On the evening of April 28, 2003, a crowd of approximately 200 Iraqi civilians gathered outside U.S. Army headquarters in Fallujah to protest the occupation of their city. As tension grew, U.S. soldiers from the 82nd Airborne stationed on the building’s roof began firing upon the crowd, killing at least 13 Iraqis and wounding more than 70. U.S. troops insisted that they fired only to defend themselves from gunfire coming from the crowd. The protesters claimed that they were unarmed and never fired at the soldiers.

The odds are that you have never beaten your breast or searched your soul over this incident in Fallujah. In fact, you have likely never even heard of this incident. And the odds are that you have never heard of the tens if not hundreds of incidents like it, in which civilians have been killed as U.S. soldiers fought in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade. ~David Brog

Well, I can’t speak for anyone else, but I am well aware of the “incident” Brog describes, I remember reading about it at the time, and I thought it was just the sort of terrible thing that was bound to result from invading and occupying another country. One of the reasons why I and many others opposed the invasion is that we wanted to keep such terrible things from happening. Though no one knew it at the time, that “incident” was an important provocation that helped make Fallujah a particularly strong center of the insurgency in western Iraq, so this “incident” that Brog thinks no one has ever heard of is better-known than he claims and far more important than he lets on. Yes, it was an outrage against the civilian population, but then so was the entire war! Fallujah was only one of the most well-known locations in all of Iraq, especially by the end of the second battle of Fallujah. Brog may have heard a few people complain about the war, of which this “incident” and the later destruction of much of Fallujah were products. Of course, Iraqi civilians had no government to protest on their behalf, as we had already destroyed their government.

It’s true that there was not as much attention paid to that particular event, and there are several reasons why “incidents” such as that one and others like it have not individually generated the same international outrage. Regardless of what one thinks about the wars in question, these have all happened in war zones. That doesn’t excuse them, but it makes them more understandable. War opponents rightly deplore them, and even some war supporters can see how harmful civilian deaths are to success in these wars, and almost all of them can agree on stricter rules of engagement that aim to prevent these things from happening. Because they happen in remote places in distant war zones, they are also harder to learn and report about, and the places where they happen do not have the built-in high profile of Israel and Palestine, which sympathizers of both sides unduly invest with extraordinary global significance.

The flotilla was sailing under the flags of states that were not at war with Israel. Indeed, several of them sailed under the flag of an official military ally. The ships were in international waters bound for a territory under a blockade of very questionable legality. It is doubtful that Israel had any legal right to board the ships, and in any case the decision to do so resulted in nine civilian deaths. The standard to which Israel is being held right now is a pretty simple one, and it is not terribly high: do not attack civilians in international waters when they are on a relief mission. This shouldn’t be a hard standard to meet.

Video records also make a difference in how people react to events. People have talked about the WikiLeaks video much more and for much longer than they have talked about almost any other “incident” in Iraq, because there is video to watch rather than reported accounts to read. There are now interviews with people who were aboard the Mavi Marmara who can confirm or reject earlier accounts, and most of them have much readier access to media outlets than people in Iraq and Afghanistan. That combined with the greater interest in matters related to Israel and Palestine creates the conditions for more attention, more reaction and commentary, and more criticism.

The people who laud Israel as the region’s only democracy, America’s “reliable ally”, and talk about it as a front-line state of the West contribute to the extraordinary attention paid to everything that happens in Israel and the territories as much as anyone else. Perhaps if we acknowledged that Israel is a “tertiary strategic interest” for the United States, as Anthony Cordesmann put it recently, then we could also acknowledge that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is just one of at least a dozen intractable political disputes with minimal strategic significance. That would probably help ensure that Israel receives less attention, both positive and negative. Somehow I don’t think “pro-Israel” people will accept that proposal.

On a slightly different point, one of the sillier complaints in the last week and a half has been that the U.N. is slow to act on complex, contentious, difficult international issues with potentially enormous implications for international stability one way or another, such as Iran’s nuclear program or the sinking of the Cheonan, but it was quick to issue condemnations of Israel’s unnecessary and outrageous attack in international waters. It is not hard to see why. There is no international consensus on Iran’s nuclear program, and to the extent that a consensus is beginning to form it is taking a very different shape than the one Washington wants to create, so it is necessarily more time-consuming and difficult to agree on how to proceed. It is important to get the response to North Korea’s outrage right so that it doesn’t lead to war, and it is necessary to get China to agree to that response so that it will be somewhat more effective. In other words, the U.N. has difficulty handling problems that are very difficult to solve. Recognizing this is treated by Israel’s reflexive defenders as some kind of deep insight into international affairs.

Practically every government concluded that the raid was wrong, and most governments have long since concluded that the blockade was wrong, so they are unlikely to be sympathetic to the argument that Israel was enforcing its blockade. The other governments know it was enforcing the blockade, which is a large part of what they find objectionable. Condemnation of the raid was swift not because Israel is being held to an impossibly high standard, but because this was a rather obvious case in which reaching a judgment was fairly easy. As it is, the weakened resolution condemning the “actions” on May 31 is purely symbolic. There are no penalties attached, and it is doubtful that the U.S. will allow any penalties to be imposed.

P.S. Later in his article, Brog does his best Jonah Goldberg imitation:

Many of my friends are horrified by Israel’s blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. Yet these same people never once questioned the United States’ blockade of Saddam-controlled Iraq throughout most of the 1990s.

I’m very doubtful of that, but let’s suppose this is true. That could mean one of a few things. Brog’s friends might have been uninformed about the consequences of Iraq sanctions, or they might have been foolish enough to believe that those sanctions were “working” to achieve some desirable goal rather than inflicting needless suffering on an entire nation. Maybe they came to recognize that Iraq sanctions had been a terrible, destructive policy and they would never make the same mistake of unquestioningly approving of another such policy. If they are Americans, perhaps they were less willing to admit that policies of their own government were so inhumane. Who knows? Brog’s many friends are not available to speak for themselves, and so we are left to rely on hearsay evidence as the core of Brog’s entire argument.

Towards the end, Brog writes:

The path toward terrorism begins with the erasure of moral lines. It starts with the equation of terrorists — who seek to kill civilians — with the armed forces who seek to stop the terrorists.

Actually, the path towards terrorism begins with the erasure of the lines between combatants and non-combatants and with the belief that everyone in an enclave, city or country is complicit in the actions of their regime and therefore equally culpable for its actions and its crimes. It seems as if defenders of the raid want to erase, or at least blur, that line, and they seem to endorse the idea of collective guilt on which all terrorism is based.