In time of war, people tend to lose all sense of proportion.  This is true when it comes to the kinds of domestic government measures they are willing to endorse during the “emergency,” which always overreach and violate fundamental legal protections to the general indifference of the masses, or when it comes to the latitude they are willing to grant their armed forces in attacking the hostile state (and nation), resulting in excesses and crimes to which the general public typically reacts with relatively little concern.  Thus violations of principles of discrimination (distinguishing between combatants and noncombatants) and proportionality are frequently shrugged off or the assumptions behind these principles are questioned or denied.  Even when it is an ally that is at war, there is the tendency to lose a sense of what the proper limits to waging war ought to be, because anything less than solidarity and arguments in defense of the ally’s war effort will appear to be hostility to the ally and an expression of a desire to see the ally defeated. 

Because of a desire to show steadfast support for an ally, in this case Israel, there have been a number of expressions of outright hostility to the very idea of proportionality as a legitimate principle governing justice in war.  Quickly vanishing is the trope of Israel’s tremendous restraint.  The new idea is the virtue of her disproportionate violence. 

This does no credit to Israel and rather reinforces the notion that a perpetual state of “existential threat” from her enemies somehow justifies behaviour that would, were it committed by any other government, be a cause of condemnation and sanctions, which muddies Israel’s image and makes it appear as if Israel is exempt from the standards that her benefactor, the United States, applies only too rigorously to other states.  How any of this serves the long-term interests of Israel genuinely does escape me.  At the same time, it hardly serves American interests, which are my primary concern in matters of foreign policy, to have an ally committing excesses that our government tacitly or openly endorses.  

Some have recourse to the experience of total war in WWII, as Mr. Chait does.  Of course, between the notion of a moral total war and the just war tradition, of which the principle of proportionality is a part, is a vast and unbridgeable chasm.  If you believe that total war is just, you will never see any virtue in proportionality, just as you will scarcely see any virtue in discrimination.  Indiscriminate killing is the essence of total war, so why would any supporter of total war be interested in a principle that automatically makes total war unjust?  Proportionality exists, in part, to limit the destructiveness and cruelty of war, rooted in the virtue of charity.  Total war, on the other hand, does not even admit the humanity of the enemy, so why should it wish to show him charity?   

Others, such as Mr. Cohen, take refuge behind an argument from pragmatism: responding in limited fashion to small-scale attacks does not establish deterrence.  This is a more serious argument, divorced as it is from Chait and Podhoretz’s nostalgia for the good old days when bombers turned tens of thousands of people to ash.  This is harder to argue against, because the priority of deterrence is security for your side and the priorities of proportionality are justice towards both sides and a desire to act virtuously.  Particularly when you are of the opinion that the other “side” does not deserve to be treated justly, proportionality simply seems incredible. 

But let me take a stab at showing why this deterrence argument is nonetheless mistaken.  Deterrence relies to a certain degree on predictability.  Both sides refrain from large-scale provocations or attacks on the assumption that they will call forth absolutely overwhelming retaliatory force from the other side.  If every incident, no matter how small, results in a large-scale response, there is nothing–short of their physical annihilation (which may or may not be achievable)–to keep those whom you are trying to deter from making ever larger and more destructive attacks.  They will attempt to do the maximum of damage before the inevitable large-scale response comes.  The more disproportionate the response now, the less restrained an enemy will be by deterrence in the future.  If a string of border incidents over several years, capped off by the kidnapping of two soldiers, leads to waves of air strikes and a ground invasion, it is not hard to see that Hizbullah or its successors will initiate hostilities next time on a much more destructive scale.  The disproportionality of response seems effective in pummeling your adversary this time, but it is only truly effective as a deterrent to others if the adversary is wiped out or permanently disarmed (an objective that would currently require an even more disproportionate response than Israel has so far employed).  Of course, the entire notion of proportionality rests on such quaint notions as having a causus belli and obtainable objectives that, once met, bring an end to the need for war.  It assumes that the waging of war is done to achieve redress of specific wrongs.  It has no meaning for partisans of theories of “total victory,” because there is no justice in “total victory,” which presupposes the degradation and complete surrender of all protections of the defeated party to the mercy of the victors.  Vae victis is not a motto that we should want to take to its logical conclusions.  Proportionality is an essential feature of governing Macht by means of Recht.  We would be extremely unwise to throw out this principle, if for no other reason than that we should want to hold to something that justifies our claims to civilisation and which keeps the line distinguishing us from the likes of Hizbullah bright and clear.