Gaza Rules (VDH On The Post-Modern Politically Correct View Of Warfare Alert)

National Review ^ | 1/03/2009 | Victor Davis Hanson

[goldstategop]

The Israelis just struck back hard at Hamas in Gaza. In response, the United Nations, the European Union and the Arab world (at least publicly) expressed their anger at the killing of over 300 Palestinians, most of whom were terrorists and Hamas officials.

For several prior weeks, Hamas terrorists had been daily launching rockets into Israeli towns that border Gaza. The recent volleys of missiles had insidiously become more frequent — up to 80 a day — and the payloads larger. Iranian-backed Hezbollah terrorists were reportedly supplying their own training and expertise.

These terrorists point to the Lebanon war of 2006 as the proper template for provoking an Israeli counter-response that will bog down the Israeli Defense Forces in the streets of urban Gaza and ensure that Palestinian civilians are harmed on global television.

Watching both this week's war and the world's predictable reaction to it, we can recall the Gaza rules. Most are reflections of our postmodern age, and completely at odds with the past protocols of war.

First is the now-familiar Middle East doctrine of proportionality. Legitimate military action is strangely defined by the relative strength of the combatants. World opinion more vehemently condemns Israel's countermeasures, apparently because its rockets are far more accurate and deadly than previous Hamas barrages that are poorly targeted and thus not so lethal.

If America had accepted such rules in, say, World War II, then by late 1944 we, not the Axis, would have been the culpable party, since by then once-aggressive German, Italian, and Japanese forces were increasingly on the defensive and far less lethal than the Allies.

Second, intent in this war no longer matters. Every Hamas unguided rocket is launched in hopes of hitting an Israeli home and killing men, women, and children. Every guided Israeli air-launched missile is targeted at Hamas operatives, who deliberately work in the closest vicinity to women and children.

Killing Palestinian civilians is incidental to Israeli military operations and proves counterproductive to its objectives. Blowing up Israeli non-combatants is the aim of Hamas' barrages: the more children, aged, and women who die, the more it expects political concessions from Tel Aviv.

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.

Third, culpability is irrelevant. The “truce” between Israel and Hamas was broken once Hamas got its hands on new stockpiles of longer-range mobile rockets — weapons that are intended to go over Israel's border walls.

Yet, according to the Gaza rules, both sides always deserve equal blame. Indeed, this weird war mimics the politically correct, zero-tolerance policies of our public schools, where both the bully and his victim are suspended once physical violence occurs.

According to such morally equivalent reasoning, World War II was only a tragedy, not a result of German aggression. Once the dead mounted up, it mattered little what were the catalysts of the outbreak of fighting.

Fourth, with instantaneous streaming video from the impact sites in Gaza, context becomes meaningless. Our attention is glued to the violence of the last hour, not that of the last month that incited the war.

Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005 to great expectations that the Palestinians there would combine their new autonomy, some existing infrastructure left behind by the Israelis, Middle East oil money and American pressure for free and open elections to craft a peaceful, prosperous democracy.

The world hoped that Gaza might thrive first, and then later adjudicate its ongoing disputes with Israel through diplomacy. Instead, the withdrawal was seen not as a welcome Israeli concession, but as a sign of newfound Jewish weakness — and that the intifada tactics that had liberated Gaza could be amplified into a new war to end the Zionist entity itself.

Fifth and finally, victimization is crucial. Hamas daily sends barrages into Israel, as its hooded thugs thump their chests and brag of their radical Islamic militancy. But when the payback comes, suddenly warriors are transmogrified into weeping victims, posing teary-eyed for the news camera as they deplore “genocide” and “the Palestinian Holocaust.” At least the Japanese militarists did not cry out to the League of Nations for help once mean Marines landed on Iwo Jima.

By now, these Gaza asymmetrical rules are old hat. We know why they persist — worldwide fear of Islamic terrorism, easy anti-Westernism, the old anti-Semitism, and global strategic calculations about Middle East oil — but it still doesn't make them right.

[goldstategop]

Victor Davis Hanson presents a brilliant overview of the post-modern, politically correct rules of warfare subsumed under what he calls the "Gaza Rules." The most pernicious of them being both sides are guilty of starting a war. In practice, its usually the stronger party to a conflict that gets the blame. To post-modern minds in the West, neither the context nor the moral cupability of the sides to a war matter. Its akin as he puts it, to the "politically correct zero tolerance policies of our public schools where both the bully and his victim are suspended once physical violence occurs." The basic point of the asymmetrical Gaza Rules really is no one has to use their judgment because judgment is in and of itself a bad thing. So that is where we are today. Hanson doesn't say they're right but they are a fact of life.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

[Iscool]

Israeli bombs and missles are far, far too accurate...I agree they should tone down their hi-tech capability and use thousand pounders like we did in WWII...

And maybe some phosphorus and napalm like we did way back in Viet Nam...

It’s just not fair to the Palistupidans...

[chuckles]

I think it was the UN spokesman today that was bemoaning the unbalanced death toll in Gaza vs Israel. In other words we can't have a REAL war today unless you allow some of your citizens to be murdered and the military should never be so much better than the foe that a war will just be unwinable for decades until both sides just get tired of fighting.

If Israel loses 4 people and Gaza loses 50,000 and hollers "uncle", well, that just not a real war. If you shoot bottle rockets at a country with nukes, you probably made a mistake.

[Uncle Miltie]

"Killing Palestinian civilians is incidental to Israeli military operations and proves counterproductive to its objectives. Blowing up Israeli non-combatants is the aim of Hamas' barrages: the more children, aged, and women who die, the more it expects political concessions from Tel Aviv."

Year after year we just keep quoting each other.

Just wipe them out, and then we can stop talking.

[screaminsunshine]

Kine of like the Planet of the Apes military vs. The 82nd Airborne.

[dalereed]

Kill everything that moves in the west bank.

There is no such thing as a civilian in a war zone!

[johnny7]

[Slings and Arrows]

Kill everything that moves in the west bank.

Gaza != West Bank

[M-cubed]

reminds me of a lighter I once had...

Downtown Pleiku.........2 for $5..Inscribed

KILL “EM ALL

LET GOD SORT THEM OUT”

[2ndDivisionVet]

Related thread:

Why Arabs Believe In Force Fields (Interesting!)
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2157509/posts

[Elsie]

If you shoot bottle rockets at a country with nukes, you probably made a mistake.

Likewise...

[Chuckster]

reminds me of a lighter I once had... Downtown Pleiku.........2 for $5..Inscribed KILL “EM ALL LET GOD SORT THEM OUT”

Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet

[TXnMA]

"If America had accepted such rules in, say, World War II, then by late 1944 we, not the Axis, would have been the culpable party, since by then once-aggressive German, Italian, and Japanese forces were increasingly on the defensive and far less lethal than the Allies."

"Disproportionate force": aka Victory!"