Israel Attacks Red Cross Ambulances

I mean....wtf?

The ambulance headlamps were on, the blue light overhead was flashing, and another light illuminated the Red Cross flag when the first Israeli missile hit, shearing off the right leg of the man on the stretcher inside. As he lay screaming beneath fire and smoke, patients and ambulance workers scrambled for safety, crawling over glass in the dark. Then another missile hit the second ambulance.

Even in a war which has turned the roads of south Lebanon into killing zones, Israel's rocket strike on two clearly marked Red Cross ambulances on Sunday night set a deadly new milestone.

Six ambulance workers were wounded and three generations of the Fawaz family, being transported to hospital from Tibnin with what were originally minor injuries, were left fighting for their lives. Two ambulances were entirely destroyed, their roofs pierced by missiles.

I've been sympathetic so far to pro-Israeli claims that Hizboullah possessed no moral high ground in the current conflict even though the Israelis seemed to be dead set on eroding their own moral position with a mass application of deadly force that seemed more a form of collective punishment that any kind of rational attempt to target their actual enemies.

Richard Cohen tries to defend the indefensible today:

The dire consequences of proportionality are so clear that it makes you wonder if it is a fig leaf for anti-Israel sentiment in general. Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East knows that proportionality is madness. For Israel, a small country within reach, as we are finding out, of a missile launched from any enemy's back yard, proportionality is not only inapplicable, it is suicide. The last thing it needs is a war of attrition. It is not good enough to take out this or that missile battery. It is necessary to re-establish deterrence: You slap me, I will punch out your lights.

Which of course is exactly how the neocons would like to frame the conflict.

The truth, however, is more messy. It is more a case of "you slap me, I punch out your lights and the lights of everyone for three blocks around you."

Then there's the Heritage Foundation's pet blogger, Ed Morrissey, who has this gem of insight:

To use a crude analogy, if someone is stupid enought to bring a knife to a gunfight, it doesn't mean that those holding the guns have a moral obligation to fight with knives instead. Proportionality demands exactly that, and it leads to nothing but longer and more destructive wars.

Which conveniently ignores the fact that it isn't ever ok to spray down the entire street with machinegun fire, killing shoppers and bystanders, even if the other guy does have a knife.

When a nation attacks clearly marked Red Cross vehicles or uses cluster munitions over civilian areas - both clear war crimes - it has given up any claim to moral pre-eminence whatsoever. Israel is now very definitely on the same level as Hizboullah. I'm waiting for neocon calls to bomb Tel Aviv to stop unewarranted aggression against civilians by a rogue nuclear-armed state which has shown it will ignore international law...