Those Crazy “Middle Eastern” Doctrines
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Not that it should surprise anyone, but Victor Davis Hanson does not understand the doctrine of proportionality. Jim Antle comes much nearer the mark when he says, “The standard rightly applied compares the harm inflicted with the harm the military action seeks to avoid.” The harm that the IDF seeks to avoid in this case is obviously far less than the harm already inflicted on civilian population of Gaza, given the puny and ineffective nature of the rocket attacks prior to the operation, to say nothing of the harm that will be inflicted in the future. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, “the use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated.” (2309)
Hanson then trots out past U.S. crimes to cover for the indiscriminate warfare of the IDF:
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.
They are not exactly equivalent, but both were criminal. Arguably, the bombing of Belgrade was more so, because the war in question had absolutely no justification (the “genocide” being thwarted by the bombing had never occurred and was in all likelihood not going to occur). What is strange about this is that Hanson seems to believe quite genuinely that this example strengthens his case, as if invoking the killing of civilians in a war of aggression justifies the killing of civilians during the current operation. This is a variant on the argument from war crimes that many people used during the war in 2006, which amounted to waxing indignant that the standards regarding indiscriminate and disproportionate warfare applied today would have made the bombing campaigns of WWII criminal. Indeed, they would, because they were.
Filed under: foreign policy, politics
3 Responses to “Those Crazy “Middle Eastern” Doctrines”
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Hi Daniel,
Happy New Year! I’m very glad to see you back to doing what keeps my productivity at work depressingly low – posting conservative thought that challenges every liberal bone in my body!
As regards Victor Davis Hanson – everything I have read of his, principally at NRO [and admittedly not all that much] seems to revolve around a central tenet of finding ways to justify and rationalize military intervention, both committed and proposed, as a prime mover in American foreign policy. Several months ago I picked up a couple of his books – _Carnage and Culture_ and _Ripples of Battle_ – which I have yet to get around to reading.
Have you, or any of your readers who may wish to comment, read either or both of these works? I have heard that his analysis is trenchant and atypical, his writing is very crisp and clear, and that, by not reading them, I am doing myself a disservice in my never-ending quest to become more clueful. However, I have found his NRO output to be offputting enough that I am reluctant to put in the time and effort to take these two works on. There are _so_ many wonderful and illuminating works, fiction and non-fiction, out there to devour that I would hate to waste time on these [admittedly brief] tomes, sans some manner of boosting from other than Amazon reviewers and his website employers.
Cheers.
Thanks for the comment. I have not read any of his books, and it is possible that I am missing out. From what I understand, his work as a classicist is fairly well regarded in the field, even if he and his politics are not. I don’t know about the volumes you mentioned, so I can’t say one way or the other. You are correct that most of his columns do seem to be focused on defending current interventions or justifying new ones.
Hanson asserts the most of the world’s reactions to “this week’s war†are “reflections of our postmodern age, and completely at odds with the past protocols of war.†Personally, I think the postmodern condition should inform the way we think about war and apply the principles of just war theory, particularly the condition of proportionality. Proportionality includes not only the methods used but also the consequences of those methods. While I acknowledge the right to self-defense and the use of force in that defense, I question whether it is really possible to ensure that the force used doesn’t produce evils graver than the evil to be eliminated. The structure of the world today, marked by its interconnectedness and interdependency (e.g. global markets), opens the whole world to the consequences of a local act of violence, and therefore renders the knowledge that one is using proportional violence difficult if not impossible to acquire. In the postmodern condition, we have to decide whether or not to wage war without knowledge or perhaps even reasonable speculation about the war’s full consequences. Given this condition, I tend toward the position that war is no longer a suitable means of self-defense.