A war by any other name…

14 July 2006, 2227 EDT

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Hizbollah’s chief pledged open war on Israel on Friday after it bombed his home, saying “look at it burn” when an Israeli warship that had earlier rocketed Lebanon was attacked and set ablaze.

“You wanted open war. We are going to (wage) open war,” Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said in a telephone message broadcast live on Hizbollah television after his house was hit as Israel ramped up the assault it launched after Hizbollah fighters seized two Israeli soldiers and killed eight.

This is what war looks like.

I heard a news reporter yesterday describe how camera crews had decided not to release footage of a nine-month old girl dismembered by an Israeli bomb: “too graphic.”

Rockets pour into Israel.

Certainly puts Yossi Klein Halevi’s article or Glenn Reynold’s “instapunditry” in perspective….

As academics and virtual commentators, I think all of us tend to distance ourselves from the reality of war. Let’s please remember that real costs of violence, whatever our particular slant may be.

(Photos from the AP, Reuters, and AFP.)

Filed as: Israel and Lebanon

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.