Harold Meyerson tries to build an op-ed around the idea that our bombs are more discriminating than our diplomacy has been. His basic point about the Bush administration’s “arrogance” has, of course, been made (and controverted) before. But this comparison was new to me: “The White House has treated the global warming accords, the International Criminal Court, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty and the U.N. Charter with the same respect that the German Foreign Ministry accorded its pledge of nonaggression to Belgium in 1914. The Germans seemed truly bewildered that the British would enter the war just because the German army had violated Belgium’s neutrality — over, as the German minister memorably put it, ‘a scrap of paper.’ That keen Prussian sensitivity seems alive and well in the West Wing today.”

So not joining some treaties–and withdrawing from others under terms spelled out in the treaties themselves–is the same as invading Belgium? It seems to me that anyone making such claims ought not to reproach others for lacking “keen sensitivity.”