New buzzword

Orwell and Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty were right: words are whatever you want them to mean. For example, take this EU/Lebanese talking point:

The European Union on Thursday criticized Israel for “the disproportionate use of force” in Lebanon “in response to attacks by Hezbollah on Israel,” according to a statement issued by the union’s current Finnish presidency.

Setting aside for the moment my ignorance of whether anyone engaged in a low-intensity guerrilla conflict has the right to have only "proportionate force" used against him, as Tracy astutely pointed out, the term is nigh-meaningless. If Israel strikes Lebanon, and one person is killed, I'm sure the dead individual would characterize the use of force as entirely disproportionate. But what is proportionate? If Hezbollah raids an Israeli border post, killing five and capturing two, must Israel then limit itself to five Lebanese casualties, with an option on taking two hostages? Is a power plant and an airport runway a fair trade for three Israeli captives? This is the sort of problem that legal scholars in the remedies field have struggled with for generations; and the type of problem where the system of damages begins to show its ragged edges. These are situations where money damages are insufficient to fairly recompense the plaintiff (at least from the plaintiff's perspective) and are not particularly amenable to standardless, on-the-fly adjustment by pronouncements such as "proportionate force".* That's not a practical standard: that's an opinion, and its usefulness and credibility must thereby be of limited usefulness.

*At least, not when a statement could be translated much more efficiently as "I, the Finnish president of the European Union, believe that Israel uses too much force. But then again, when I go home, I go back to Finland." I wonder what he'd have thought proportionate force was during the Winter War.