A Pox On All Their Houses

From The Economist, November 17-23rd Issue

This cartoon captures some of the absurdity of the current goings on between Israel and Hamas.  But what is utterly misstates is the disproportionality of the mess.  What Israel is doing is a little like dropping a 500 pound bomb on an obnoxious teenager because he shot you with a BB gun.  The pictures of the destruction wrought by Israel in Gaza are all over the place.  What is very, very hard to find is any comparable evidence -- indeed any evidence at all -- of destruction in Israel.  Given the Israeli PR adeptness, I suspect this is because there is very, very little of it.

I have no sympathy for Hamas.  What they hope to accomplish other than getting their own people killed by shooting rockets at Israel is beyond understanding.  Perhaps there is a better explanation, but the seemingly obvious answer is a culture of no-harm-goes-unavenged that would make the Hatfields and McCoys proud. 

But neither do I have any sympathy for Israel.  The idea that somehow Israel is the victim here is preposterous.  The Israeli Ambassador asked what would American do if some foreign group lobbed 8,000 rockets into America.  That begs the question, though, of what we would do if a foreign state had occupied most of the country for nearly 45 years and was relentlessly building settlements along the entire eastern seaboard.  Sporadic rocket fire from Hamas is the price Israel pays for the occupation.  And, since Israel has no intention of ever agreeing to a Palestinian state worthy of the name, they should accept that as a very small price indeed.

The Middle East has dominated American foreign policy for a quarter century now.  We need to follow through on the promise that Iran will not get a nuclear weapon.  But beyond that, it's time to give up.  We are no longer so dependent on the Middle East for our energy, and if we backed away from Israel, the terrorism threat would largely evaporate.  It's time to tell the entire Middle East: "You made this mess. Continuing it hurts no one but yourselves.  We've tried to help.  But we're done.  It's up to you to either clean it up or live with it."

Trying To Define "Terrorism"

In a WSJ editorial today on a recent speech by the British Defense Minister John Reid suggesting that the Geneva Conventions may need to be reviewed given the differences in the nature of war in the 21st Century, Daniel Henninger lamented that:

Most likely, any such reconsideration would pass through the United Nations, [which] has never been able to agree on a definition of "terrorism." That is so the worst of them can escape censure for crimes against civilian populations. Thus the legitimacy of suicide bombings as an instrument of policy remains, repulsively, an "open question."

I may try to find and read Mr Reid's speech becuase, from the description in Henninger's editorial, it sounds like a thoughtful, even angushed, effort to at once preserve our commitment "to mitigate the savagery of armed conflict" and yet recognize the reality that "we have now to cope with a deliberate regression towards barbaric terrorism by our opponents."

But forget that for a minute. Forget the difficulties involved in trying to gain international consensus on what is and is not allowed in modern warfare. Let's start with the more basic question: How do we define "terrorism"? What definition are we prepared to lobby in favor of? More particularly, what tactics are we prepared to have declared to be violations of international law and, perhaps, "crimes against humanity" that could (theoretically at least) end up putting an American President in the dock at the Hague.

Henninger jumps right over this question to reach his conclusion that it is only the bad guys who are frustrating a consensus. He takes it a self-evident that suicide bombing and flying planes into buildings should be declared illegal. I agree, of course. But surely we need something more principled that a listing of specific acts. Why are such tactics wrong yet others like the fire bombing of Dresden or the defoliation of Viet Nam OK? Why is flying a plane into a building different from dropping a bomb on one? Why are IED's along the roadsides in Baghdad condemned yet Francis Marion's ambushes of Redcoats so glowingly celebrated in "The Patriot"?

One feature of "terrorism,"of course, is that it is directed at civilian populations as they go about their day-to-day lives. This doesn't explain the difference between IEDs and Francis Marion's ambushes, of course. But more importantly, the whole notion that civilian populations are not "legitimate" targets in time of war died an ignominous death in World War II, and I suspect few today would classify Harry Truman as a terrorist simply becuase he nuked two Japanese cities of little or no military significance. So, at least today, the status of the victims is not alone a sufficient basis for distinguishing illegal "terrorism" from legal acts of war.

But what else is there? The only other "principle" I seem able to divine is that attacks generally, and attacks on civilan populations in particular, are OK so long as the attackers are wearing uniforms, but they are not OK when the attackers are themselves civilians. Is that really the principle at work here? And, if so, how legitimate is that?

It is at times like this that I wish I had Kevin Drum's or Instapundit's audience. But if anyone in my own very small audience has any thoughts on this issue, please post them below.