Via John Schwenkler, Peter Hitchens makes an argument very similar to the one John and I have been making over the last few days. The core moral judgement of the conflict seems very similar:

Terrorist attacks on Israel are indeed revolting and indefensible. But the bombing of densely populated areas, however accurate, is certain to cause the deaths of many innocents.

How then can it be defended? In what important way is it different from Arab murders of Israeli women and children?

One is directly deliberate. The other is accidental but unavoidable. I wouldn’t say that was a specially important distinction, especially if you are a victim of it.

This is rather more remarkable because, as he did in his opposition to the war in Iraq, he has taken this position “as a consistent hard-line supporter of the Jewish state.” Mr. Hitchens is not alone in being a pro-Israel “hard-liner” opposed from the beginning to the invasion of Iraq and the strikes in Gaza, but his combination of views is still fairly rare in Britain and almost unheard of in the United States.

It does prompt me to wonder what exactly is required to be a “consistent hard-line supporter of the Jewish state” when one (correctly!) rejects the policies espoused by most other hard-line supporters. This does not seem to me to be as difficult to pin down as defining who is and is not a conservative. Provided that one does not start with policy positions and work backward, conservatives might acknowledge that their persuasion allows for at least some areas of disagreement on public policy. To be a self-described “consistent hard-line supporter” of a particular state is even more specific than saying that one is a strong supporter, because the label hard-liner implies that there are other, genuine supporters who are nonetheless soft, naive, wobbly, squishy and so forth.

Hard-line usually implies not only a certain temperamental implacability and refusal to compromise, but it often also refers to the perceived severity of policies being supported. Consequently, hard-liner is rarely a name that one self-applies; it is more often used pejoratively and dismissively in the same way that people use the words extremist, fringe or theocrat. Even though Mr. Hitchens uses it here to drive home that he believes the Gaza operation to be so foolish that even he, the hard-liner, opposes it, it is all the more strange to see label used here. He is making clear in his argument that he is not, in fact, consistently hard-line, but happens to agree with the position that is also held by “the usual anti-Israel factions and their gullible supporters,” which opens up the possibility that at least some of the “anti-Israel factions” and “gullible supporters,” so called, may not necessarily be so blinkered and confused as previously thought. (It is hard to tell, as it is not entirely clear who is to be included among “the usual anti-Israel factions.”)

This is a good thing, but it then prompts other questions: if someone as “hard-line” pro-Israel as Hitchens is opposing and even criticizing the strikes in Gaza in terms that are virtually indistinguishable from, say, my criticisms, what separates the pro-Israel hard-liner from the person who criticizes Israeli government actions because they are wrong and because they are manifestly counter-productive and injurious to Israeli security? People would laugh if I were to describe myself in the same way that Hitchens does, but in reality how do we actually differ on policy?

This is not, I think, merely a matter of semantics, but gets at a deeper problem with how we discuss public policy. We could consider the same problem with the troubling use of adjectives pro- and anti-American. Obviously, there are some people who are genuinely, utterly anti-American as such, just as there really are people who are consciously, vehemently anti-Israel, but just as “pro-Israel” has gradually narrowed in meaning until it is difficult to distinguish from maximally hawkish policy views “anti-American” has come to mean any serious or thorough criticism of the exercise of U.S. power no matter its source or expression. Even though opposing hegemony and unnecessary foreign wars is eminently patriotic, we are all too familiar with critics of hegemony and unnecessary foreign wars being accused of hating their country and wishing it ill.

Conor plunges into the Gaza debate again, and catches Mark Steyn making an unfounded claim:

Did you catch the logical leap there? As Freddie points out, of course we expect better from the Middle East’s most advanced democracy that we do from Hamas! Israel is indisputably a Western society bound by civilized norms, as I’m sure Mark Steyn would agree. French President Sarkozy, however, emphatically doesn’t think that “any old barbarism issuing forth from Gaza is to be excused on grounds of ‘desperation,’” unless I’ve missed the shocking statement in which he excused rocket attacks, suicide bombings, etc.

This is a crucial point. If we are speaking of Israel’s critics in the West, including members of Western governments, none has excused barbarism of any kind. Indeed, I assume virtually all of Israel’s critics in the West take for granted that Hamas has been and is a terrorist group that at the very least continues to permit (largely ineffective) terrorist attacks from the territory it controls. Outrageous, indefensible, wrong–these are just the most common words that I have seen used and have used to describe the rocket attacks. What the critics have insisted on is the application of civilized standards to both sides on the assumption that such standards are desirable and valid, and should therefore be observed by all parties. If more of the criticism has focused on Israeli actions, it is because Israel escalated the conflict, just as more criticism initially focused on Georgian escalation of conflict with the Ossetians. The flip side of generally greater identification with Israel is greater attention to its actions, which is made all the more acute in the U.S. because of Israel’s status as an allied and subsidized government. Because we are more closely tied to and implicated in what Israel does, we are more concerned that Israel not commit blunders or crimes.

What we do not assume is that all Palestinians in Gaza are complicit in such acts and therefore do not deserve to be treated as if they were. Further, we do not take for granted that a population living in rather dismal conditions that backed an “Islamic resistance movement” should therefore be treated as if they were barbarians. One of the dangers that comes from describing a people as barbarian or barbaric or complicit in barbarism is that it lowers the standards in both directions: “we” may expect less from “them,” but there is a tendency to allow worse treatment of “them” on the grounds that “they” are barbarians.

That is, we do not make the identitarian move of reducing an entire people to a uniform mass that is to be painted with the worst wrongdoing of its political leaders. This is a move that nationalists of various kinds often make (yes, including Palestinian nationalists), and more generally it is a move that a person of almost any persuasion can make when he opts for describing a group of people in essentialist terms. Essentialism is not simply generalization about trends or habits (generalizations can sometimes be true and useful), but a claim that such-and-such a group acts in a certain way as an expression of their nature, which is to imagine that a cultural habit, which may have only been fairly recently adopted and might not long endure, is a permanent feature or characteristic of the group. The most ridiculous and insulting stereotypes of other nations are often enough created at a particularly humiliating or ugly moment in the nation’s history, but have little or no merit as an observation on the character of a nation over decades and centuries. How else could so many Americans associate the French with a lack of martial prowess and Germans with militarism and efficiency, when for most of modern history something more like the reverse would have been closer to the truth?

To make one other quick point, comparison with Western reactions to the war in Georgia is useful. Most politicians and pundits deplored Russian “aggression” and disproportionate Russian actions following the initial Georgian escalation. Indeed, I also said that the Russian response was disproportionate, because it seemed to be so, but for most Western observers the importance of proportionality seems to come and go like the tide depending on the military action in question. Two years ago and again this year, Israeli military action has appeared to be proportionate to most of the same people who were deeply offended by Russian actions, or else they will insist that proportionality is irrelevant or impossible to define. If the consensus-supporting politicians and pundits are creative, they may argue both things at the same time. What never fails is their willingness to make excuses for one side while falsely claiming that their opponents in the debate are doing likewise. If there is one thing that most of the critics of U.S.-allied governments have in common, it is the desire to get Americans to stop making excuses for their allies when the allies are in error.

Conor asks:

What do you imagine would be a more radical change to our current marriage laws, allowing gays — 5 percent of the population, say — the ability to wed, or returning to a matchmaker system or a system in which it’s common for men to take multiple wives?

Well, since Conor asks, I would have to say that the former is a more radical change for a few reasons: it is entirely unprecedented (James Boswell’s fantasies about what adelphopoia represents notwithstanding), it quite plainly departs from any recognizable form of matrimony, and so it absolutely divorces marriage from procreation, which all of these other varieties of marriage not only include but make central to their understanding of marriage’s purpose. It might be that the more radical change is not necessarily the most socially destructive change (liberalized divorce laws are more modest, but almost certainly have far worse effects), but it is more vehemently opposed because of the degree to which it is proposing to change a fundamental institution. To address Conor’s other point regarding conservatism, the standard for the conservative case would have to be much higher than he has made it. When endorsing a change, particularly one this radical, a conservative would need to show not only that it does not do harm to the institution in question but also that it actually reinforces and reinvigorates the institution. Whether or not “gay marriage” harms the institution of marriage, it certainly does not strengthen it. It is therefore undesirable because it is unnecessary to the preservation of the relevant institution, and so the appropriate conservative view is to leave well enough alone.

If allowing that change means, as Andrew puts it, “accepting gay love and commitment as indistinguishable in moral worth and social status as straight love,” it is not going to happen for a very long time, if it ever will, because I think it is fair to say that opponents of “gay marriage” do not accept the two as indistinguishable and see no reason why they should. If that is what “gay marriage” requires, I see even less reason why conservatives should accept it. Indeed, that statement helps explain the reason why “gay marriage” is so strenuously opposed while there is no movement trying to overturn Lawrence: there is a vast difference between permitting something and being compelled to accept it as indistinguishable from the norm.

Incidentally, this is one reason why Newsweek‘s articles on the subject and their attempt to fabricate a religious case for “gay marriage” were met with so many harsh critiques, including mine: it is one thing to say that there ought to be legal protections in a secular system for certain relationships, which might then be established through the legislative process (rather than by judicial ruling), and quite another to say that religious conservatives must concede that their understanding of their own sacraments and Scripture is somehow faulty because they refuse to modify their religious teachings to suit the fashions of the world. The attempt to distort Christian tradition to suit the cause of the moment and to pretend that fidelity to that tradition is actually betrayal of it, as Meacham attempted to do, is the sort of insulting and obnoxious tactic that not only fails to persuade but also makes opponents of cultural change even more resistant than they were. Meacham and Newsweek‘s attempt to claim some religious sanction or authority for something that has none did achieve one thing: it served as a confirmation of the fears of religious conservatives in churches throughout the world that attempts to re-define marriage seem necessarily to go hand in hand with innovation and distortion of Christian teaching.

While Western sanctions in response to the war proved short-lived, Russia paid a heavy price for its victory in the flight of foreign capital – which both predated October’s financial crisis and exacerbated its effects in Russia. ~Cathy Young

This is a story that I heard bandied about in September, but which I didn’t think anyone would bother to repeat at this point. Capital had been “fleeing” Russia in the form of a decline in its stock market throughout 2008, long before the war in Georgia and the full outbreak of our financial crisis in September, in a more dramatic expression of the slow downward trend that our own market was showing through the first half of the year. At the time of the war in Georgia, the Russian index had already declined roughly 20% for the year, and Russia did not suffer its worst precipitous drops in its stock market until the full brunt of the financial crisis struck New York in mid-September. Most of the value lost in the Russian stock market and most of the economic woes now besetting Russia came about in the wake of the global crisis, which was compounded by the rapid decline in the price of oil, natural gas and metals. Capital flight from Russia has been extraordinary, as its market has lost 70% of its value on the year, but it has occurred during a period when all major indexes have declined by large margins. Any investors who pulled out because of the war in Georgia would represent a tiny fraction of that overall decline. It is telling that this RFE report on Russia in 2008 does not attempt to make the same claim and makes this observation instead:

But if the Georgia war passed largely without penalty, a far bigger blow was awaiting Moscow in the form of the gathering global economic storm.

Although its early ripples could already be felt in Russia months before the Georgia campaign, the massive scale of its impact is becoming clear only now.

Why were investors pulling out? RFE tells us:

Some estimates put capital flight since August at over $200 billion, as Russian and foreign investors flee a ruble that has sunk to a four-year low against the euro and which is being steadily devalued against the U.S. dollar [bold mine-DL].

Far in the background of all the coverage and commentary on the strikes in Gaza has been the response, or complete lack thereof, of Obama to what has been happening there. This has led to a some commentary on what he might do once in office. Sometime TAC contributors Glenn Greenwald and Philip Weiss both stated very plainly that they think it is impossible to know what Obama will do once he takes office, and moreover Weiss says that you cannot know what he really thinks about this conflict. I don’t think Obama’s likely course of action is so hard to discern, and his public position is going to be exceedingly predictable, regardless of whether that is what he “really” believes. For once, Gerard Baker makes a solid point when he argues that Obama will have many other higher priorities than diving into Israel-Palestine problems early on, but Obama’s action or lack of action will be dictated by more than a busy schedule handling economic woes and our own wars.

The incoming administration will almost certainly abide by Obama’s campaign pledges not to force Israel to make concessions or “drag” them to the negotiating table. It will maintain what Weiss and perhaps even Greenwald will find to be an incredibly out-of-touch position of absolute support for ongoing military operations in Gaza (assuming the operations will still be going on in three weeks’ time) just as Obama supported Israeli actions in Lebanon in 2006 to the hilt. The public stance of the administration will be staunchly, almost embarrassingly supportive of the actions of Olmert’s outgoing government and whatever new government forms later this year. Of course, he might surprise everyone by departing from everything he has said and done for the last four years regarding this subject, but I don’t think it likely.

Now there is a new Israeli military doctrine: go nuts. The Israeli commentator Ofer Shelah put it more elegantly: ‘In the face of enemies who have opted for a strategy of attrition and attacking from a distance, Israel will present itself as a “crazy country”, the kind that will respond (albeit after a great deal of time) in a massive and unfettered assault, with no proportion to the amount of casualties it has endured.’ ~Paul Wood

One of the reasons why I keep coming back to the war in Lebanon two years ago is that, even more than the operations themselves, all of the arguments supporting the operation in Gaza are the same as they were in support of the campaign in Lebanon. In both cases the idea of proportionality in warfare has received a fair amount of abuse. According to Hanson, it is a “phoney” doctrine, and James Robbins all but dismisses it as irrelevant. Those are among the most extreme examples, but their sentiments are quite typical. This is revealing and important, and it repeats the pattern we saw in 2006. Faced with the possibility that there are Israeli actions in Gaza that actually are excessive and disproportionate, this element of just war theory is simply scrapped or dismissed as inappropriate to asymmetric warfare by defenders of those actions. As I remarked in 2006, “Quickly vanishing is the trope of Israel’s tremendous restraint. The new idea is the virtue of her disproportionate violence.” Something very similar is happening again.

In the same post two years ago, I argued that proportionality and deterrence were linked in an important way:

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).

Anyone who claims that Israel is restoring its ability to deter attacks with its current campaign has misjudged things badly.

Rod asks:

The Palestinians, on the other hand, had a choice — and they chose Hamas, in a free and fair election. Are they not to be held responsible for those choices?

It seems to me that they have been “held responsible” for this for almost two years as Gaza has gradually been deprived of aid and supplies in response to the election of Hamas. Having to live under Hamas rule since then is how they have been “held responsible” for the majority’s vote, and one would think that this is punishment enough. This question of collective responsibility and collective punishment is central to the matter. Do we, in fact, believe that an entire population is directly responsible for the actions of a relative few or for the actions of their political leaders? Does an entire population deserve to suffer on account of those actions? Put that way, I hope most of us would say no to both. Most of us understand that this is the reasoning behind total war and also the justification for terrorism.

I assume no one would seriously maintain that Israelis are being “held responsible” for the choices of their past governments when they come under attack, and I would hope we would all maintain a sharp and clear distinction between the people and the political authority in all cases. Collective responsibility here seems to mean that every voter is not only partly responsible for empowering or endorsing a particular government, but that every voter is culpable and can be punished for any wrong done by that government. I submit that we would not make such an argument about most other nations, and if someone used such an argument to justify attacks on American or Western cities we would repudiate it immediately, but it is one that we hear with depresssing frequency when it comes to Arab nations.

The logic of collective punishment in this case says, “Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa members are launching outrageous rocket attacks into Israel, Hamas permits them to do this, a majority voted for Hamas, so any Palestinian in Gaza who suffers on the account of the retaliatory strikes basically had it coming.” Isn’t it clear how effectively lumping together everyone in Gaza from the fanatic launching the rocket to the Hamas voter who relies on its social services to the Fatah supporters who quietly oppose Hamas rule works directly to the advantage of Hamas? Isn’t it even more clear that Hamas’ appeal grows when it can portray itself to people in Gaza as a resistance movement, and that the siege and these strikes recreate some of the occupation conditions that originally made Hamas so popular?

Rod asks what I and other critics of the strikes would like to see Israel do instead. Speaking for myself, I would have liked to see Israel not foolishly strengthen the hands of its enemies by escalating a minor security threat into a major military operation. What else could the Israeli government have done? It could have lifted or ameliorated the siege, or better yet never imposed it. If we grant that cutting off Gaza was actually a blunder, remedying that blunder would be a first step. It is not certain that ending Gaza’s isolation would weaken Hamas, but its isolation has done nothing but strengthen Hamas’ position. Short of an extremely difficult and risky urban war aimed at destroying the organization entirely, which would cause massive dislocation and suffering, that seems the best means of weakening Hamas politically by forcing it to (mis)govern Gaza under relatively normal conditions. There will undoubtedly be a core of support for the group that will remain, but surely the political goal that Israel wants to reach is to have a majority of people in Gaza grow disillusioned with Hamas and to drive wedges between the group and most of the population. I don’t assume Hamas would sit idly by and let its support dwindle without attempting to gin up another crisis, and I expect that it would try to intimidate or kill dissenters to retain its hold on power, but there does not seem to be any other way to break its hold without taking military action that will create, if it is possible, an even more radical movement to replace Hamas should it be destroyed.

Of course, this may not be politically palatable in Israel, and it would invite accusations of “showing weakness,” because any policy that has been thought out for more than ten seconds is always labeled as “weakness” or “appeasement,” but that is at least the beginning of my proposal of an alternative.

At his new Culture11 sports blog, Michael surveys the debacle that was Favre’s return as the Jets’ starting quarterback. Favre’s self-regard is almost as great as the undue praise heaped on him for his ability as a quarterback, and his return to the league this year was the ultimate expression of this. The Jets had a perfectly good quarterback in Pennington, whom they had been trying to marginalize and undermine for years, and had no reason to waste resources and time on Favre, and so long as Pennington was there the Jets were the one AFC East team that I did not completely despise. They threw all that away and suffered the consequences in what must be among the most immediate and perfect examples in sport of karmic justice during the last year. I was particularly annoyed by the shabby way the Jets treated Pennington, because it was all too reminiscent of how my Titans had foolishly mistreated McNair. Having run him off and then drafted the woefully out-of-his-depth Vince Young, the Titans’ owner and management suffered a mediocre season for their mistake and were spared another wasted year only thanks to the mental meltdown of their star rookie. It was impressive to see how Pennington helped to transform an improving Miami team from an interesting turnaround story to one of the two great comeback teams of the year, and it was doubly sweet that their playoff spot came at the expense of the wretched Patriots.

Not that it should surprise anyone, but Victor Davis Hanson does not understand the doctrine of proportionality. Jim Antle comes much nearer the mark when he says, “The standard rightly applied compares the harm inflicted with the harm the military action seeks to avoid.” The harm that the IDF seeks to avoid in this case is obviously far less than the harm already inflicted on civilian population of Gaza, given the puny and ineffective nature of the rocket attacks prior to the operation, to say nothing of the harm that will be inflicted in the future. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, “the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.” (2309)

Hanson then trots out past U.S. crimes to cover for the indiscriminate warfare of the IDF:

By this logic, the 1999 American bombing of Belgrade — aimed at stopping the genocide of Slobodan Milosevic — was, because of collateral damage, the moral equivalent of the carefully planned Serbian massacres of Muslim civilians at Srebrenica in 1995.

They are not exactly equivalent, but both were criminal. Arguably, the bombing of Belgrade was more so, because the war in question had absolutely no justification (the “genocide” being thwarted by the bombing had never occurred and was in all likelihood not going to occur). What is strange about this is that Hanson seems to believe quite genuinely that this example strengthens his case, as if invoking the killing of civilians in a war of aggression justifies the killing of civilians during the current operation. This is a variant on the argument from war crimes that many people used during the war in 2006, which amounted to waxing indignant that the standards regarding indiscriminate and disproportionate warfare applied today would have made the bombing campaigns of WWII criminal. Indeed, they would, because they were.

Via Scott on the main blog, I see that Greenwald writes a longer post discussing the implications of U.S. policy that ignores the neutralist position preferred by 70% of the American public that I mentioned earlier today. As Greenwald observes, the political class’ formulation of policy that large majorities reject outright is standard practice, but it is particularly obvious when it comes to U.S.-Israel relations. We have seen it with refusal to end the war in Iraq, of course, but it is also a common feature of our immigration policy and, to a lesser extent, our trade policy. So in this respect the complete disregard for public opinion is a normal part of how the political class operates when it comes to major policy decisions: for various reasons, it adopts the policies most at odds with popular views and runs the government in the least representative way possible. As Greenwald says:

Americans shouldn’t be in the position of endlessly debating Israel’s security situation and its endless religious and territorial conflicts with its neighbors. That should be for Israeli citizens to do, not for Americans.

There is something a bit rich in the “pro-Israel” insistence that Israel must do such-and-such a thing in Lebanon or Gaza or wherever to assert its sovereignty, and meanwhile a foreign government provides it generous subsidies and possesses the leverage to dictate to it what it will do in what it regards as its internal affairs. The patron-client relationship between the U.S. and Israel is ultimately a burden on Israel and it becomes at best an enormous distraction for U.S. policy in the region. It should not be for us to debate what Israel does on its borders, because we should not be so closely tied to and implicated in the actions of its government that we should have anything to say about it.