That war that's been going on... (vis a vis Scott Brison)

I haven't really been blogging in too much depth about the mideast crisis because really, there's so much cyber-ink being spilled on it already that I felt that there was nothing more to say.

I would just like to point out that I agree 100% with Scott Brison's position on the issue. I'll admit, like any reasonable person I've been questioning my committment to my preferred candidate; understandable I feel, given that there are eleven candidates in total, and about five that I considered supporting. One of the reasons I've been a bit lethargic in this support has been for that reason - it's such a wide field, and I've wanted to be very careful about blindly supporting any one candidate, since most of them have their own distinct advantages.

But on this issue, Brison stands virtually alone among the contenders (with Volpe expressing similar but characteristically more bombastic views, and Ignatieff surprisingly not saying anything at all) in supporting my point of view, and it is serving to remind me why I endorsed him in the first place.

Brison is essentially alone among the (serious) contenders in voicing a distinctly pro-Israeli position on this issue. The rest of the candidates are mostly just parrotting the same wishy-washy ideas coming from most of the "nuance" backers - that is, that Israel has a right to defend itself, as long as it doesn't actually use any force whatsoever.

Alternatively, they say that Israel has a right to defend itself, as long as it employs a "measured" response. Now, I find it hard to disagree with that - except that in most cases, the people calling for a "measured" response define "measured" a bit differently than I do; they define it in the style of the typical knee-jerk anti-Israeli world opinion that hypocritically and sanctimoniously holds Israel to a far more strict standard than any other country in the world. In other words, "measured" means that any civilian deaths are absolutely intolerable.

In the sense that any and all civilian deaths are always a tragedy in war, they have a point. But in the sense that every conflict sees civilian deaths, people who expect Israel to avoid any civilian deaths whatsoever... well, have just got to be kidding.

Scott Brison on the war:

"Israel does have a right to defend itself against unprovoked attacks from Hezbollah."

"[T]he fault in the initiation of this conflict was Hezbollah's. We should avoid a knee-jerk anti-Israeli positioning on this issue."

"I stand for the peace-loving people of Israel and the peace-loving people of Lebanon, and I stand against Hezbollah and its supporters."

"Hezbollah started this conflict. Hezbollah can end it by returning the soldiers and by disarming."