"You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means."
[Updates at end]
Something has been troubling me about all the complaints of the "disproportionate" response by the Israelis to the cross-border attacks and the seizure of "only" 3 Israeli soldiers. Many of the usual suspects (the UN, Chirac, Putin, CNN, BBC, New York Times) have been making the charge or offering the warning, often citing the damage done to the Lebanese infrastructure, the danger to the nascent Lebanese democracy, and especially the high numbers of civilian casualties.
Callimachus made an interesting point in which he took issue with a comment I made regarding the "disproportionate" response meme:
The idea of proportionate Israeli action in Lebanon, which I advocate, is getting a lot of slagging from some people who are technically on the same team I am.
What troubles me about this is that, in fact, all indications are that Israel has been behaving in a proportionate manner, yet this has not stopped the accusations of behaving in a "disproportionate" manner. It seems clear that the first order of business is to understand and define our terms. Apparently disproportionate means different things to different people.
As I understand the current situation, Israel wants to get its soldiers back and remove the threat of future terrorist attacks (either by suicide bombers, random unguided missiles, guided missiles, cross border incursions). Once they have achieved these objectives,they would be happy to agree to a cease fire. On order to maximize their chances of attaining their objectives, the Israelis are conducting a campaign using relatively carefully targeted munitions to destroy Hezbollah infrastructure, kill Hezbollah members, degrade their capacity to attack Israeli civilians, and minimize their opportunities to take the soldiers out of the country. In such a campaign, especially when Hezbollah uses civilians as human shields, and stores weapons in and under civilian houses, some civilian deaths are unavoidable. After a week of war, only ~300 Lebanese civilians have been killed (and who knows how many are actually Hezbollah fighters who have taken off their uniforms; oh, wait, they don't wear uniforms.) This suggests incredible restraint and care by Israel.
For contrast consider that the Syrians killed 10-25,000 in Hama over the course of only a few hours. King Hussein reportedly killed between 3000-5000 Palestinians and was accused of indiscriminate attacks on Palestinians during the 10 days of Black September. Saddam Hussein managed to kill more than 5000 in the course of a two to three day chemical weapons assault on the Kurdish town of Halabja.
Since we know the Israeli armed forces are much more capable than the Arab armies, this suggests that if Israel is attempting to commit genocide or attacking in an indiscriminate or disproportionate way, they are doing so very ineptly; the more likely possibility is that they have, in fact, been behaving with great restraint and proportionality.
I suspect Callimachus would agree with me on this, though I wouldn't presume to speak for him. If he and I disagree on the level of proportionality of the Israeli response it is probably on the margins.
The fact is that those who are busy accusing the Israelis of a "disproportionate" response really mean that ANY offensive attacks by Israel are unacceptable. The ideal Israeli response would be to "hunker down" as per Richard Cohen. After all, its only a few Jews who were seized; and after all, it was only a couple of hundred Qassam rockets and Katyushas that Hamas and Hezbollah have tossed into Israel in the last year. Most of the time, no one in Israel got killed.
The world has always shown a high tolerance for Jewish deaths.
The next time someone tells you the Israeli response is "disproportionate" you might be best to refer them to Inigo Montoya.
Update:
Victor Davis Hansen has an interesting article at Real Clear Politics, Patience is Wearing Thin, in which he suggests the Islamists and their apologists may have misread the zeitgeist:
Finally, the world is accepting that the Middle East problem was never about so-called occupied land -- but only about the existence of Israel itself. Hezbollah and Hamas, and those in their midst who tolerate them (or vote for them), didn't so much want Israel out of Lebanon and Gaza as pushed into the Mediterranean altogether. And since there will be no second Holocaust, the Israelis may well soon transform a perennial terrorist war that they can't easily win into a conventional aerial one against a terrorist-sponsoring Syria that they can.
....
Yet for all their threats, what the Islamists -- from Hezbollah in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley to the Iranian government in Tehran to the jihadists in Iraq's Sunni Triangle -- don't understand is that they are slowly pushing tired Westerners into a corner. If diplomacy, or aid, or support for democracy, or multiculturalism, or withdrawal from contested lands, does not satisfy radical Islamists, what would?
Perhaps nothing.
What then would be the new Western approach to terrorism? Hard and quick retaliation -- but without our past concern for nation-building, or offering a democratic alternative to theocracy and autocracy, or even worrying about whether other Muslims are unfairly lumped in with Islamists who operate freely in their midst.
Any new policy of retaliation -- in light both of Sept. 11 and the messy efforts to birth democracies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon and the West Bank -- would be something of an exasperated return to the old cruise-missile payback. Yet in the new world of Iranian nukes and Hezbollah missiles, the West would hit back with something far greater than a cruise missile.
If they are not careful, a Syria or Iran really will earn a conventional war -- not more futile diplomacy or limited responses to terrorism. And history shows that massive attacks from the air are something that the West does well.
This goes to what I meant when I explained the Israeli's current response, which is war, has been relatively restrained and proportionate. I agree with VDH that the West in general, and specifically the American people, are getting close to the end of their tether with the Islamists. At some point, a sufficient atrocity will not evoke isolationism, as it might have in the past (the Beirut bombing that killed more than 200 American soldiers for instance or Mogadishu) but will evoke massive retaliation from the air. Dinocrat agrees:
We believe that anti-war cadres in America have deluded themselves into a seriously wrong analysis of the mindset of much of the American people, which is just fine with us — the problem comes because these anti-war types mug for the cameras and announce their views to the enemy via the MSM, encouraging America’s foes to try even greater depredations to wear out the stamina of the man in the street. The anti-war cadres and the MSM hence give temporary aid and comfort to the enemy, goading him to miscalculate and persist in his barbarity. If the result of such aid and comfort is the American version of Israel’s — 100x more powerful than Israel’s strikes against Hezbollah — those anti-war fools may turn out to be responsible for far more killing and suffering — when hell is finally unleashed — than would have taken place if America had presented a unified face to the world in the first place.
What the purveyors of the "disproportionate" response meme miss is that the current Israeli campaign is a rational one. Again, it is possible to disagree on the margins, whether hitting one target or another is reasonable, but all in all it is militarily rational. The grave danger is that an atrocity occurs which is so great that it causes a people to become so frightened and enraged that they lose rationality. At that point, there are no further thoughts about rational or proportionate responses, there is massive death and destruction on one's enemies. Thus far, the Arabs have had the irrationality without the capability and the Israelis (and us) have had the capability without the irrationality. If that ever changes the results will be unimaginable.
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