Ultimately,the laws of war are an Israeli strategic asset.
That’s my take-away from a beautiful and heartbreaking description of war’s moral complexity published yesterday in the Wall Street Journal. Well worth the read:
Five years ago, a particularly gruesome image made its way to our television screens from the war in Iraq. Four U.S. civilian contractors working in Fallujah were ambushed and killed by al Qaeda. Their bodies were burned, then dragged through the streets. Two of the charred bodies were hung from the Euphrates Bridge and left dangling.
This barbaric act left an impression that our military did not forget: In a special operation earlier this year, Navy SEALs captured the mastermind of that attack, Ahmed Hashim Abed. But after he was taken into custody in September, Abed claimed he was punched by his captors. He showed a fat lip to prove it. Three of the SEALS are now awaiting a courts-martial on charges ranging from assault to dereliction of duty and making false statements.
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Rules of war are important. They are something to strive for as they separate us from our distant ancestors. But when only one side follows these rules, they no longer elevate us. They create a very unlevel field and more than a little frustration. It is equally bizarre for any of us to judge someone’s behavior in war by the rules we follow in our very peaceful universe. We sit in homes that are air-conditioned in the summer and warmed in the winter. We have more than enough food in our bellies and we get enough sleep. The stress in our lives won’t ever match the stress of battle. Can we honestly begin to decide if a soldier acted in compliance with rules that work perfectly well on Main Street but not, say, in Malmedy or Fallujah?
The question is important and well-portrayed, but I don’t think it’s entirely relevant to Israel’s situation. For one thing, the IDF has succeeded in repeatedly defeating its nonconventional enemies without great civilian casualties on either side. (30,000 of some of the best-trained infantrymen on Earth were fighting in densely-populated Gaza for a whole month, and even Hamas says that fully a third of the Palestinian dead were its fighters, who were operating at the time from within populated neighborhoods. If civilians were the target, as Goldstone and Hamas claim, then the IDF is rather frighteningly incompetent.)
But there’s another reason to obey the laws of war, besides the simple demonstration that you can still win while obeying them: for Israel’s adversaries, civilian dead are a weapon of great strategic significance. In fact, Hamas has no other strategic lever over Israel than forcing it into killing Palestinian civilians by targeting Israel’s own civilians. Neither act is tolerable for Israel politically and internationally, so creating this catch-22 – utterly ignored by Goldstone, incidentally – is the essence of Hamas’ strategy.
You can only de-incentivize Hamas’ particularly vicious brand of warfare by exacting a price for aggression without “giving” them Israeli or Palestinian civilian deaths.
With this thinking, a scrupulous adherence to the laws of war is not just morally important, but strategically advantageous.
Maybe that’s why the IDF, for all the criticism it faces abroad, has actually done better in avoiding civilian deaths than similar armies fighting in places like Helmand or Fallujah.
