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Politics : The Obama - Clinton Disaster -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (4145)	1/2/2009 1:28:24 PM
From: TimF	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 103300

Israel and the "proportionality" canard By TigerHawk at 12/31/2008 08:46:00 AM Once again we are hearing that Israel's response to aggression is not "proportionate," as if this were a bad thing. Even smart and reasonable lefty bloggers are complaining about this, never mind the knee-jerkers. Ezra Klein: There is nothing proportionate in this response. No way to fit it into a larger strategy that leads towards eventual peace. No way to fool ourselves into believing that it will reduce bloodshed and stop terrorist attacks. It is simple vengeance. There's a saying in the Jewish community: "Israel, right or wrong." But sometimes Israel is simply wrong. There are two responses to this, one legal and the other geopolitical. First, the legal response from Ramesh Ponnuru: The traditional just-war standard is that military action should be "proportionate" in that it causes fewer harms than it seeks to prevent. That's a sane and sound moral standard. It does not mean that military means must inflict only as much pain as the enemy has inflicted. Now, you might argue that because Hamas has been recently ineffective at killing Israelis, the current assault is in fact inflicting more harm than it seeks to prevent. That logic is highly suspect; the point is not to prevent minor harms, but much bloodier future attacks that will no doubt occur if Hamas is not both interdicted and deterred, of which more below. More on the legal arcana from Andy McCarthy here. The geopolitical argument ought to be more persuasive than the legal to liberals, who no doubt wish we would join the community of nations and sign Protocol 1. Massive, militarily disproportionate retaliation is the cornerstone of deterrence, and without it there would be more war, not less. During 2006's Hezbollah war I wrote this post, which remains sadly germane to the present fighting with Hamas: The left claims that the powerful states of the world, especially the United States and Israel, need not fear for their security because they can use their military power to deter aggression. To a post-Cold War lefty, the magic of deterrance supposedly obviates the need to intervene preemptively, or to remove regimes that commit "petty" acts of war against us or even declare themselves to be our enemy. See, e.g., the most frequently offered reasons why we should not have removed Saddam, or should not consider military options to deal with Iran. We can, after all, obliterate any power that actually attacks us, so why worry? What your basic anti-defense lefty does not admit, however, is that effective deterrance requires not only the capability to retaliate, but that the threat to retaliate be credible. The former without the latter is worthless. The requirement that retaliation be proportional reather than "massive" destroys the credibility of the threat to retaliate and therefore the effectiveness of the deterrance. Why? Because it allows the attacker to determine the price he will pay for launching the attack. If the attacker knows that he can absorb a blow equal to the one he delivers, then he will not be concerned that the defender has the capability to retaliate massively. This is like limiting the penalty for property crimes to restitution. Why not rob the bank? If you're caught, you only have to give the money back. The advocates of "proportionality", therefore, are undermining the effectiveness of threatened massive retaliation as a means for preventing war. If the left succeeds in promoting this ridiculous idea as a new norm of international behavior or requirement of international law, it will have destroyed the effectiveness of deterrance, the one means that we know reliably prevents war in the first place. Surely this is not what the left and the Europeans hope to accomplish. No less an expert than Dwight Eisenhower institutionalized massive retaliation as the official policy of the United States. This was wise, for there was no other plausible way to deter the use of nuclear weapons. And it worked. "Proportionality" as it is now used by the chatterers criticizing Israel today is nothing more than a prescription for endless war... tigerhawk.blogspot.com