Can the standards of just war theory be applied so stringently that they become irrelevant to modern warfare? This is what concerns Ross about Peter Hitchens’ position on Gaza. As Hitchens’ position is more or less my position as well, I have a few thoughts about this. First, here is Ross:

Who gets to define what sort of harm is “lasting, grave, and certain” enough to justify going to war? Who decides when all means of preventing conflict “have been shown to be impractical or ineffective”? Doesn’t almost everybody enter a war convinced they have “serious prospects of success”? Isn’t every party to a war convinced that their actions won’t “produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated”? I’m being a bit glib, obviously, since serious thinkers have drilled down on all of these questions - but the fact remains that on a case by case basis, a shared commitment to just war theory doesn’t guarantee anything like a consensus on the justice of a given war or operation.

Well, that’s putting it mildly. George Weigel could claim, presumably with a straight face, that preventive war against Iraq is perfectly in line with the standards of a just war, and then-Cardinal Ratzinger could say that the “concept of a ‘preventive war’ does not appear in the Catechism of the Catholic Church.” Obviously, I think the current Pope has a better understanding of the matter than the administration’s court theologian, which ought to bolster the claims of those who interpret just war requirements more narrowly, but this rather dramatically illustrates Ross’ last point.

There are, broadly speaking, two camps who appeal to the just war tradition: those looking for loopholes that permit the use of force as often as possible, and those looking for barriers to prevent the use of force as often as practicable. The loophole crowd seems to start from the assumption that every use of force, particularly when employed by governments with whom they sympathize, is licit and just and that just war tradition exists to provide the language and borrowed authority for the arguments to support this view. The barrier crowd starts from the assumption that there has to be an extraordinarily high standard met before force can be used. Naturally, as someone in the latter crowd, I think that the purpose of the standards set forth in just war theory is to make it as difficult as possible to meet them, because war, while sometimes necessary, is a great evil. It should not be easy to go to war even in self-defense, much less should it be easy to escalate or start wars. For the loophole crowd, the reason for invoking just war theory seems to be mainly to gain the political benefits of being able to claim to being on the right side, and preferably without having to meet most of the obligations that just war theory requires (or to lower the standards for meeting those obligations such that virtually every operation will meet them no matter what happens).

Of course, it is possible that applying high standards will simply cause those who wish to wage war for whatever reason to ignore the restraints of the tradition entirely, but then I thought that one of the purposes of establishing moral standards was not to accommodate the unjust in their desires. After the last six years, I would have thought that the tendency to water down these standards and thus make escalating and starting wars more morally and politically acceptable was the far greater problem that we face. We are not in danger, it seems to me, of “giving ammunition to the side of the debate that wants to do away with moral restraint in the struggle against terrorism entirely,” as these are the people who are perfectly happy to warp and distort the just war tradition (and the Constitution, international law and the basic meaning of words, among other things) to accommodate the virtual abandonment of that restraint. One could make a similar argument that opponents of the torture regime, by taking an absolute stance against torture as wrong in all cases, are giving ammunition to those who have defended and justified it as necessary, but I think Ross and I would agree that there is an obligation to oppose injustices that are carried out by the state, whether in isolated incidents or as a matter of systematic policy, that needs to be fulfilled whether or not apologists for those injustices can demagogue that opposition to their temporary advantage.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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The top candidates to become Israel’s next prime minister vowed on Sunday to topple Hamas in the Gaza Strip and officials authorized strikes on a wider range of Islamist targets after a six-month-old truce ended in violence.

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Underscoring the military challenge facing Israel in the densely-populated Gaza Strip, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said even an incursion involving two-to-three divisions, or more than 20,000 troops, may not be enough to stop rocket fire.

Government ministers promising to topple Hamas “do not know what they are talking about,” Barak said. ~Reuters

This was an older article from mid-December, but it seemed worth commenting on now. Just about every observer, whether supportive of the strikes or not, seems to accept that toppling Hamas is either impossible or undesirable or both. It appears that it will be the stated policy of the Israeli government to pursue that goal regardless of which party controls the coalition government after February’s elections, which means that either Livni or Netanyahu will come to power with a pledge to do something that cannot be done or should not be done. Barak’s remarks suggest that, if it is possible, it would be extremely difficult and costly to do, and it seems clear that there would be no other force capable of replacing Hamas once it has been overthrown. A Mediterranean Somalia would be a likely result, which would almost certainly worsen Israeli security and make it extremely difficult to establish order in Gaza. So both party leaders are promising a massive military campaign to destroy Hamas and to return to the occupation of Gaza under even more chaotic conditions than there were three years ago, and the Defense Minister was essentially saying that both of them are clueless.

I take the point that the siege of Gaza is driven by an angry Israeli public that does not want to supply a territory from which they are being attacked. That’s understandable, but it is short-sighted. This anger seems to be blinding the public to the realities Barak is describing. If there were any reason to think that the strikes on Hamas were to be paired with a later lifting of the siege, I might be able to see some long-term rationale for them, but at present the only likelihood of any military success in Gaza relies on perpetuating and intensifying the siege for a long time to come, which is sure to be a long-term political loser for Israel.

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At the risk of becoming unduly preoccupied with the conflict in Gaza upon returning to blogging, I thought I might add a few remarks to the conversation that Freddie started with this post. Conor referred to the post in passing while responding to an earlier Joe Carter post, which prompted Carter’s reply, and the original post led Max to criticize Freddie’s moral certitude. John Schwenkler (from atop his new Culture11 perch) answered some of Carter’s remarks with a defense of naivete, but as I will lay out in a moment I don’t think naivete enters into it at all. Max and Carter’s responses are particularly striking, since they take the same argument to be an example of moral certitude and relativism respectively. Specifically, Carter objects to Freddie when the latter says this:

Firing rockets indiscriminately into Israel is a putrid crime. Shelling Palestinian civilians is no less. What’s the difference, for our purposes?

In fact, what Carter objects to here is not really moral relativism (which would not permit such full-throated condemnations of these acts as crimes), but, as he says elsewhere in the post, moral equivalence. However, it is not clear to me that Freddie is claiming moral equivalence between the two belligerents here. He does not say that the intentions of the actors on both sides are the same and morally equal. Freddie is condemning the practice of indiscriminate warfare in all cases, and he is asking, reasonably enough, what the difference is between different examples of such warfare. As it happens, I think there is a difference, but not nearly as great a difference as Carter holds.

If Max finds Freddie’s remarks all together too theoretical and frustrating, I find the constant recourse by defenders of Israeli (or, for that matter, American) military actions to the good intentions of one side to be even more so. When you endorse indiscriminate warfare, as Freddie correctly says, you are effectively endorsing the consequences of that warfare. Indiscriminate warfare as such is wrong. To admit that both sides engage in indiscriminate warfare, but then protest that one side doesn’t really mean to injure or kill civilians is not persuasive. Regardless of whether one side “means” or “intends” to do this or not, it is doing it. This truth does not make the IDF morally equivalent to Hamas, and I don’t know of anyone in this conversation who makes such a claim, but it does mean that the Palestinian civilians killed by Israeli strikes are of equal worth in our moral reasoning to the Israeli civilians killed by Hamas rockets. This is what I was talking about two years ago when I referred to a “necessary moral equivalence” concerning the war in Lebanon.

The war in Lebanon again seems useful as a comparative example. Two years ago, we heard many of the same arguments, albeit with more references to human shields last time than this time. Despite the fact that the far greater proportion of fatalities in Lebanon was made up of civilians, the appeal to good intentions was among the most frequently made. In other words, even when the indiscriminate nature of the campaign was unmistakable and undeniable, indiscriminate warfare was somehow justified by intending to do the right thing. Certainly, in judging the severity of crimes intention is a relevant and important factor. Deliberately killing the innocent and non-combatants is significantly different from doing so unintentionally. There is a moral difference between indiscriminate firing that kills civilians by accident and indiscriminate firing that is undertaken with the specific goal in mind of killing civilians, but both are still crimes. Freddie here is not showing moral naivete, but has instead pushed through the sentimentality that tempts us to make excuses for the crimes of one side in a conflict. In doing so, he has perhaps not stressed enough the distinctions between the different kinds of crimes, but I suspect this is mainly because he wants to make a strong claim that neither side is exempt from moral standards.

As I said many times two years ago, it is the friends of Israel who have the most reason to hold the Israeli government to a high standard, just as it is important for friends and citizens of the United States to hold our government to a high standard, and this means holding those governments accountable when they commit excesses and crimes. Those most inclined to defend a government’s actions will focus on the good intentions of members of the government at the expense of the practical effects of its policies, which allows the government to persist in folly and remain blind to the problems it is creating for itself in the future. It is ultimately a disservice to the people whom they want to support.

Update: Freddie has another post remarking on the argument from good intentions and the utterly lopsided coverage and commentary on the conflict.

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