The Absurdity of “Disproportionality”
No serious man should talk this way.

By Jay Nordlinger, NR managing editor
April 18, 2001 4:30 p.m.

h, yes, our old friend "disproportionality": I've known him well. I had a particularly memorable encounter with him on April 15, 1986. I was doing my taxes in my college dorm room, and Ronald Reagan was bombing Tripoli and Benghazi, in Libya. Reagan ordered the strikes to punish Qaddafi for his acts of terrorism, and, more important, to deter such attacks in the future.

And all the Democrats — I remember Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts in particular — were expressing concern over the "proportionality" of what Reagan had done. "I'm concerned that this was disproportionate," the likes of Kerry said.

Well, some of my right-leaning friends and I had a good (and bitter) laugh over that, for what would a "proportionate" response have been? Most recently, Qaddafi had sponsored a bombing attack on a West Berlin discotheque that killed an American serviceman and a Turkish woman. It wounded more than 200 people. And the "proportionate" response? Should Reagan have found a dance hall frequented by Libyans somewhere and bombed it, in the hope of killing and maiming just the right number of people?

Libya had also planned to attack, with grenades and machine guns, a U.S. visa office in Paris. Would the "proportionalists" have targeted a Libyan visa office in some world capital — Paris, to be most proportionate of all?

What the Democrats were saying, in essence, was: "I don't like these strikes, and I don't like Reagan. But I realize you have to do something, if only because the huffy public demands it. But can't we do it more politely and more mildly" (and less effectively)?

Reagan, by the way, was typically unabashed and forthright. He said, shortly after the raids, "America's policy has been and remains to use force only as a last resort. We do not underestimate the brutality of this evil man, but Colonel Qaddafi ought not to underestimate either the capacity or legitimate anger of a free people." Qaddafi evidently got the message. He has had a somewhat quieter rule for the last 15 years, after his rendezvous with Reagan-led American power and justice. After his rendezvous with Reaganite "disproportionality."

The Middle East — the Arab-Israeli conflict — is a much different situation, but some of the words and concepts are the same. Secretary of State Colin Powell has just condemned Israel for its "disproportionate" measures against its Arab enemies. "Excessive and disproportionate," said Powell. Really, no serious man should talk this way, and certainly no secretary of state.

Imagine a world in which Israel — beset on all sides, and beset constantly — relied on "proportionate" responses. When a suicide bomber killed 15 people in an Israeli town, Israel would … send a suicide bomber of its own into an Arab town, hoping that he killed precisely 15, and not 14 or 16? Would the proportionality fetishists be happy then?

I have never liked the journalistic habit of quoting from movies. But everyone's favorite line from The Untouchables applies here. Uttered by Sean Connery (playing an old, experienced cop), it goes, "They send one of yours to the hospital, you send one of theirs to the morgue." This is the ultimate statement against proportional response.

We should remember the fundamental and horrible fact that Israel is engaged in a war. The objective of the Israeli government should not be to respond "proportionately"; it should be to win the war, and the sooner the better. Was Begin's raid on the Iraqi nuclear reactor a "proportionate" response? I don't know, but it was the right response, even as the U.S. condemned it. The objective of peace and security — of winning this war — would not be served by an endless game of tit-for-tat. To require of Israel some neat "proportionality" is not only illogical and unfair, but immoral.