Qana Happened

Lately, I've been reading bloggers who claim that Qana never really happened or was staged. Now whether one is fully behind this war or not, I think some facts are going to have to be faced here. In a Washington Post blog entry about such bloggers, Jefferson Morley makes abundantly clear that overwhelming evidence exists that Qana did happen.

It is a disturbing pattern of denial that surfaced in the Iraq war as well. When Abu Ghraib was revealed, some commentators compared it to a football hazing ritual, or even denied that what we saw in photographs was even real. (Of course, it didn't help that some sensationalist British newspapers did in fact stage some photographs.)

War - even a war such as WWII that by universal consensus was just - is not always heroic, is not always clean, and even the team you're rooting for is capable of at the very least making some horrendous mistakes. Claiming that the ugliness simply didn't exist to begin with demeans the whole enterprise, and in some sense even dishonours the people fighting it. They're in the muck, we're not, and we have no business sanitizing their horrific experience.

Now I realize Qana is an incident that certainly tends to lend resilience to those who want an immediate ceasefire. A good argument can perhaps be made that Qana is being overreported, and attacks with Katyusha rockets by Hezbollah are being underreported, and that the context we thus have in the public space is not balanced. But to claim that Qana didn't happen? That is to again kill every single child in that building, this time in cold blood.

War is brutal. People who both oppose war and support it both need to recognize the truth of that. And whitewashing its horrors doesn't allow for real discussion. How can we debate a war if we can't even speak honestly about what is happening in it?