Today, Hezbollah fired 182 rockets into Israel, the largest single-day number to date in this hot war along the Lebanese border. I wouldn’t expect a slurry of news reports trumpeting the fact. I don’t say that as a facile attempt to provoke a reaction, or as a manifestation of my visceral dislike of Islamic fanatics, but merely to highlight the popular thinking—if by popular we mean the squeakiest wheel—regarding moral culpability in warfare, a kind of popular thinking that reduces the combatants to the level of sides engaged in a sporting contest. And as we all know, there is nothing we love so well as the underdog.
Because hardly anyone comes to this conflict with a truly open mind, it is very difficult to separate one’s love of the underdog from one’s dislike of Israel. After all, in the big picture, one could view a Jewish state of 6 million amid 300 million Arabs as the arch-underdog, but no one really sees it that way. Given the immense advantage the Israelis enjoy in terms of military technology, perhaps one shouldn’t. But it is clear, after examining the discourse from all but the most strident of American conservatives, that I am expected—as a moral actor in a world of moral actors—to censure Israel for its use of ‘disproportionate’ force against Hezbollah, and by extension, Lebanon.
Such an expectation has dusted off a ream of analogies in the recent press. Dresden, Hiroshima, Hamburg, Würzburg, Königsberg, Nagasaki. The names of these cities are now etched into the annals of moral ambiguity. Long after the flames were extinguished, the arguments concerning the rightness of those attacks have not been. Still today, we wage war with ourselves—60 years after the fact—regarding the decisions and actions of our grandfathers and great-grandfathers, and in light of purported recent Israeli actions in Lebanon, this patrimony of doubt is now hauled out and applied in force to Israel. For anyone who grows immediately suspect of arguments by analogy, this currently popular one will likely not satisfy. And it shouldn’t. It is, as they say, apples and oranges.
What should be clear is that the expectation to censure the Israelis is more a product of jus in bello, as opposed to jus ad bellum. In other words, rules concerning the proper justifications for declaring war have largely held up into the 21st century, Iraq notwithstanding; however, the rules concerning our conduct in fighting are in tatters. Traditionally, proportionality has been a key consideration for moral philosophers of war. For example, if as a matter of military necessity, one must destroy a bridge, it would be deemed immoral to destroy the whole town in which the bridge sits. Most folks would agree with this. Where things get hairy is in supposing, for instance, that one has only the means of destroying the town or not, rather than the bridge specifically—would it then be just?
One school of just-war theory would ask us to evaluate such a use of force against the military necessity of destroying the bridge in the first place. Such a calculation is at root utilitarian; it is a mere cost/benefit analysis, one that we have seen in countless other contexts, such as Paul Fussell’s classic essay “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” in which he posits that the thousands of lives lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were still fewer than the prospective number that would have been lost in a full-scale invasion of Japan.
Philosophers of a more rights-based school of philosophy would ask that we consider the inherent rights of the actors in judging the use of force. Philosopher Michael Walzer, in his book Just and Unjust Wars (1977), tees it up this way: “Here is the crucial test, then, for anyone who argues that the rules of war are grounded in a theory of rights: to make the combatant/noncombatant distinction plausible in terms of the theory, that is, to provide a detailed account of the history of individual rights under the conditions of war and battle—how they are retained, lost, and exchanged (for war rights) and recovered.”
In the chapter that follows the excerpt above, Walzer seeks to do just that. In order to accomplish this, he begins with the medieval Catholic notion of the “double effect,” a doctrine that he summarizes in the following manner:
The argument goes this way: it is permitted to perform an act likely to have evil consequences (the killing of noncombatants) provided the following four conditions hold.
1) The act is good in itself or at least indifferent, which means, for our purposes, that is a legitimate act of war.
2) The direct effect is morally acceptable—the destruction of military supplies, for example, or the killing of enemy soldiers.
3) The intention of the actor is good, that is, he aims only at the acceptable effect; the evil effect is not one of his ends, nor is it a means to his ends.
4) The good effect is sufficiently good to compensate for allowing the evil effect; it must be justifiable under Sidgwick’s proportionality rule.
As explained earlier in his book, Walzer was somewhat skeptical of a purely utilitarian view of these matters; therefore, he sought to amend the double effect doctrine by providing for “some sign of a positive commitment to save civilian lives.” In other words, the double effect doctrine is workable in just-war theory provided that the soldiers attempt to save lives in some active manner, rather than merely applying “the proportionality rule and kill no more civilians than is militarily necessary.”
As far as this goes, I tend to agree with Walzer, if only because he qualifies his argument in this regard by noting that “there is a limit to the risks that we require [of soldiers]. These are, after all, unintended deaths and legitimate military operations, and the absolute rule against attacking civilians does not apply. War necessarily places civilians in danger; that is another aspect of its hellishness. We can only ask soldier to minimize the dangers they impose.” For some, such reasoning doesn’t go nearly far enough, but to go any farther, in my opinion, would be to legitimize the use of human shields. We must walk a fine line in this regard; to ask soldiers to take on more risk concerning the civilian presence would reward those who seek to use civilians in order to gain a battlefield advantage; to take on less risk would risk making any set of war conventions nugatory. Walzer’s balance is a workable one.
In attempting to apply such a concept to the current hostilities in Lebanon, one is immediately confronted with another set considerations, namely, to what end do we set the rules? Do we seek to apply the rules postwar as a punitive measure? Or are they merely a moral guide for setting military policy, for determining the so-called rules of engagement?
I have severe doubts as to the first scenario. Even in the case of, say, Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav head of state who died recently during a war-crimes trial in The Hague, it’s difficult for me to view such an application of the Conventions as anything more than form of victors’ justice. Carry such trials out if you wish, but I don’t believe they accomplish much. Even the famous Nuremberg trials eventually bogged down and became a postwar PR fiasco for the Allies, netting only a subset of the most outrageous perpetrators of atrocity. The justice of such trials is often less than absolute, and in some instances, can be seen as merely capricious.
A far more functional usage of the Conventions is the way they can (or should) condition the way we fight, and even then, not absolutely, for mistakes will surely occur even under the most conscientious of regimes. Nevertheless, our rules of war should proceed from a vigorous pursuit of the Good, as steadfastly applied as possible. In this regard, unfortunately, it is almost impossible for observers to make judgments in real time during hostilities. Most observers are not privy to actual battlefield conditions, nor are they conversant with any sense of military necessity as it evolves during the hostilities. Because of this very distance, the weapons of modern warfare include press relations every bit as much as bombs and rockets, something of which both Israel and Hezbollah are very much aware.
What do we know with any certainty concerning the war in Lebanon? Only what we see from the reporters’ guided tours through the combat zones and what we are told by the official mouthpieces of the combatants. We know, for example, that civilians are dying. We also know that Israel has dropped leaflets urging civilians to leave areas to be bombed. We know that Hezbollah’s military assets (people and ordnance) are placed irresponsibly in close proximity to civilians. We know that Hezbollah rockets are fired blindly into Israel without having any military target in mind (see Rule 3 above in the Double Effect Doctrine). We know from satellite pictures that Beirut’s Shiite neighborhoods have been heavily damaged, just as we know from the same pictures that other quarters in the city are relatively unscathed. We know that an Israeli bombing mission in the village of Qana has killed nearly 30 civilians without knocking out—so far as we know—any military assets, likely because none were present.
The above tidbits constitute information, but they are not knowledge. To base a definitive view of the war on the above information is akin to skimming the first chapter of Proust and claiming to have read the whole book. To my mind, Arab accusations of war crimes—as well as Israeli and American denials of culpability—regarding Qana only confirm that the world’s newspapers are also a front in the battle.
If the Qana incident occurred more or less as the press reports indicate, there is no question that the responsibility for those deaths is Israel’s alone. So far as we know anything about Israel’s military policies, it is not generally held that the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians is viewed as acceptable policy by the Israelis. And indeed, in practice, there is an overwhelming array of evidence that demonstrates this. So Qana was either an outright mistake or, at most, a poorly considered application of military necessity, for there was no evidence of armaments in the area. As such, the Qana attack clearly fails the “double effect” test. However, I submit for your consideration that, if those 182 Hezbollah rockets had killed 30 Israelis today, it would have been no mistake. Such is the latitude, I suppose, given to the “underdog.”
No comments:
Post a Comment