Back of the Envelope

Cynthia Lo talks a bit about the issue of proportionality in war, specifically as applied to the current Israel-Hezbollah conflict, over at Iron Chef. She quotes a lot of people without really giving her own opinion, but I think I'll go ahead and give my opinion on the matter.

The idea of proportionality has been misrepresented a lot recently. In just war, proportionality is not about doing no more damage to your enemy than they do to you. That is not a reasonable way to conduct war, as by its very nature it precludes victory. No, proportionality is about doing no more damage than necessary in order to achieve your objectives. The question, then, is whether the objective of the Israeli military is just, and whether the damage they've done is proportional to their objective. Proportionality in this sense is very technology dependent. In World War 2, you basically had to destroy a city if you wanted to take out a military factory. Precision bombing is a vast improvement over that.

So, we're faced with three questions: What is the Israeli military's objective? Is it just? And is the damage they are doing proportionate to their objective? The objective is, and I think most people are agreed on this, to cripple Hezbollah's capability to wage war against them, even destroying the organization if possible. Is this a just objective? Well, Hezbollah is a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel. It is not possible for Israel and Hezbollah to coexist, because Hezbollah's entire reason for being is to eliminate Israel. Some folks say that Hezbollah is now a legitimate political party, which provides social services and builds schools and hospitals. This is true only in the sense that Hezbollah is a political party dedicated to the destruction of Israel. I can't speak for the hospitals, but the schools are propaganda mills teaching a new generation of martyrs to hate Jews. And political parties, as a rule, are not also armed militias which control some territory so thoroughly that the legitimate elected government doesn't dare send police or troops there. So I think that there is a strong argument that the destruction, or at least disarmament (as called for in Security Council Resolution 1559), of Hezbollah is a just cause. Ideally, the Lebanese army would do it. It's their country, and Hezbollah is a threat to their authority as much as Israel's existence, but Lebanon is either unable or unwilling to do it. The leader of Hezbollah, Nasrallah, claims that he controls Lebanon's government, and some of what they're saying seems to conform with that.

So the final question is whether Israel's use of force is proportionate with their objective. I believe it is, but that is an argument that has to be decided by people who better understand the military situation. As I understand it, Israel has taken action to cut off Hezbollah from Syria and Iran, and then has bombed the location of known Hezbollah hideouts. They've tried to clear the civilian population away from the area, which is probably a mistake. First, it warns Hezbollah so it can leave the area. Second, the civilians are unable to leave since Hezbollah is keeping them in place by force. Civilian casualties on either side works to Hezbollah's benefit, and they will attempt to maximize them and inflate the numbers. There have been reports of firefights between civilians attempting to leave the area and Hezbollah fighters.

Ideally, Israel would so weaken Hezbollah that the Lebanese government could send its troops in and sweep away the remnants. It would be difficult for Lebanon to publicly cooperate with Israel, though, which is why I'm hoping that there is more going on behind the scenes than there appears to be.

Many conservatives are chomping at the bit, feeling that Bush has been too soft when he should have been more aggressive in going after North Korea and Iran. Captain Ed disagrees:

Most of this comes from a short attention span. This effort will take decades, not months, and Bush knows it. One cannot hope to transform all tyrannies into democracies overnight. It takes time to build up the momentum, and it will ebb and flow as world events unfold. The crisis in North Korea has been years in coming, and Bush started off with a lousy hand, as the Jimmy Carter-imposed Agreed Framework allowed Pyongyang to do as it pleased for eight years. Unless we want to start another ground war in Asia, we cannot simply bomb the Kim regime into non-existence. The Kim regime is committing slow suicide as it is, and the Bush policy of multilateral engagement is the correct one to contain Kim and to contain the damage from the ultimate collapse that will inevitably come.

On Iran, Bush allowed the Europeans to take the lead for a number of good reasons. Primarily, the White House wanted to focus on consolidating the Iraqi victory, and the mere presence of Americans on Iraq's Western border made it clear that we had a big stake in the outcome. It also made sense to have the EU-3 handle the negotiations, since neither Iran or the US wanted diplomatic relations with each other. Europe, which had convinced itself of the folly of American unilateralism, wanted the chance to strike a deal with Iran, and since they had more at risk with a nuclear Teheran, it made sense to allow them to do so. After all, we do not run the world.

Now we know that the EU failed, and the EU knows that it failed. We still have the big military in place in the region, and the Iranians know that we will not stand idly by while Iran threatens our position. If they had not realized it by now, they certainly understand it in our refusal to rein in Israel in Lebanon. We cannot simply start attacking Iran simply because their leader makes nutty statements about the Holocaust and has abrogated a treaty on non-proliferation. We need to build up as much of a consensus as possible to take action -- just as we did with Iraq -- and then strike if necessary.

I believe in a strong defense and pre-emption when necessary. I don't see the necessity at the moment, and in fact I see Israel's action as putting off that day for a while longer. If Israel crushes Iran's proxy and chases the Islamists out of Lebanon, Iran will find itself isolated even further -- and then they will want to cut a deal that makes sense.

Captain Ed makes some good points, but I really do not know whether he is right or not. There is too much I don't know about Iran and North Korea, and unfortunately, I'm not sure anyone knows. I hope we're taking the right approach, but I don't feel qualified to judge.

Mark Steyn has a book review of Nicholas Wade's Before the Dawn. The book's premise is that anthropologists have whitewashed the violence in primitive societies, allowing the myth of civilization's evils and the primitive man as peaceful and in tune with nature to thrive in the popular mind, despite it's lack of a factual basis:

But the passage that really stopped me short was this:

"Both Keeley and LeBlanc believe that for a variety of reasons anthropologists and their fellow archaeologists have seriously underreported the prevalence of warfare among primitive societies. . . . 'I realized that archaeologists of the postwar period had artificially "pacified the past" and shared a pervasive bias against the possibility of prehistoric warfare,' says Keeley."

That's Lawrence Keeley, a professor at the University of Illinois. And the phrase that stuck was that bit about artificially pacifying the past. We've grown used to the biases of popular culture. If a British officer meets a native -- African, Indian, whatever -- in any movie, play or novel of the last 30 years, the Englishman will be a sneering supercilious sadist and the native will be a dignified man of peace in perfect harmony with his environment in whose tribal language there is not even a word for "war" or "killing" or "weapons of mass destruction."

Anyone who's studied ancient history should have little trouble seeing the lie. War, slavery, and oppression are not inventions of Western culture. They've been practiced by just about every culture man has come up with.

Lawrence Keeley calculates that 87 per cent of primitive societies were at war more than once per year, and some 65 per cent of them were fighting continuously. "Had the same casualty rate been suffered by the population of the twentieth century," writes Wade, "its war deaths would have totaled two billion people." Two billion! In other words, we're the aberration: after 50,000 years of continuous human slaughter, you, me, Bush, Cheney, Blair, Harper, Rummy, Condi, we're the nancy-boy peacenik crowd. "The common impression that primitive peoples, by comparison, were peaceful and their occasional fighting of no serious consequence is incorrect. Warfare between pre-state societies was incessant, merciless, and conducted with the general purpose, often achieved, of annihilating the opponent."

Why then, against all the evidence, do we venerate the primitive? ... We want to believe that the yard, the cul-de-sac, the morning commute, the mall are merely the bland veneer of our lives, and that underneath we are still that noble primitive living in harmony with the great spirits of the forest and the mountain. The reality is that "civilization" -- Greco-Roman-Judeo-Christian -- worked very hard to stamp out the primitive within us, and for good reason.

Genocide was considered the normal way of war in the ancient world. The rightness or wrongness of war was not considered, only whether you were strong enough to take what you want from the neighboring village, city, or nation. Aside from the high points of a few ancient civilizations (the Greeks, for example, often practiced limited warfare between professional armies for limited gain--and ultimately lost to the Romans, who did not practice limited war), it is only recently, in the last few hundred years, that we've come to believe wiping out the opposing nation is wrong, to believe that civilians are not legitimate targets in war, that it is not permitted to start a war simply to conquer another nation. Is it any wonder that large numbers of people have not been convinced yet? They'll take advantage of our distinction between combatant and civilain, but they won't follow it.

Mankind is fallen, given to sin and violence. Peace is the aberration, not war. It won't survive on its own.

By now, you've heard the news of the death of a 38-year-old woman due to a falling slab of concrete in one of the tunnels of Boston's Big Dig. I've driven in this tunnel quite a few times in the last couple of months. There but for the grace of God go I.

The Big Dig has been a boondoggle since before I moved to Boston a decade ago. The cost overruns, the leaking tunnels, the substandard concrete, the gigantic icicles forming on the bridge and crashing down on motorists--it's hard to believe you can get this level of incompetence without trying. This is the epitomy of a federal project gone mad (the Big Dig cost $14.6 billion, when it was supposed to cost $2.5 billion, much of it federal money). And yet we think a federal project in New Orleans, an area known for its political corruption, will fix its problems.

I think huge projects have a tendency to run away like this. That's why I'm cautious about proposing such things.

From Jonah Goldberg:

It seems an obvious point to me that flying space Marines would be a valuable contribution to the arsenal of democracy.

There's simply no way I can follow that.

It's an act of provocation any way you look at it. North Korea launched seven missiles yesterday:

All of the seven missiles fired by North Korea early Wednesday local time — six short-range variants of the Soviet-era Scud and one long-range rocket — fell into the Sea of Japan.

The long-range missile, the Taepodong-2, failed about 40 seconds after it was fired, U.S. officials said. Some analysts believe the Taepodong-2 is capable of hitting the western United States.

As might be expected, diplomats are talking about imposing sanctions, which of course are opposed by China and Russia, who may have contributed to North Korea's missile capablities in the first place. If that is the case, I vote for sanctions against China and Russia and permanent removal from the security council (and can we get rid of France as well?), but there's no mechanism to do that.

The question on everyone's mind is why the Taepodong-2 crashed into the sea. Was it defective? That would be good news, but not that good. Did the US shoot it down? That would be better, but it's unlikely. Was it only supposed to go a short way? That's not good.

Despite all this bluster, North Korea is desperate. Its economy is falling apart, its people are starving, its infrastructure is non-existent. It is reduced to stealing trains to keep its railroads running. At heart, North Korea is a thug which has nothing but the threat of violence to get what it wants. The smart thing to do would be to stop giving it what it wants. It couldn't survive long without international support, but the fear is that it will lash out in its death throes and kill millions, either with nuclear weapons (which it may or may not have) or with a massive ground assault on South Korea. It's doubtful it could win--it doesn't have the infrastructure to support a prolonged war. Even the Western will isn't so weak that it couldn't outlast them. However, even in losing, North Korea could kill thousands, perhaps even millions. The Western nations would rather just appease it until it collapses, while Russia and China see it as a useful tool against the US. But my guess is that propping up a dying regime is only delaying the inevitable, and meanwhile millions of North Koreans are suffering and, yes, dying, in Kim Jong Il's war on his own people. And every year Kim Jong Il extorts food and money from the West with his thuggery, more dictators are convinced they can do the same.