy is hiding behind civilians or is placing his military assets, which I must strike, within civilians – I’m sorry, but the collateral casualties who are noncombatants fall on the heads of the people using the noncombatants as shields.
People like Greenwald, and Zbigniew Bryzhinski (who was quoted as condemning Israel’s response on the grounds of “disproportionality”)may fancy themselves as elite thinkers in matters of policy, but when you break it down they are intellectual lightweights. Any classically trained philosopher and/or theologian could clean their clocks in a debate about the ethics of just about anything.
Isn’t it a bit scary that in this country policy is often driven by people who are such intellectual charlatans? They may have degrees from elite institutions, but that does not mean that they are true thinkers. Drop any very clever human being into a classroom at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, or Stanford, and if he’s a very good memorizer he can ape the professors’ drivel and use their material in slightly creative ways to get a good grade. He can then network with the right people and organizations after he gets his sheepskin and, voila, he’s off and running. Twenty years later he’s nested inside the policy or business establishment, making pronouncements from on high.
A high proportion of the rest of the population will ape his logic and his views because they come from someone who is respected from the best schools. Politicians will sign ‘em up as advisers. Very few people will break down what these people think, write, and speak to check for faulty logic or deviations from reasonable, rational ways of thinking. In other words, it takes someone with a sound mind and a good education to tell the emperor that he has no clothes on.
