On Wednesday, Illinois Republican Congressman Mark Kirk spoke at a rally in Washington:
U.S. Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) and Reps. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) and Frank Wolf (R-Va.) all also strongly backed the Jewish state's actions at the hourlong rally.
"To misquote Shakespeare, something is rotten in Gaza and now it's time to take out the trash," Kirk said.
No mention of diplomacy or of the brutality and human suffering on both sides. Just "taking out the trash."
On Friday, the UK’s Guardian newspaper showed us what "taking out the trash" looks like in this photo captured by Mohammed Abed for AFP/Getty Images:
I guess, for some people who’ve never been in the thick of the fighting in a combat zone, it’s easy to lose sight of what that process entails. And when people lose that perspective during a conflict, they sometimes make stupid statements aimed at burnishing their own credentials as big, tough, fighting men, even though that’s not what they are.
People who throw around such cavalier remarks have never watched a civilian bleed to death on a battlefield after being cut down in the crossfire. To people like Congressman Kirk, combat doesn’t involve real people in real situations. Just numbers, ideologies, terrorists, and "trash." It’s the same reckless attitude that birthed George W. Bush’s "bring’em on" statement and many others like it.
What non-counterinsurgency-understanding individuals like Kirk fail to comprehend, however, is that, while the statement in itself might make him feel like a big man in the moment he says it, it’s not helpful at all. All it does is inflame, polarize, and further divide the two sides both in Israel and in the United States. Such language transforms Kirk into a callous warmonger instead of a responsible adult leader in the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Navy. And that’s not the type of American leadership the peace process needs right now.
In Israel and Palestine, both sides believe they are right. And that’s understandable. But both sides also bear responsibility for the carnage there. Both have killed civilians. Therefore, in the future, anyone who takes a side in this conflict--as a combatant, a policymaker, or a simple bystander--should consider the wiser words of a man a bit more eloquent than Mark Kirk:
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster."
--Friedrich Nietzsche
Words to live by in the world of foreign policy.