On Moral Compasses
Charles Krauthammer has an outstanding piece up in the Washington Post. In it he poses the simple question: "What other country, when attacked in an unprovoked aggression across a recognized international frontier, is then put on a countdown clock by the world, given a limited time window in which to fight back, regardless of whether it has restored its own security?"
He is, of course, correct. There is an astonishing double standard in play here. There is a sickening moral equivalency being used to equate things that are not at all the same thing.
To hear the world pass judgment on the Israel-Hezbollah war as it unfolds is to live in an Orwellian moral universe. With a few significant exceptions (the leadership of the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada and a very few others), the world — governments, the media, U.N. bureaucrats — has completely lost its moral bearings.
The word that obviates all thinking and magically inverts victim into aggressor is "disproportionate," as in the universally decried "disproportionate Israeli response."
When the United States was attacked at Pearl Harbor, it did not respond with a parallel "proportionate" attack on a Japanese naval base. It launched a four-year campaign that killed millions of Japanese, reduced Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki to cinders, and turned the Japanese home islands into rubble and ruin.
Disproportionate? No. When one is wantonly attacked by an aggressor, one has every right — legal and moral — to carry the fight until the aggressor is disarmed and so disabled that it cannot threaten one's security again. That's what it took with Japan.
Britain was never invaded by Germany in World War II. Did it respond to the Blitz and V-1 and V-2 rockets with "proportionate" aerial bombardment of Germany? Of course not. Churchill orchestrated the greatest air campaign and land invasion in history, which flattened and utterly destroyed Germany, killing untold innocent German women and children in the process.
The perversity of today's international outcry lies in the fact that there is indeed a disproportion in this war, a radical moral asymmetry between Hezbollah and Israel: Hezbollah is deliberately trying to create civilian casualties on both sides while Israel is deliberately trying to minimize civilian casualties, also on both sides.
Anyone who has read this blog since the war in Lebanon started knows that this has been my position all along. There is no equivalence here. If the world and the left would start denouncing what Hezbollah has been doing for years instead of blindly regurgitating Hezbollah talking points as straight fact, we might, just might, be able to start making some effective changes in the Middle East. Instead, we get Warren Christopher urging the same old failed policies and endless screeching about what Israel is doing. No condemnations of Hezbollah. There has been exactly one UN official (Egeland) who I have heard denounce Hezbollah for using civilians as shields. And that was one brief quote that has not been repeated to my knowledge.
Israel's response to Hezbollah has been to use the most precise weaponry and targeting it can. It has no interest, no desire to kill Lebanese civilians. Does anyone imagine that it could not have leveled south Lebanon, to say nothing of Beirut? Instead, in the bitter fight against Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, it has repeatedly dropped leaflets, issued warnings, sent messages by radio and even phone text to Lebanese villagers to evacuate so that they would not be harmed.
Risking the lives of their own soldiers and pilots in an attempt to warn civilians. Not hiding rockets in homes, not putting fighters as close as possible to UN observer positions. Not roadblocking civilians trying to escape the fighting. Not launching unguided rockets at civilian targets intentionally.
There is no equivalence here.
UPDATE: Bruce Kesler has thoughts on this subject as well.
By AlwaysWatching, July 28, 2006 @ 2:36 pm
Egeland from the UN denounced the HA? He must have been thinking out loud. I bet he is telling himself, not to let that happen again. Give him another week, and he will be able to tell everyone Bush was using some kind of mind control weapon on him, and it was Bush who really said it.
By Gaius, July 28, 2006 @ 2:46 pm
http://bluecrabboulevard.com/2006/07/24/this-is-huge/
Sorry, should have linked that. I’ll update the post