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Morality and Expediency in Israel
It is not hard to tell right from wrong, morality from expediency, especially at the extremes of human existence in war.
It is impossible to see as right — moral — attackers who intentionally targeted and killed over 1,400 civilians, babies and the elderly, and laborers from Thailand who could not be responsible for the decades of Gazan violence, as if that could be justification anyway. Those same gunmen took hostages to use as human shields and will likely murder many of them, too.
It is moral to condemn barbarism. It cannot be brushed aside by phrases such as “ethics is rarely black and white” when in many cases — the massacres in Israel — black is indeed black and white is white. No one can justify killing babies. Morality is not “that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
It speaks poorly of American education that right and wrong are so muddled, that the expediency of horrendous acts is confused with independence. A coalition of 34 student organizations at Harvard say they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” A club in Brooklyn staged an “Intifada Fundraver” using images of militants to advertise a night of pre-Halloween dancing on the graves of more than 1,400 murder victims. A recent You.gov poll conducted after the Hamas attacks in Israel found only 32 percent of Americans aged 18-29 think Hamas deliberately targeted civilian areas in Israel. In a roundup of atrocities, one outlet found at UPenn students chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” in response to the killings. Students for Justice in Palestine at the University of Virginia cheered the “events of yesterday” as a “step toward a free Palestine.” Student groups at the California State University in Long Beach advertised a “Day of Resistance” rally with a poster featuring an image of a paraglider, used to kill over 200 ravers. A Columbia professor called the attacks “awesome” while another at Cornell described them as “exhilarating.” Thousands rallied in Times Square and across America claiming to support Palestine even as they stepped aside morally for the massacres to occur.
It may be clearer to define the terms morality and expediency. Here’s a practical example, adapted from my first book.
Soldiers in Iraq who would joke about anything would become quiet on a checkpoint. Within the limits of available electricity, they tried to light up the ‘point as best they could, so drivers could see it. Iraq at night was a dark and dangerous place, and like in inner city America the drivers were not going to slow down, or God forbid, stop, without a very good reason. So, Step One was to brighten up your checkpoint so the drivers had that good reason to admit they saw it. Drivers knew if they then tried to run a checkpoint they’d be shot at, a bad way to make time. After the lights were on as best they could be (you could only run so many watts if all you had was some Chinese portable generator), the next step was to communicate to the often uninformed drivers that they needed to stop. There was no such thing as licensing drivers in Iraq; someone showed you how to drive and then you were a driver. Driving trucks, either as suicide bombers or as delivery persons, was sought-after employment, so fibbing about actually knowing how to drive was popular. It was possible the guy heading toward your checkpoint had not, like you, done this before.
Standing at a checkpoint in a dense area was easier, as the jammed up traffic meant cars approached you at a crawl and everyone had some time to signal their intentions across cultures and languages. However, in the suburbs or on a lesser-traveled road, things got stickier. You could start with big signs in Arabic and English that told folks to slow down, but there was that light problem again, plus many Iraqis were illiterate. You could set up all manner of flashers and twirling things, a good start, but ambiguous. It could be a wedding party (plenty of guns there as well).
Car bombs were a thing to be scared of at a checkpoint. In most cases the explosives were intended for some other target, and just had to pass through your ‘point. But, if the driver thought you were on to him, he’d blow the car right there and never mind the real target. Checkpoints also made everyone nervous, and nervous people and guns were a bad mix. Iraqi drivers hit the gas too often, worried about whatever, maybe angry, maybe stuck in an Arabic macho cycle and needing to show the Army who had guts in a real dumb way.
You hitched up your pants and started thinking about the ROE as cars approached. ROE meant “rules of engagement,” basically a set of orders on when you were allowed to kill someone legally, without consequence. Even wars have rules, and nobody went outside the wire without knowing exactly what the rules were. ROEs changed all the time, but at a checkpoint they might have gone like this: try and stop the car with lights, sounds, and hand gestures. If he kept coming, shine a laser or bright light at the driver (called “beaming”). If that did not work, fire a warning shot, or a non-lethal round. Still coming? Fire into the engine block to disable the car. Not enough? Kill someone. This all seemed logical, but let’s play the game together for real.
You are 23 years old and at a checkpoint, having been up the last 18 hours, and staying awake only with the constant application of Rip It energy drinks, chew and instant coffee crystals crunched between bites of candy. Last night one of your buddies was almost killed by a driver at a checkpoint who got scared and hit the gas. You are sweating despite the cool weather because standing still anywhere, never mind under bright lights, can attract snipers and you do not want to get popped tonight. The vehicle approaching has only one headlight, and it looks like there are several people in the front seat where you’d expect only one or two. In the span of three seconds you need to try and wave down the driver, beam him with the laser if he doesn’t slow down, fire a non-lethal round if he gases and goes and then switch weapons and be ready to take a life. You’re Zeus throwing lightning bolts. Make the decision. Make the decision now, shoot or don’t shoot the guy. You’re the judge of your own cause.
And that’s the difference between what Israel has done in the past through mistakes and as a consequence of war, and what the Palestinians did earlier this month taking 1,400 lives and killing babies by choice. There is no equivalency. It seems new, a sick product of our modern age, but it is all old. The Greek Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War is a seminal work in the field of military history. It offers a deep exploration of the intersection between morality and expediency in the context of a long conflict between Athens and Sparta more than 2.000 years ago. Thucydides presents the moral dilemmas and strategic considerations people face during times of war, offering insight into the timeless tension between what is right and what is expedient. In the end, however, everyone gets to decide for themselves.
You don’t shoot. You get to decide many times every night at the checkpoint. It takes a lot of guts to not shoot someone.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
How Accidental are America’s Accidental Civilian Killings Across the Middle East?
U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis has said “civilian casualties are a fact of life in this sort of situation,” referring to America’s war against Islamic State.
How can America in clear conscience continue to kill civilians across the Middle East? It’s easy; ask Grandpa what he did in the Good War. Civilian deaths in WWII weren’t dressed up as collateral damage, they were policy.
Following what some claim are looser rules of engagement in place under the Trump administration, U.S.-led coalition air strikes in Iraq and Syria killed 1,484 civilians in March 2017 alone. Altogether some 3,100 civilians have been killed from the air since the U.S. launched its coalition war against Islamic State, according to the NGO Airwars. Drone strikes outside of the ISIS fight killed 3,674 other civilians. In 2015 the U.S. destroyed an entire hospital in Afghanistan, along with doctors and patients inside.
That all adds up to a lot of accidents — accidents created in part by the use of Hellfire missiles designed to destroy tanks employed against individual people, and 500 pound bombs that can clear a football-field sized area dropped inside densely inhabited areas. The policy of swatting flies with sledgehammers, surgical strikes with blunt instruments, does indeed seem to lead to civilian deaths, deaths that stretch the definition of “accident.”
Yet despite the numbers killed, the watchword in modern war is that civilians are never targeted on purpose, at least by our side. Americans would never intentionally kill innocents.
Except we have.
The good guys in World War II oversaw the rapid development of new weapons to meet the changing needs of killing entire cities’ worth of innocents. For example, in Europe, brick and stone construction lent itself to the use of conventional explosives to destroy cities. In Japan, however, given the prominence of wood construction, standard explosives tended to simply scatter structures over a limited area. The answer was incendiary devices.
To fine-tune their use, the U.S. Army Air Force built a full-size Japanese village in Utah. They questioned American architects who had worked in Japan, consulted a furniture importer, and installed tatami straw floor mats taken from Japanese-Americans sent off to internment camps. Among the insights gained was the need for incendiary devices to be made much heavier than originally thought. Japanese homes typically had tile roofs. The early devices tended to bounce right off. A heavier device would break through the tile and ignite inside the structure, creating a much more effective fire.
Far from accidental, firebombing Japan had been planned in War Plan Orange, written long before Pearl Harbor. As far back as the 1920s, U.S. General Billy Mitchell had said Japan’s paper and wood cities would be “the greatest aerial targets the world had ever seen.” Following the outline in War Plan Orange, the efforts were lead by Curtis “Bombs Away” LeMay, who expressed his goal as “Japan will eventually be a nation without cities, a nomadic people.”
LeMay also helped run the U.S. bombing campaign against North Korea during that war, claiming that American efforts killed some 20 percent of the civilian population. The man many call the architect of the Vietnam War, Robert McNamara, worked for LeMay during the WWII firebombing campaign. McNamara as Secretary of Defense went on to order the use of napalm in Vietnam, often against undefended civilian targets. The accidents of civilian deaths in war turn inside tight circles.
The skill with which America tuned its WWII firebombing into a exquisite way to destroy civilians reached its peak on March 10, 1945, when three hundred American B-29 bombers flew virtually unopposed over Tokyo’s most densely populated residential area. They dropped enough incendiary bombs to create a firestorm, a conflagration that burned the oxygen out of the air itself.
What was accomplished? One hundred thousand dead, a million people made homeless. The raid remains the single most destructive act of war ever committed, even after Hiroshima.
The problem, however, for the U.S. with such raids was their inefficiency in killing civilians. The logistics of sending off 300 planes were daunting, especially when an hour or two of unexpected wind or rain could negate much of effort. There was no question firestorms were the very thing to systematically commit genocide in Japan. But what was needed was a tool to create those firestorms efficiently, and to make them weather-proof.
It would only take science a few more months after the Tokyo firebombing to provide that tool. A single atomic bomb meant one plane could do the work of 300. And the bomb would create a fire so powerful and large and hot that weather would have no effect; it was foolproof. There could be no better weapon for destroying whole cities and all of the people in them, and it has only been used by one nation. Twice, because the 85,000 killed in Hiroshima were not enough.
These were tactics of vengeance matched with weapons designed to carry them out as horribly as possible. They worked well: the firebombing campaign over Japan, including the atomic bombings, purposely killed more than one million civilians in just five months in 1945.
It was only after WWII ended, when accurate descriptions from Hiroshima began finding their way back to America, that the idea of firebombing as a way to shorten the war, to spare lives in the long game, came into full flower. The myth, that the atomic bomb was in fact a reluctant instrument of mercy, not terror, was first published in Harper’s Magazine in February 1947 under the name of Secretary of War Henry Stimson. The actual writing was done by McGeorge Bundy, who later as National Security Adviser helped promote the American war in Vietnam that took several million civilian lives.
The majority of Americans, recovering their consciences post-war, were thus nudged into seeing what was actually a continuation of long-standing policy of civilian genocide in Japan as an unfortunate but necessary step toward Japan’s surrender, and thus saved innumerable lives that would have been lost had the war dragged on. This thinking lives on today on politically correct ground under the banner of great powers having to reluctantly put aside what is moral in peace for what is expedient in war. A “fact of life,” according to the U.S. Secretary of Defense.
So look deeper into history if you want to understand the morality-free rise in civilian deaths across America’s battlefields in the Middle East. We don’t like to think of ourselves as the kind of people who willfully kill innocents, but we were pleased by it only a skip back in history; your grandfather flew missions over Japan to burn children to death. Accidents of course happen in war, but there is a dark history of policy that demands skepticism each time such claims are made.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
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