Marc Schulman performs an extremely important service in his post describing Our Rules of Engagement in Iraq. He reviews some of the ROE which have hampered our military in Iraq and raises important questions:
The rules of engagement we've followed in Iraq raise an issue than couldn't be more fundamental. If our twenty-first century conflicts are going to pit us (or, I might add, Israel) against extremist groups whose tactics know no bounds and we allow our conduct to be constrained by the dictates of international law, as defined by such multilateral institutions as the UN, we are condemning ourselves to fighting protracted conflicts that erode American willpower, as has happened with Iraq. If we give precedence to conforming to international norms over winning, it won't escape the notice of militants, who will use every opportunity to weaken us.
The Palestinians have already discovered that they can use Israel's insistence on behaving morally as a weapon against Israel:
Palestinians form human shield to protect militant's house
The Israeli military has called off a planned strike on the home of a Palestinian militant after hundreds of people gathered at the house to act as a human shield.
The Israeli military had telephoned the house of a commander of the Popular Resistance Committees in northern Gaza to warn him of an impending attack.
The Israeli military often strikes at houses it says are used to store weapons, and on this occasion - as they often do - they phoned a warning to allow the occupants to escape and thereby limit civilian casualties.
But the owner of the house refused to leave.
Instead, he called for neighbours and relatives to rally round and protect his home.
They thronged the surrounding streets and gathered on the roof of the building.
The human shield tactic worked, making it impossible for the Israelis to strike without causing a large number of casualties.
Elder of Ziyon points out the conscious hypocrisy of the Palestinians, aided and abetted by the World's press and most Western governments, who should know better but find it preferable to continue the age old scapegoating of the Jews:
The Palestinian Arabs themselves know better than anyone they are not in the same moral universe as Israel. But instead of trying to improve themselves, they will use Israel's well-known morality as a weapon to protect the most evil and depraved of their own people. They will willingly bet their own lives on Israeli morality in order to protect the immoral.
As long as the world doesn't demand the same moral standards from Arabs as they do from Jews, the Arabs have no incentive to behave morally at all.
One can make an argument that our ROE in Iraq has laid the groundwork for an eventual victory for the effort to ensure democracy in that benighted country. One could alternatively argue that our ROE have prolonged the conflict and ultimately raised the death toll. ROE based on a more typical military approach to war, killing large numbers of Iraqis, essentially destroying their will to resist by killing some significant percentage of military aged men, would most likely have reached a more favorable outcome with lower American casualty levels, but would have risked all sorts of moral and political repercussions. It may well be that in the end we will abandon the fight in Iraq because our ROE have kept us from winning the war. It also raises the question anew whether or not a Democracy, in the current media age, can ever win a limited war. In other words, we can clearly tolerate dropping bombs from a distance, where there are few American casualties and the victims of the bombs are relatively indiscriminate, but it appears unlikely that we can ever tolerate the kind of limited war that we are engaged in in Iraq. This means our military options are either to fold or go "all in", which strikes me as deeply immoral.
Israel has much less of a margin of error. If we leave Iraq, we can look forward to an emboldened enemy and eventually more terror around the world, eventually including here at home. If Israel loses the battle, they face a much more immediate existential danger. If Israel remains constrained by their ROE to conduct a "civilized" war with an uncivilized opponent, they will lose. You cannot beat an opponent who gets "free shots" at you without risking a response.
Dinocrat suggests that Iran has created conditions on the ground that fit their strategy for destroying Israel, and this is even before they have a bomb:
It is true that Israel has a good economy and a GDP per capita ($25,000 or so) that is probably 10-20x or more greater than than the backward sharia societies that surround it. It is also true that Israel’s military continues to be far stronger and better equipped than those surrounding it. But these are not enough to ensure the long-term survival of a tiny island in a sea of enemies all of whom want it destroyed. Diplomacy and psychology are crucial, and Israel is on the losing end at the moment in these categories.
It would appear that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s strategy is working reasonably well. Iran’s military backing of Hezbollah, its alliance with Syria, and its rallying Islamists within Jordan and Egypt are setting the stage for a far greater set of attacks the next time around. And Ahmadinejad’s repeated theme — denying the Holocaust and promising a new Holocaust, while telling Europe to take Israelis back where they came from — appears to be somewhat effective in framing the issue, even within Europe itself. More than ever, the United Nations is functioning as an Islamist diplomatic tool, and the recent EU capitulation in the 156-7 landslide appears to be further evidence of the diplomatic scales tipping against Israel.
Iran needs to destroy Israel for several reasons, not just theological, but political and strategic, as well. By destroying Israel, they will cement their place at the vanguard of militant Islam; in effect, Iran will emerge as the pre-eminent nation in the Muslim world. It would not end there, of course. Destroying Israel would only be the end of the beginning of the age of Iranian based Islamic terror.
Israel, by behaving morally, is guaranteeing more Israeli deaths and genuinely risking the destruction of the Jewish state. This is the height of immorality and the Israeli leadership seem to be unaware that their aspirations to civilized behavior are not only dangerously corrupt, but risk the worst imaginable outcomes.
The dilemma shared by Israel and America is just this: If by fighting morally, we cannot win a limited war, we create the conditions which will ensure the fighting of an unlimited war.
Recent Comments