As always, after a barbarous attack by jihadists, their apologists are distorting the ‘proportionality’ principle.
I was traveling a bit late last week so I didn’t catch up with The Editors podcast until the weekend, and thus, until I heard Charlie’s apt praise for it, did not catch up until then on MBD’s excellent post on the concept of proportionality in warfare. Should be required reading.
The distortion of this commonsense law-of-war doctrine by Muslim Brotherhood strategists, Islamist-sympathizers, and transnational progressives (including many Democrats) has been an initiative energetically pursued since the aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities. That’s when our government finally concluded that a military response was in order because jihadist terrorism, executed by well-armed, foreign-based organizations backed by state sponsors, is a national-security challenge more than a law-enforcement matter.
I recounted this history in a New York Post column posted over the weekend:
The proportionality twaddle is a hobby horse of anti-Western leftists — ever ready to rationalize the barbarity of jihadists who recognize no constraints on their tactics.
It came into vogue in the years after 9/11. Following the mass-murder of nearly 3,000 of our fellow citizens, American and allied armed forces were dispatched to take the fight to the jihadists’ strongholds overseas.
In response, the Muslim Brotherhood’s pom-pom squad at CAIR, and its familiar echo chamber — the media, American university campuses, and the political left generally — lectured incessantly that our combat operations must be “proportionate.”
Their distortion of this commonsense military principle is being echoed today.
As should be obvious, proportionality is nothing so ridiculous as eye-for-an-eye limits on responsive combat. For one thing, we don’t fight that way: American, Israeli, and other Western military forces do not wage war by targeting and terrorizing civilians, including raping women, murdering the defenseless, or taking hostages and using them as human shields.
Those are war crimes — a term at which jihadists scoff, for it describes atrocities they execute precisely because we are horrified by them. Western military forces regard such savagery as unacceptable, regardless of the enemy’s resort to it.
So what, then, is proportionality?
It is a principle that requires military commanders, when they determine battlefield targets, to weigh the importance of the military objective against the likelihood of “collateral damage” — i.e., civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure.
Significantly, proportionality does not mean an army is prohibited from attacking if it knows there will be collateral damage. To the contrary, if the military objective is important enough, collateral damage is a baleful but unavoidable consequence of warfare.The military commander is obliged to try to minimize collateral damage, but not to the point of refraining from attacking important military targets.
If important targets are not hit, wars last far longer, and there’s nothing humanitarian about insisting on more carnage. The object of war is not to achieve a stalemate. It is to defeat the enemy. It is to achieve the legitimate objectives that drive a people to go to war.
The full column is here.
I went back to find some of my other ravings over the years about the warping of the proportionality principle. Illustrating yet again that there is nothing new under the sun, I found a column from nearly a decade ago entitled, “The Laws of War Matter in Gaza.” I know this may be hard to believe, but at the time — whaddya know? — Hamas had just committed barbaric attacks against Israel, Israel was launching a military response, and Islamists and transnational progressives were collaborating on a propaganda campaign to condemn Israel’s armed self-defense as a “disproportionate” attack on civilians in violation of international law.
To repeat what I said at the time:
[I]f Hamas is reasonably believed to be using a schoolhouse filled with children to facilitate missile attacks on Israeli civilian centers, Israel is within its rights to bomb the schoolhouse. It goes without saying that the resulting deaths of Palestinian children are tragic; but so would be the killing of Israeli children by continued Hamas missile strikes. If Israel does not attack, Hamas will keep firing. Israel is not required to refrain from protecting its own citizens in order to spare Palestinian children. Under the laws of war, the Israeli attack is justifiable; it is Hamas’s use of children as human shields that is condemnable.
Though this is common sense, Israel’s detractors endeavor to muddy the waters in two ways: (a) twisting the military concept of proportionality beyond recognition, and (b) imposing the proof protocols of peacetime due process. So, we are told, Israel’s attacks are “disproportionate” because there are so many more Palestinian than Israeli casualties. And what is Israel’s evidence, they ask, that this schoolhouse or that hospital was really being used to house or launch Hamas missiles?
These points are frivolous[.] . . . As a law-of-war concept, proportionality has nothing to do with the comparative casualty count. A lopsided death tally is, instead, an indication of the relative competence of the opposing armed forces. In this particular instance, it also reflects the opposing societal values that Rich Lowry described this week, citing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s assertion that Israel uses its missiles to protect its people, while Hamas uses its people to protect its missiles. . . .
Proportionality actually involves weighing the military value of a potential attack against the likely harm to non-combatants and civilian infrastructure. Significantly, international law does not prohibit such collateral damage. There would be nothing humane about doing so: It would only prolong war and its carnage. Lethal attacks are legitimate unless the potential loss of innocent life clearly outweighs the military value. That is a military judgment call not amenable to precise measurement. It’s one that must take into account the deaths that would result from, for example, failing to attack a mosque that is being used as a fort.
And in wartime, courtroom proof that a target is a strategic enemy asset is not required before attacking. Again, targeting is a judgment call made by military professionals based on experience and battlefield intelligence. The United States armed forces do not conduct a trial or seek a judicial warrant based on probable cause before striking terrorist havens in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Yemen. Why, as Iraq War vet David French pointedly asks, would we expect Israel — while fighting an existential defensive war against terrorists who repeatedly attack its territory — to abide by self-defense restrictions we would not tolerate for ourselves?
October 7 is only nine days ago, the IDF’s ground assault in response to Hamas’s barbarities has not yet even begun in earnest, and already Israel is being bombarded with the proportionality canard. It always happens and it’s always wrong. Peace is unlikely in the Middle East, but it doesn’t even have a chance unless and until Israel defeats the jihadists. The laws of war do not make victory a war crime.