Ethics News
War, Weapons of Mass Destruction
>> = Important Articles; ** = Major Articles
Supplemental Articles in a separate file (click here to read)
**Guts and Principles: Just War and Assassination (Christian Post, 100415)
**Pacifists versus peace (townhall.com, 060721)
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A “ceasefire” would occur should Hezbollah give back kidnapped Israelis and stop launching missiles; it would never follow a unilateral cessation of Israeli bombing. In fact, we will hear international calls for one only when Hezbollah’s rockets are about exhausted.
“Civilians” in Lebanon have munitions in their basements and deliberately wish to draw fire; in Israel they are in bunkers to avoid it. Israel uses precision weapons to avoid hitting them; Hezbollah sends random missiles into Israel to ensure they are struck.
“Collateral damage” refers mostly to casualties among Hezbollah’s human shields; it can never be used to describe civilian deaths inside Israel, because everything there is by intent a target.
“Cycle of Violence” is used to denigrate those who are attacked, but are not supposed to win.
“Deliberate” reflects the accuracy of Israeli bombs hitting their targets; it never refers to Hezbollah rockets that are meant to destroy anything they can.
“Deplore” is usually evoked against Israel by those who themselves have slaughtered noncombatants or allowed them to perish — such as the Russians in Grozny, the Syrians in Hama, or the U.N. in Rwanda and Dafur.
“Disproportionate” means that the Hezbollah aggressors whose primitive rockets can’t kill very many Israeli civilians are losing, while the Israelis’ sophisticated response is deadly against the combatants themselves. See “excessive.”
Anytime you hear the adjective “excessive,” Hezbollah is losing. Anytime you don’t, it isn’t.
“Eyewitnesses” usually aren’t, and their testimony is cited only against Israel.
“Grave concern” is used by Europeans and Arabs who privately concede there is no future for Lebanon unless Hezbollah is destroyed — and it should preferably be done by the “Zionists” who can then be easily blamed for doing it.
“Innocent” often refers to Lebanese who aid the stockpiling of rockets or live next to those who do. It rarely refers to Israelis under attack.
The “militants” of Hezbollah don’t wear uniforms, and their prime targets are not those Israelis who do.
“Multinational,” as in “multinational force,” usually means “third-world mercenaries who sympathize with Hezbollah.” See “peacekeepers.”
“Peacekeepers” keep no peace, but always side with the less Western of the belligerents.
“Quarter-ton” is used to describe what in other, non-Israeli militaries are known as “500-pound” bombs.
“Shocked” is used, first, by diplomats who really are not; and, second, only evoked against the response of Israel, never the attack of Hezbollah.
“United Nations Action” refers to an action that Russia or China would not veto. The organization’s operatives usually watch terrorists arm before their eyes. They are almost always guilty of what they accuse others of.
What explains this distortion of language? A lot.
First there is the need for Middle Eastern oil. Take that away, and the war would receive the same scant attention as bloodletting in central Africa.
Then there is the fear of Islamic terrorism. If the Middle East were Buddhist, the world would care about Lebanon as little as it does about occupied Tibet.
And don’t forget the old anti-Semitism. If Russia or France were shelled by neighbors, Putin and Chirac would be threatening nuclear retaliation.
Israel is the symbol of the hated West. Were it a client of China, no one would dare say a word.
Population and size count for a lot: When India threatened Pakistan with nukes for its support of terrorism a few years ago, no one uttered any serious rebuke.
Finally, there is the worry that Israel might upset things in Iraq. If we were not in Afghanistan and Iraq trying to win hearts and minds, we wouldn’t be pressuring Israel behind the scenes.
But most of all, the world deplores the Jewish state because it is strong, and can strike back rather than suffer. In fact, global onlookers would prefer either one of two scenarios for the long-suffering Jews to learn their lesson. The first is absolute symmetry and moral equivalence: when Israel is attacked, it kills only as many as it loses. For each rocket that lands, it drops only one bomb in retaliation — as if any aggressor in the history of warfare has ever ceased its attacks on such insane logic.
The other desideratum is the destruction of Israel itself. Iran promised to wipe Israel off the map, and then gave Hezbollah thousands of missiles to fulfill that pledge. In response, the world snored. If tomorrow more powerful rockets hit Tel Aviv armed with Syrian chemicals or biological agents, or Iranian nukes, the “international” community would urge “restraint” — and keep urging it until Israel disappeared altogether. And the day after its disappearance, the Europeans and Arabs would sigh relief, mumble a few pieties, and then smile, “Life goes on.”
And for them, it would very well.
— Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is the author, most recently, of A War Like No Other. How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.
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By Chuck Colson
The Obama administration has targeted Anwar al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric, for assassination. Al-Awlaki has been linked to both the “underpants bomber” and the shootings at Fort Hood.
There’s no doubt that Americans would be safer in a world without al-Awlaki, but that’s not the only question we should be asking ourselves.
Al-Awlaki was placed on the “kill or capture” list after the White House concluded that he had gone beyond inciting attacks to actually participating in them.
Since al-Awlaki is currently in Yemen, the “kill” option is the most likely. And the most likely way of killing him is using a Predator drone, the kind used in Pakistan and Afghanistan against Al Qaeda and Taliban targets.
As one official told the New York Times, “None of this should surprise anyone.”
Well, my gut reaction is to applaud this resolution-kill the bad guys. But my gut instincts, like everyone else’s, are fallen. That’s why we need to ask what principles are involved in this kind of assassination.
For starters, al-Awlaki is an American citizen. We’re talking about executing an American citizen on the basis of evidence that has never been presented in open court, or any court for that matter.
Killing him would be satisfying, and it may make us safer, but it also sets a troubling precedent about the due process every citizen is guaranteed. There’s nothing in the reasoning being employed here that limits extra-judicial executions to people outside the United States-the next time those suspected of participating in alleged terrorist activities might be in Michigan or Idaho.
Then there are the just war implications of targeting al-Awlaki. The legal justification for the assassination is the September 12, 2001, congressional authorization of force against al Qaeda. This makes going after him an act of war and, to Christians at least, something that must be judged by just war criteria.
While this case clearly meets the “just cause” requirement, there are other considerations. Historically, the just war tradition has looked askance on assassination. Among other things, it has viewed assassination as treacherous and even cowardly because it doesn’t give the target a chance to defend himself.
It has also been concerned about what today is called the “collateral damage.” Drone attacks in Afghanistan and Pakistan have not only killed the bad guys but also their families and neighbors, a violation of non-combatant immunity.
Then there’s the way that assassinations can devolve into a kind of “tit-for-tat” that undermines order. A world where warfare is increasingly irregular is a world without meaningful limits on the way we conduct war.
Apart from some voices on the left, coverage of this story seems to assume the legality and rightness of the policy. But I make no such assumption, nor should you.
I don’t really know how I come out on this. The “kill or capture” decision may pass muster or it might not. But I do know that the rule of law and the just war tradition are two of Christianity’s great contributions to Western civilization. And I know also that, in a fallen world, a ruthless leader might rely on this precedent to kill Americans for the wrong reasons.
This is a tough-yes, dubious-call. No matter what our gut tells us.
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By Thomas Sowell
One of the many failings of our educational system is that it sends out into the world people who cannot tell rhetoric from reality. They have learned no systematic way to analyze ideas, derive their implications and test those implications against hard facts.
“Peace” movements are among those who take advantage of this widespread inability to see beyond rhetoric to realities. Few people even seem interested in the actual track record of so-called “peace” movements — that is, whether such movements actually produce peace or war.
Lebanese men pass by the wreckage of vehicles in front of a building that holds the Lebanese Interior Ministry’s civil defense center of Tyre, after it was attacked by an Israeli warplane at the southern Lebanon city of Tyre, Sunday, July 16, 2006. Israeli airstrikes reduced entire apartment buildings to rubble and knocked out electricity in swaths of the Lebanese capital Sunday, and Israel dramatically escalated the ferocity of its campaign after Hezbollah rockets hit the northern city of Haifa. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
Take the Middle East. People are calling for a cease-fire in the interests of peace. But there have been more cease-fires in the Middle East than anywhere else. If cease-fires actually promoted peace, the Middle East would be the most peaceful region on the face of the earth instead of the most violent.
Was World War II ended by cease-fires or by annihilating much of Germany and Japan? Make no mistake about it, innocent civilians died in the process. Indeed, American prisoners of war died when we bombed Germany.
There is a reason why General Sherman said “war is hell” more than a century ago. But he helped end the Civil War with his devastating march through Georgia — not by cease fires or bowing to “world opinion” and there were no corrupt busybodies like the United Nations to demand replacing military force with diplomacy.
There was a time when it would have been suicidal to threaten, much less attack, a nation with much stronger military power because one of the dangers to the attacker would be the prospect of being annihilated.
“World opinion,” the U.N. and “peace movements” have eliminated that deterrent. An aggressor today knows that if his aggression fails, he will still be protected from the full retaliatory power and fury of those he attacked because there will be hand-wringers demanding a cease fire, negotiations and concessions.
That has been a formula for never-ending attacks on Israel in the Middle East. The disastrous track record of that approach extends to other times and places — but who looks at track records?
Remember the Falkland Islands war, when Argentina sent troops into the Falklands to capture this little British colony in the South Atlantic?
Argentina had been claiming to be the rightful owner of those islands for more than a century. Why didn’t it attack these little islands before? At no time did the British have enough troops there to defend them.
Before there were “peace” movements and the U.N., sending troops into those islands could easily have meant finding British troops or bombs in Buenos Aires. Now “world opinion” condemned the British just for sending armed forces into the South Atlantic to take back their islands.
Shamefully, our own government was one of those that opposed the British use of force. But fortunately British prime minister Margaret Thatcher ignored “world opinion” and took back the Falklands.
Lebanese men pass by the wreckage of vehicles in front of a building that holds the Lebanese Interior Ministry’s civil defense center of Tyre, after it was attacked by an Israeli warplane at the southern Lebanon city of Tyre, Sunday, July 16, 2006. Israeli airstrikes reduced entire apartment buildings to rubble and knocked out electricity in swaths of the Lebanese capital Sunday, and Israel dramatically escalated the ferocity of its campaign after Hezbollah rockets hit the northern city of Haifa. (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)
The most catastrophic result of “peace” movements was World War II. While Hitler was arming Germany to the teeth, “peace” movements in Britain were advocating that their own country disarm “as an example to others.”
British Labor Party Members of Parliament voted consistently against military spending and British college students publicly pledged never to fight for their country. If “peace” movements brought peace, there would never have been World War II.
Not only did that war lead to tens of millions of deaths, it came dangerously close to a crushing victory for the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese empire in Asia. And we now know that the United States was on Hitler’s timetable after that.
For the first two years of that war, the Western democracies lost virtually every battle, all over the world, because pre-war “peace” movements had left them with inadequate military equipment and much of it obsolete. The Nazis and the Japanese knew that. That is why they launched the war.
“Peace” movements don’t bring peace but war.
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Supplemental Articles in a separate file (click here to read)