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Following from my post here, which produced a lot of heated comments (including, I am sorry to say, a few from yours truly), and Perry’s ‘proportionality’ post yesterday, it might be worth taking a few minutes to read this long but worthwhile essay by Christopher Hitchens. Hitch writes about the Allied bombing offensive of the Second World War, the obliteration of cities like Dresden, Hamburg and the subsequent – and controversial – vilification of Bomber Command leader Arthur Harris. I will not try to summarise what Hitchens has to say, which revolves around a new book by English writer A.C. Grayling, but here is a bit towards the end to give some of the flavour:
However, if we are to be allowed alternative historical courses and speculations, there is a “moral” that Grayling overlooks. What if the RAF had been in good enough shape to inflict “terror” on Berlin in the fall of 1939? What if the United States had determined to strike the Imperial Japanese Navy first? What if the League of Nations had decided to stand by the Spanish Republic and Abyssinia, and had pounded Franco’s and Mussolini’s armies before they could get off the mark?
Those who oppose violence on principle are called pacifists. Those who oppose it until its use is too little and too late, or too much and too late, should be called casuists. Those who try to resist their own despotisms, and who appeal in vain to lazy democracies who are also among the potential victims, and who welcome the eventual arrival of the bombs and planes–I am thinking of some courageous Serbian and Iraqi democrats–should be called our allies now, and in Europe should have been our allies no later than 1933.
Moral crisis is the vile residue of moral cowardice, and Grayling has fully proved this without quite intending to do so. His book is a treatise, not on the dubiety of the retributive, but on the urgency and integrity of the “preemptive.”
On a personal note, it enrages me how the area bombing of German towns, for example, was denounced by people with the wisdom of hindsight, although it should be noted that the bombing was questioned at the time and not just by lily-livered peaceniks. As a son of an RAF navigator, I also have to recognise that in Britain, a country isolated in the early years of the war, having lost Singapore, Trobuk, fighting a terrible campaign to avoid starvation against U-boats, that the bombing of German towns and cities was seen as a vital way to hit back. Hitchens does not mention another very good reason: the bombing tied up hundreds of Luftwaffe aircraft that would otherwise have been deployed on the Eastern front, and forced the Nazis to tie up a lot of manpower and material to deal with air attacks.
Where does all this take us to what is going on in the Middle East now? To repeat a point made in my previous article, countries like Israel are entitled to do what is necessary to prevent their own extinction. For to be clear about this: Hizbollah and their backers want Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth. So it is only right that the country should do what is deemed necessary to prevent its destruction, even if that involves loss of civilian life. But I make no apologies for re-stating my revulsion at those who claim that there is “no such thing as an innocent civilian” in order to justify use of massive military force. There are plenty of good arguments for using massive force, however awful, but dehumanising millions of victims beforehand by claiming “Muslims are all alike,” or whatever, is not one of them.
Commentators who have been lambasting Israel for reacting ‘disproportionately’ in its military reaction to Hezbollah strike me as making a mistake as to what ‘proportionality’ really means within the context of a war. If a man hiding behind a wall fires a rifle at you, proportionality does not mean you must only fire a rifle back at them… it means you should only attack them with enough force to kill the enemy hiding behind a wall, which may well mean returning fire with a 120mm tank round or a 500 kg HE bomb. A nuclear warhead would be ‘disproportionate’.
I would argue that Just War Theory’s notions for ‘proportionality’ only makes sense as meaning proportional to the imperative of effectively attacking a legitimate target, not proportional to a legitimate target’s specific actions.
Diana Hsieh, a hardline objectivist of the Big-O variety, thinks libertarians like Tom Palmer, whom she cites in an article on her Noodlefood site here, are losing their nerve if they worry about attacks on civilian targets in places like Beirut. She writes:
Obviously, wars cannot be fought without harm to civilian populations. Governments and their militaries do not exist in some separate dimension from civilians, such that they might be uniquely targeted by an invading force. Enemy governments are thoroughly integrated into the territory over which they rule, depending upon its wealth, hospitals, roads, factories, trains, farms, ports, industry, people, and more. That’s why quickly and decisively eliminating the threat posed by an enemy nation cannot but require the bombing of so-called “civilian” targets.
Moreover, without active support and/or tacit submission from a majority of the civilian population, no government could maintain its grip on power. That’s why the vast majority of the population of an aggressive enemy nation are not morally innocent bystanders. The sometimes-awful luck of genuine innocents in wartime, such as young children or active dissidents, is a terrible tragedy. However, the party responsible is not the nation defending itself but rather all those who made such a defense necessary, particularly the countrymen of the innocents complicit in or supportive of the aggression of their nation.
I am very troubled by that last paragraph. Hsieh seems to be saying that civilians in a country that is led by a brutal government are, unless they do everything to rebel, more or less complicit in the crimes of that government. Therefore, they have little or no excuse to complain if bombs come raining down on their homes.
This way of reasoning involves, by an ironic twist, to a sort of collectivist “guilt” shared across a whole populace. If a family living say, in Stalin’s Russia or Hitler’s Germany have not actively sought to overthrow those governments, then they are somehow not terribly deserving of our compassion (Hsieh, to be fair, seems to exempt children and one or two other groups from this).
I entirely defend Israel’s right to do what is necessary to defend itself from terror groups like Hamas and Hizbollah, and alas, its actions may lead, inevitably, to the loss of civilian life. I consider myself pretty much pro-Israeli and have nothing but contempt for the bogus moral equivalence drawn in certain parts of the media between the actions of the Israeli armed forces and terror groups. But I have a real problem with the line of argument presented here by Hsieh. The ends do not always justify the means, and as moral agents, it is surely right to minimise loss of innocent life as far as possible if that can be done. For consider this: if the western powers had really thrown off all moral constraints about foreign populations in the recent past, then much of the Middle East would be a radioactive wasteland.
The Hezbollah missiles landing on civilians deep within Israel change everything. I would suspect that the Syrians and Iranians who have supplied Hezbollah with the weapons to effectively attack Israel’s cities will soon find Israel’s fury directed against them directly. If we start seeing chemical or even radiological warheads, which are by no means beyond possibility, the Israeli reaction scarecely bears thinking about.
Will the US and UK get dragged in? Well given that Syria and Iran are both also integral to the insurgency against the US and UK in Iraq, it may well be in the interests of the allies to strip away the fiction that these nations are not a key enabler of their woes in Iraq. A wider Middle Eastern war would open all manner of options against the manufacturers and suppliers of the weapons killing US and UK forces. The upside/downside could be considerable. Roll the dice.
Pondering putting your spare cash onto petroleum futures? You had better do it quick.
The Israeli state appears to be doing the same thing that the British state does when it accidentally shoots the wrong person. The latest horror in which a Palestinian family were hit by a shell whilst on a beach is a case in point. The Israeli military is now claiming that it was not a naval shell that had caused the unintended deaths but rather some unexplained mine or old buried shell in the sand which just happened to go off at or about the same time as an Israeli gunboat was shelling a terrorist target in the Gaza strip.
Well that story is coming unravelled and it is a marvel that they thought any reasonable person would believe that during a bombardment from the sea over the heads of the innocent victims, this explosion just ‘happened’ by complete coincidence.
Any critical observer should realise that the Israeli military had no interest in killing the hapless Palestinians who died when one of their rounds went short, so why not admit it was a terrible error and move on?
All concocting fairy tales does is confirm the prejudices of those who see the official Israeli line as being fundamentally untrustworthy. Hamas and their useful idiots in the west will not believe anything done by the Israeli state is not done out of pure malevolence regardless of the facts, so they can be ignored. Israel’s ethno-nationalist cheerleading squad will just assume anything Israel does under any circumstances is completely justified regardless of the facts, so they too can be ignored. However between those two poles of mindless unreason exists a large group of people who tend to judge things on the basis of ‘reasonableness’ and the likely facts.
What the Israeli military spokesman should have said was: “Whilst firing on a legitimate terrorist target, one of our shells went short. It is unclear if this was due to a firing error or a defective round, and as a result some innocent bystanders were killed. We are truly sorry that happened and we wish like hell that the sons of bitches we really were trying to kill did not keep putting us in the position of having to do things like this”.
Mistakes happen and in war, mistakes cost lives. Admit the truth and move on because in the long run it actually helps your cause if people have reason to believe what you say.
Tim Blair is one of the first bloggers to note the killing of Abu Musab Zarqawi – the target of an American bombing raid. I feel a little ghoulish celebrating the death of anyone, however this is brilliant news. Zarqawi’s untouchability had grown into a legend; he represented an on-the-ground inspiration for many would-be jihadis. Many touted him as the true head of al-Qaeda, vital in his position and leading from the front – in contrast to Osama bin Laden – the largely sidelined nominal leader. The removal of this valuable piece from the game is a major coup for American forces.
UPDATE : Iraqi blog IraqTheModel claims
Zarqawi’s identity was confirmed through his fingerprints.
Reports of his death seem a lot more unequivocal this time, as opposed to earlier claims that turned out to be false. The man is almost certainly dead.
Ok, now this is both cool and a bit wierd.
US Army Generals have been much discussed lately, and not for the right reasons. For the most part, discussion has been based on the criticism of US Secretary of Defence, Donald Rumsfeld, by a faction of recently retired officers who have lost confidence in his handling of the insurgency. Discussion has taken two tacks- firstly the etiquiette of senior officers criticising their political superiors, and then the actual merits or otherwise of Rumsfeld. I haven’t been following recent events in Iraq that closely. However for a good description of the case for the prosecution (of Rusmfeld) The Belgravia Despatch has been all over the story.
However, my ruminations were triggered by a story in the Daily Telegraph where American commanders have been criticised for their style and operational methods by British Brigadier Alan Sharpe. There is a long and not entirely honourable tradition of British officers looking down on US Army commanders, going back to the Second World War if not earlier, motived partly by the different traditions of the two Armies, and partly by envy. However, after thinking about this story, I think the thrust of British views on the US Army might have a point.
Since the Second World War, the British Army has changed radically. It has changed from being a force which was designed to defeat an enemy army on a battlefield to a force designed as often as not to keep the peace, and to use military means to create a political climate in which a political solution can be used to solve disputed issues. This means that there has been a great deal of change in the way in which the British Army operates. The United States Army, however, has not changed in this way. It remains designed mostly to defeat an enemy army in battle. It is frighteningly good at this job, as witnessed by the mauling it gave the Iraqi Army in the invasion of 2003. However it is not so good at being a force that uses military means to create the desired political climate.
This is not to be critical of the US Army. It is simply a rumination about why the British Army is perceived as being better then the US Army at one particular style of military operations. The British Army has evolved in this way because it suits the strategic requirements of the United Kingdom to do so. However, in the long term, it is likely that the US Army is going to be increasingly involved in Iraq style counter-insurgencies. If the US political establishment continues to require the US Army to serve as a sort of ‘firefighting’ role in strategic hotspots around the world, then we might see the US Army evolve into a force with an operating ethos more in the style of the British Army.
I was talking to a civil engineer friend of mine today. I asked him what he knew about the vulnerability of underground facilities, such as those rumoured to be under construction in Iran as part of their nuclear programme. He told me that one does not need to go that deep underground to make such facilities impervious even to a surface level nuclear strike. The flipside is that once you get inside the underground caverns, it is fairly simple to demolish them. If Iran’s nuclear programme is made up of significant subterranean facilities, any effort to end the programme using military means will require a ground offensive of some kind. A concerted air offensive is not going to be enough – bodies on the ground will be necessary to infiltrate and destroy the facilities.
Assuming the intelligence about Iran’s underground laboratories is correct, thoroughly disarming Iran will require more than the easy solution we saw used against Serbia in 1998/99. It remains to be seen whether the United States has the stomach for another ground war in the Middle East – a war they would probably fight alone or in concert with Israel as a (very) junior partner. Under such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that some are questioning American resolve on the issue. Unfortunately, the possibility of Iran successfully acquiring nuclear weapons is far from remote.
Sometimes people are shown ink blots in the hope of finding clues as to their mental characteristics. If the ink blots remind you of the ‘wrong’ things then you may have problems.
However, a different form of “ink blot madness” has been doing the rounds for some time: The ink blot strategy.
The ink blot strategy holds that the British won in Malaya (now Malaysia and the independent city state of Singapore) not by killing, capturing or driving out the communists, but by taking bits of Malaya and making life “so good” in these bits that people “did not want to fight the British any more” and then expanding these bits “like ink blots”. By copying this strategy we can all win in Iraq – or so it is claimed.
There are various problems with this idea. Firstly it is not what the British army did in Malaya – whatever some people may say they did. In reality the men went out and fought the enemy (in the jungle or elsewhere). Certainly there were ‘protected villages’ and so on, but Malaya was a fight (it was not a welfare project).
Further the British did not give vast amounts of aid to Malaya. Britain did not have this sort of money to give away in the early 1950’s and it would not have really improved economic life anyway (more on that below). In so far as economic life did improve in Malaya during the “Emergency” British aid was not the real reason.
And, of course, the (mostly ethnic Chinese) communists in Malays were not fighting for “better socio-economic conditions” anyway – they were fighting for communism (hint, that is why they were called ‘communists’). Try asking someone who knows something about Vietnam how all the welfare statism there did not make the VC or NVA vanish (nor was ‘support’ for them among civilians based upon poor social or economic conditions, such support was based on terror – you helped the communists or you and your family would be killed)
How can someone be so plain daft as to suppose that the reason someone becomes a suicide bomber in Iraq (whether they are from Iraq or from outside) is because they turned on the light one day and it did not go on. “Oh if only the electricity and the water supply worked better, then I would not strap a lot of explosives to myself and go blow up a bus full of school children”.
Also physics teaches us that it is less difficult to destroy that to create. The terrorists left undisturbed (under the ink blot strategy) in ‘their’ bits of Iraq will find it less difficult to come in and blow things up in ‘ink blot land’ than the U.S. Army (or anyone else) will find it to build nice services.
The ink blots will not ‘spread, they will shrink. Going on the defensive is sign that one has no real will to win – and would mean that soldiers being killed would be dying for nothing (as the poltical choice to give up had already been made – sound familar?).
Then there is the assumption that government can make the lives of people Iraq “so good they will not fight”, it is not just that the terrorists are fighting because they would like nicer ‘public services’ (which is absurd), but the whole idea that the government can make so many millions of people have such happy lives.
One does not have to a libertarian to see the absurdity of this idea. The government can not (for example) make the lives of Compton in greater Los Angeles. “So good they will not want to fight” (after so many decades of welfare schemes and ‘urban renewal’ schemes) – so how is going to that in Iraq?
Whatever one thinks of the Iraq war, the ‘ink blot strategy’ is stupid. And whoever the military officers and politicans who are behind may be, it is time they shut up. If the war is justified then fighting should continue (i.e. the enemy, especially the leadership, should be hunted down and killed or caputured), and if the war is not justified then the troops should come home.
But there is no ‘socio-economic road’ to victory.
U.S.-based libertarian blogger Jim Henley is none too impressed with the latest story in the Weekly Standard by one of its correspondents, Stephen F. Hayes, to the effect that there are loads of documents proving that Saddam’s Iraq trained thousands of Islamic terrorists. Hayes has been mining this particular seam for years. He recently published a book focusing on the alleged terror link to Saddam.
I am not quite as skeptical as Henley is about the credibility of what Hayes says(Jim does a great line in snarkiness). At the very least, if Hayes is half right, then it does rather undermine one of the standard tropes of the opponents of the war: Saddam was not in cahoots with radical Islamic terror, no way, nothing to look at here folks, etc. In any event, it would be good if all the documents that Hayes talks about could be put into the public domain so we can nail down this controversy once and for all.
This story seems to be making the rounds…
The US military said Wednesday it was investigating a report carried on an Australian television network that claimed American soldiers in Afghanistan burned the bodies of two Taliban fighters and then used the action to taunt other Islamic militants
…and my response is why oh why is this news? Just to state the obvious, the Taliban bodies in question were dead prior to being burned, so who cares?
I guess is that if they had not burned those bodies, the same people making a big deal of this would be penning articles with the title:
US forces start epidemic in Afghanistan!
As for this being an ‘affront to Islam’, if the object was to ‘smoke out’ the enemy by enraging them, again… so what? The job of US forces is to KILL members of the Taliban and I fail to see why it is unacceptable to outrage their sensibilities and perhaps even hurt their feeling prior to punching them full of 5.56mm holes.
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