Indiscriminate Warfare
At the risk of becoming unduly preoccupied with the conflict in Gaza upon returning to blogging, I thought I might add a few remarks to the conversation that Freddie started with this post. Conor referred to the post in passing while responding to an earlier Joe Carter post, which prompted Carter’s reply, and the original post led Max to criticize Freddie’s moral certitude. John Schwenkler (from atop his new Culture11 perch) answered some of Carter’s remarks with a defense of naivete, but as I will lay out in a moment I don’t think naivete enters into it at all. Max and Carter’s responses are particularly striking, since they take the same argument to be an example of moral certitude and relativism respectively. Specifically, Carter objects to Freddie when the latter says this:
Firing rockets indiscriminately into Israel is a putrid crime. Shelling Palestinian civilians is no less. What’s the difference, for our purposes?
In fact, what Carter objects to here is not really moral relativism (which would not permit such full-throated condemnations of these acts as crimes), but, as he says elsewhere in the post, moral equivalence. However, it is not clear to me that Freddie is claiming moral equivalence between the two belligerents here. He does not say that the intentions of the actors on both sides are the same and morally equal. Freddie is condemning the practice of indiscriminate warfare in all cases, and he is asking, reasonably enough, what the difference is between different examples of such warfare. As it happens, I think there is a difference, but not nearly as great a difference as Carter holds.
If Max finds Freddie’s remarks all together too theoretical and frustrating, I find the constant recourse by defenders of Israeli (or, for that matter, American) military actions to the good intentions of one side to be even more so. When you endorse indiscriminate warfare, as Freddie correctly says, you are effectively endorsing the consequences of that warfare. Indiscriminate warfare as such is wrong. To admit that both sides engage in indiscriminate warfare, but then protest that one side doesn’t really mean to injure or kill civilians is not persuasive. Regardless of whether one side “means” or “intends” to do this or not, it is doing it. This truth does not make the IDF morally equivalent to Hamas, and I don’t know of anyone in this conversation who makes such a claim, but it does mean that the Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli strikes are of equal worth in our moral reasoning to the Israeli civilians killed by Hamas rockets. This is what I was talking about two years ago when I referred to a “necessary moral equivalence” concerning the war in Lebanon.
The war in Lebanon again seems useful as a comparative example. Two years ago, we heard many of the same arguments, albeit with more references to human shields last time than this time. Despite the fact that the far greater proportion of fatalities in Lebanon was made up of civilians, the appeal to good intentions was among the most frequently made. In other words, even when the indiscriminate nature of the campaign was unmistakable and undeniable, indiscriminate warfare was somehow justified by intending to do the right thing. Certainly, in judging the severity of crimes intention is a relevant and important factor. Deliberately killing the innocent and non-combatants is significantly different from doing so unintentionally. There is a moral difference between indiscriminate firing that kills civilians by accident and indiscriminate firing that is undertaken with the specific goal in mind of killing civilians, but both are still crimes. Freddie here is not showing moral naivete, but has instead pushed through the sentimentality that tempts us to make excuses for the crimes of one side in a conflict. In doing so, he has perhaps not stressed enough the distinctions between the different kinds of crimes, but I suspect this is mainly because he wants to make a strong claim that neither side is exempt from moral standards.
As I said many times two years ago, it is the friends of Israel who have the most reason to hold the Israeli government to a high standard, just as it is important for friends and citizens of the United States to hold our government to a high standard, and this means holding those governments accountable when they commit excesses and crimes. Those most inclined to defend a government’s actions will focus on the good intentions of members of the government at the expense of the practical effects of its policies, which allows the government to persist in folly and remain blind to the problems it is creating for itself in the future. It is ultimately a disservice to the people whom they want to support.
Update: Freddie has another post remarking on the argument from good intentions and the utterly lopsided coverage and commentary on the conflict.
indiscriminate, a. 2. Of persons or agents: Undiscriminating, not exercising discrimination; making no distinctions.
I take issue with your use of the word ‘indiscriminate.’ You seem to subsume within that single word to distinct categories of action: the genuinely indiscriminate, and the insufficiently discriminate.
When Hamas launches Qassam rockets, its fire is quite literally indiscriminate. The weapons are difficult to aim, and may land anywhere within a broad range of territory. It is impossible to target an individual structure, and often difficult to hit a particular community. Sometimes, the rockets even come down within Gaza itself. This is indiscriminate fire.
I do not believe this is what you would accuse Israel of having done. There is no question, I would submit, that virtually every Israeli air strike has been deliberately and carefully targeted, and that the great majority have struck their targets. This passage from the NYTimes is particularly vivid:
Your objection is not that these attacks are indiscriminate, but rather, that a campaign of such attacks in a densely populated urban area will inevitably result in the deaths of innocent civilian bystanders. These air strikes are not “indiscriminate firing that kills civilians by accident”; they are precisely targeted firing that kills civilians incidentally. I use that word not to belittle their deaths, but to stress that those deaths are purely incidental to the purpose of the strikes.
Certainly, the world at large needs to be more acutely conscious of the tragedy of civilian deaths in war zones, too often dismissed with the oddly Orwellian phrase ‘collateral damage.’ But the question that must always be asked is this: were their deaths worth the price? It is an incredibly high bar for any military strike to meet, which is precisely why it is the question that ought to be asked. If I know that innocents will die, a military or political leader must ask himself, is this action still morally justifiable?
So I join you in asserting that glib or facile justifications of these horrific consequences ultimately harm the nation that those who employ them aim to support. A failure to assign these deaths their full moral weight, to wrestle sincerely with their consequences, is an abdication of our basic responsibility as moral beings. But focusing exclusively on these deaths, without regard for the benefits of the actions that brought them about, is no less an abdication.
Earlier today, Israel struck the home of Nizar Rayyan. It wasn’t initially trying to kill him; it was aiming to destroy the weapons cached within the house, and the tunnel and bunker beneath it. It gave a warning ten minutes prior to the attack, that was received by those within. Rayyan opted to stay and embrace martyrdom; his four wives and eleven of his children, particularly the four under the age of 18, probably didn’t have the luxury of making that choice for themselves. A warplane dropped a 1-ton bomb, large enough to destroy the underground complex. It shredded the building and ignited the explosives cached inside, setting of a series of secondary explosions. Either the initial or secondary blasts apparently killed and wounded innocent passersby as well.
Was this indiscriminate? No, it was precisely calibrated and targeted. But those authorizing the strike were certainly aware it might take innocent lives. They issued the warning, but likely knew it wasn’t heeded. But here’s the thing. Rayyan took the hardest line among the five-member council of Hamas’ political leadership in Gaza. He’d dispatched his own son on a suicide mission that killed two and wounded fifteen; he’d overseen another which aimed to kill thousands by exploding chemical tanks, but took ten lives. He was the spiritual leader of Hamas’ militant wing, and its liaison with the political leadership. He’d been pressing, for years, for stepped up violence and unrelenting attacks. His death may be the most significant blow Hamas has received in this campaign, and his disappearance from the leadership will ultimately soften its posture and increase the possibility for some sort of ceasefire, and perhaps a more lasting calming of the conflict.
Does that justify the deaths of the people walking past, or of his wives or children? Of course not. But does it justify the decision to drop the bomb, even though the Israelis had to know innocents would die? That’s a more interesting question than you allow.
Setting off powerful explosions in densely-packed urban areas necessarily fails to discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. That is what indiscriminate warfare is. If Hamas had accurate targeting information and hit only those targets they intended to hit, would that make their attacks less indiscriminate? No.
As I said many times two years ago, it is the friends of Israel who have the most reason to hold the Israeli government to a high standard, just as it is important for friends and citizens of the United States to hold our government to a high standard, and this means holding those governments accountable when they commit excesses and crimes.
Exactly, Daniel. I think this has been the precise failure of the Bush administration in its dealings with Israel and her neighbors and enemies. They have so wholly endorsed Israel’s actions, failing at any turn to question them, that they have further isolated Israel. We are no longer in a position to act as mediator. We have become too partisan.
I think the moral issues here are much more complicated than either the concepts of “equivalence” or “indiscriminate” can express.
The palestinian firing of unguided rockets into Israel is clearly intended to kill innocent civilans, and is literally indiscriminate, but not likely to cause many civilian casualties because of its primitiveness. The Israel targeting of Hamas leader in highly populate areas is discriminating, but also guaranteed to produce considerable though undesired civilian casualties.
On that count, one ought to consider the Israeli action worse in strictly moral terms, in that its actions were guaranteed to cause more severe civilian casualties than the Palestinian action.
And yet, consider that the Palestinian action was undoubtedly undertaken with the full knowledge that Israel would likely retaliate in the fashion it did, and was even undertaken with that very intention: to provoke Israel to act in such a way as that would guarantee many, many innocent civilian casualties as a result – of their own people, no less. In fact, that seems to be the general Palestianian war strategy: to indiscriminately target Israeli civilians, in order to provoke Israeli responses that kill large numbers of Palestinian civilians, thus allowing Palestine to play the “victim” card to the world, and particularly the Muslim community.
Is this not morally much worse than the Israeli response itself, in that one can only assume the Palestinians must know the consequences to their own people of their actions?
Of course, then one must calculate what effect Israeli actions have on recruiting even more violently radical palestinians and other muslims to the cause of destroying Israel, which is of course the very purpose of the provocation in the first place. Surely Israel must know that they are playing into the Palestinians’ hands by retaliating in this fashion? So aren’t they morally responsible for the future attacks it suffers at the hands of such people? Ad infinitum for both sides?
And yet, as some have pointed out, this cycle of violence can’t rationally be brought to an end by Israel. We all know that if the Palestinians laid down their weapons tomorrow, Israel would be happy to have peace declared and begin life anew on equitable terms. If the Israelis laid down their weapons tomorrow, the Palestinians would invade and kill as many of them as they could. And perhaps that is the only measure one could make, ultimately, of where the source of these moral outrages responsibilities lie. There will never be peace in Palestine until the Palestinians desire peace, but that is not what they want. They want the destruction of Israel, plain and simple, which is why they elected Hamas, which is why Israel cannot negotiate with them. In other words, ultimately the Palestinian people have decided they want their own martyrdom at Israeli hands in order to provoke other Arab nations to attack Israel to the point of everyone’s martyrdom. This is not an approach I think anyone should consider morally defensible.