Other writers such as Charles Krauthammer and co-blogger David Bernstein (link below) have made the moral case against blaming Israel for civilian deaths in Lebanon resulting from Hezbollah's tactics of hiding behind civilians.
I want to focus on a different point and emphasize the perverse incentives this practice creates. If terrorists know that liberal democracies will be blamed for civilian casualties resulting from the use of human shields by the terrorists themselves, they will have a strong incentive to keep up the practice and even expand.
Hezbollah is not the first terrorist group to use the tactic and probably won't be the last. But its tactics and the "international community's" reaction to them pose an unusually grave risk of creating perverse incentives. If world reaction against the Qana bombing and other similar incidents forces the US to compel Israel to accept a ceasefire before Hezbollah has been decisively defeated, this will be the first time in history that the use of civilian human shields has actually saved a major terrorist group from imminent catastrophic defeat, as opposed to merely protecting individual terrorists. Both Hezbollah and other terrorist groups are likely to learn from the experience and greatly increase the use of human shields in future conflicts. This makes it all the more important to resist calls for a premature ceasefire - even for those who care little about Israel or disapprove of its policies.
Ideally, world opinion would blame the terrorists rather than their adversaries in such cases. That approach would punish the use of human shields rather than reward it, thereby impeding the spread of this pernicious practice. Unfortunately, European, Arab, and even many American commentators are unlikely to adopt it anytime soon. For the time being, all we can do is strive to diminish perverse incentives. But the ultimate goal must be to first eliminate and then reverse them.
Related Posts (on one page):
- The Perverse Incentives Created by Rewarding Terrorists for Hiding Behind Civilians:
- Self-Refuting Article in Salon.com:
- Party of God Using Human Shields in a Christian Neighborhood:
Inter alia:
1. Operating in civilian vehicles and wearing civilian dress so that an enemy cannot distinguish civilians from combatants.
2. Preventing civilians from leaving a potential combat zone, in order to increase the risk of civilian casualties and thus deter enemy attack.
3. Placing combatant personnel and equipment in protected civilian structures - schools, religious institutions, hospitals, refugee camps - and again preventing civilians from leaving, so as to serve as "human shields" against enemy attack.
In other words, deploying one's forces, and constraining the movement of civilians, with the intent of maximizing the risk of civilian casualties so as to deter an enemy from attacking. Not an exhaustive list or a comprehensive definition, but I hope a start.
Also, I'm aghast with how fast people are to exculpate Israel from things like the Qana bombing and "similar incidents", as being part of their strategy and the necessary assymetric war. As Megan McArdle said, while guest-blogging in InstaPundit:
Erasmussino,
If true, does this count?
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3284514,00.html#n
To go from the specific to the general, how about this definition:
1. Launching a deadly or potentially deadly attack from a site where counteraction against the attacker is likely to injure or to kill civilians. Example: shooting missles from rooftops in Qana.
2. Immediate retreat by a combatant to an area where military action against the combatant is likely to injure or to kill civilians.
3. To make preparations that can reasonably be interpreted as being n preparation of military action, a preemptive strike against which is likely to injure or to kill civilians. Thus (to use an example of an action you would approve of) if the Israeli army today mobilized a division in a town along the Lebanese border that was poised to invade Lebanon, the likely targets would be justified in shelling the town.
4. To locate command and control facilities in an area where an attack against those facilities is liely etc. etc. Example: if a country were at war with UK, it would be reasonable for them to attack the Defence Ministry in Whitehall, despite its proximity to civilian facilities. Similarly, Italian Defense ministries, as I recall, are adjacent to the University of Rome, and should not, because of this proximity, by immune to attack by a combatant.
However, reasonable efforts should be taken to protect noncombatants if possible. The presence, for example, of a company of infantry at the edge of a town of 25,000 is not a justification for eradicating the town.
Regarding your examples, I don't think most people who is not opposed to war per se would object to attacking a bridge used by combatants.
1. Civilian clothes - yes, but would you apply the rule to (for example), the Warsaw Uprising?
2. Preventing civilian movement - yes, but there are plenty of situations in which one could legitimately feel civilians are safer staying where they are. So we are depending on assessing the intent, which isn't impossible, but there's a strong tendency to say that our intentions are good and the other guy's are bad.
3. Protected structures - this one seems pretty clear.
But let's look at the bottom line: if Hamas blows up a bus containing 20 schoolkids and 6 soldiers, it's one thing, if the IDF hits a bus with 20 schoolkids and 6 Hizbollah, it's another, and deep down you know that the presence or absence of uniforms isn't really what upsets you about one and not the other. In the end it depends on what you perceive the intent to be, and of course the enemy's intent is always bad. This is always going to be a problem with "rules of war".
Consider, by way of analogy, what your own reaction would be if some militant group wanted to use your house as a staging area, exposing you and your family to danger. You'd likely tell them to get the hell out.
On the other hand, let's say America were invaded, and resistance fighters wanted to use your house as a vantage point to fight back against the invaders. You'd probably consider it your patriotic duty in spite of the risk.
My point is that it takes an extreme set of circumstances for your average Joe to let himself be used as a human shield without objection. On an individual basis, of course, a homeowner might not be in a position to eject an armed terrorist. But overall, if the people of Lebanon had a big problem with being used as human shields, you'd expect there to be more complaints directed against Hezbollah.
I'm certainly not going to sit here, safe and sound at my computer, and tell the people who are being bombed that they're blaming the wrong folks. If terrorists were hiding out in my home, and someone shot back and killed the terrorists, I'd certainly blame the terrorists. The fact that the people of Lebanon seem to be directing their anger exclusively at Israel suggests that Israel has botched the PR aspect.
Leading up to the present conflict, one of Israel's biggest assets was Hezbollah's general unpopularity in Lebanon, amongst the people who recently ejected Hezbollah's Syrian patrons. Taking into account nothing aside from pure Israeli self-interest, they seem to have squandered that asset.
Israel has not completely ignored the civilians, but the damage that Israel has done to its own moral standing, and to all the hard work Sharon has made towards peace, over what was a containable incident, is absurd. Olmert, I predict, will be forced to resign as soon as the conflict is either over or becomes clearly "prolonged" to the Israeli people, who are too strong and too understanding of what real terrorism is to fall for the types of arguments presented by many here at the VC, and will ultimately not stand for another morally bankrupt, purposeless campaign in Lebanon.
Yes, because obviously discussing the implications of the carnage, how it is happening, and how to prevent more of it constitutes "avoiding looking into the face of the carnage."
Troll elsewhere.
What may Israel justifiably do?
I may or may not agree with Justin about what is in Israel's self interest. (If we are not delusional, we must all agree that Israel has concerns other than fish whether Justin and I like Israel.) But, what is morally justified, independent of prudential consequences.
I maintain that Israel is morally justified in attacking these areas, even if these civilians are placed at risk of injury or death. Any moral system which denies someone the right to defend himself against an attacker because an innocent third party may be harmed is a twisted moral system. Such a system by hiding behind them. If a bandit with a gun grabs a hostage and shoots at a crowd from behind the hostage, the swat team will kill the attacker, even if the hostage is also killed. But, seemingly, not if the swat team is Israeli and the shooter is Moslem.
Your absolutist approach proves too much - it justifies whatever means neccesary to take out an attacker. Your approach leaves no need to distinguish between those which will most surely obtain military victory with no regard for "the hostages" - even if that means a nuclear warhead to totally make sure a small pest to the Israeli people does not again rise.
At some point properly minimalized collateral damage of a certain level becomes acceptable. World War II could not have been won without some innocent life taken - regardless of whether in retrospect the allies fought it justly, at some point the combined factors of the need for success, the cost to third parties, and the available alternatives makes some collateral damage okay (this is what people mean, indeed, when they talk about proportionality). But to say that proportionality is never an issue doesn't appear to be the correct answer to the vast majority of decent human beings. So the question has to be asked as to whether proportionality has been met HERE.
I also disagree with you, both normatively and positively, about the SWAT team's proposed actions in a hostage situation, so our disagreement may indeed be very deep.
NB - For reasons long discussed, moral standing is necessary for the Israeli people - both as a matter of course (the citizenry is not immoral or completely amoral), to be able to defend the concept of the Jewish state (the state, being somewhat artificial in its creation, cannot stand if they are actually tyrants), and because in an international world, moral standing is neccesary to interact with the rest of the world (look at what Libya and prewar-Iraq's moral standing did for those countries).
There's also a question about the military value of a target. For example, an marked ambulance is part of the military organization, but it is not a legal target. Hezbollah has fighters and ambulances; should not their ambulances be accorded the same protection as Israeli ambulances? If so, then we must ask about non-military activities carried out by Hezbollah. Are Hezbollah food kitchens legitmate targets? What about Hezbollah social workers? Hezbollah political -- not military -- leaders?
These considerations should set the pot bubbling. ;-)
Oh please, get over yourself. The whole inquiry is just another exercise in blame-shifting and rooting for "our team".
The post starts out by noting:
So that strikes you as the beginning of an attempt to "prevent" more carnage?
This really isn't a good hypothetical, because the Louvre is unique, vice an average house, apartment building or mosque. Actually, something similar came up in WWII, look up the Battle of Monte Cassino.
But, to answer your question - (1) No - but if there were a couple hundred terrorists in there shooting out the windows - maybe. (2) Yes, it would make a huge difference.
First of all, What? Even before Qana Hezbollah had pushed back Israeli attacks and been considered fiercer better trained resistance than expected. Second Israel didn't really seem out to destroy all of Hezbollah they seemed interested in stopping the rocket attacks and disarming them (maybe recovering the hostages, but that always seemed unlikely to me).
Onto your main point, being result oriented and thinking backwards from a solution seems like a bad way to come up with policy. It seems to me that we should stick to reality where both Israel and Hezbollah both share responsiblity for civilian deaths. From your rationalizaion this would be the best solution as well, because that way Israel would be less likely too kill civilians as well as Hezbollah. I do without doubt think that if there was no blame on civilian deaths directed at Israel they would be waging a war on Hezbollah that killed more civilians (I also think America would do the same thing in Iraq, so it isn't that I think Israelis are some bloodthristy lot)
What it comes down to is that the side that actually kills civilians is always guilty; a side that hides among civilians is also guilty. Both have taken voluntary actions forseeably resulting in civilian deaths; both are intentional murderers. There is no indivisible quantum of guilt in a murder; a dozen people can be guilty of murdering one person. War is no exception.
If one side uses civilians as human shields, then the civilians are essentially conscripts. Killing the opposing side's conscripts is not murder, regardless of whether the conscripts actuall approve of the war,
For the commenters outraged at Lebanese civilian deaths, let me propose a bloodless way to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. All that is needed is for Israel to set up a network of checkpoints and roadblocks in southern Lebanon to inspect passing vehicles....
The US lost the war in Vietnam in the media not on the battlefield. I just hope the same thing doesn't happen to Israel, and to the US again in Iraq.
"But what about using civilian trappings for concealment rather than cover? For example, what if you drive an unmarked vehicle containing military supplies through a big city full of civilian vehicles, expecting only to hide among the civilians, not to force the enemy to attack them? Clearly the two situations are distinct, and while we can all agree that the former behavior can be condemned, the latter behavior is a different matter."
- Distinction without a difference. The movement of military forces or supplies is a legitimate target. The trucks in your example cannot rationally expect not to be targetted. The intent of the combatants as to whether they "intend" to draw an attack is irrelevant in this context. The act of placing a legitimate military target in a civilian convoy is the only showing of "intent" that is relevant.
Well, that's avery nice notion, but completely thoughtless. It would, for example, make "intentional murderers" of pretty much everyone who ever served in any combat arm, or anyone planning or making decisions in any war, back to and including Ug the Cave Man.
What's more, this is a war crime specifically because it weakens the distinction between civilian and military use. That's why it's a war crime for the Palestinians to use ambulances to move fighters: once it becomes clear that they aren't obeying the rules, it becomes more likely the other side will have to be less fastidious in the future.
Justin,
In my first post I said that there had to be proportionality. I am not an absolutist at all. With regard to the Israeli strategic (as opposed to tactical) bombing, I question whether the strategic bombing campaign was prudential (as you also do), but I believe that it was moral. Certainly, I do not believe that it was immoral to bomb civilian sites that were the source of the rocket bombardment.
NOT TRUE! The American Revolution was not fought this way. American troops were in uniform and fought in formations. They may have engaged in ambush, but they were not 20th Century guerrillas.
The product of news organizations is not news. It is audience. They sell you to advertisers.
Unfortunately the largest reliable day-in day-out viewing bloc is soap opera women, so that's what the news is produced for.
The bad part of this market response is that it drives out every possible serious national discussion of everything.
The MSM news seeks inner struggle, soul-searching and everlasting frustration. Nothing else survives.
So of course civilian deaths rule the airwaves forever.
I think there is no alternative business model that works for news, by the way. Even this one is in doubt, as to its survival.
But that's why they seem to be so stupid. It's the same way soap opera is stupid.
And also once a protected building or symbol is misused, the opposition is free to destroy it at will. It loses the protection of the international consventions.
And personally, I don't think that there is much one can do to eliminate the "perverse incentive" to use these tactics. For one thing, as others have pointed out, even if we think some "collateral damage" in these cases is morally justifiable, we are still likely to think that morality requires a minimization of unnecessary "collateral damage", and therefore the incentive cannot be entirely eliminated. In other words, using "human shields" will always place some limits on the tactics an attacking force can use if it considers itself bound by morality.
But more basically, there is an even more powerful incentive in play here: in an asymmetric war, if the terrorists/insurgents/guerrillas/freedom-fighters/whatever didn't use these tactics--if they carefully distinguished themselves so that they could be attacked by overwhelming military force without substantial risk to civilians--of course they would quickly get wiped out. That is the very nature of asymmetric warfare. So, you will never be able to reduce this "perverse incentive" to a low enough level, because the alternative is always going to be certain death and defeat for the terrorists/insurgents/guerrillas/freedom-fighters/etc.
But, we also charge the cop with negligent homicide when he fails to use reasonable care.
Just because we blame one side doesn't exonerate the other.
Of course! It's a problem without a solution.
My understanding of Hezbollah's, al Qaeda's et al take on Islamic doctrines of warfighting is that there are no such things as civilians, at least not on their own side. All faithful Muslims are expected to contribute to the jihad in any way they can, if not in actual combat then in some other capacity - such as letting jihadis set up shop in their home and/or serving as a human shield. Refusal to do this, of course, instantly identifies the residents as either non-Muslim or insufficiently devout, in which case the jihadis would presumably have no compunctions about simply taking over the house by force and using the residents as human shields anyway, if not simply killing them outright.
In other words, I would venture that a significant percentage of what most outside observers term "civilian casualties" in Lebanon are in fact willingly cooperating with Hezbollah (albeit pressed into doing so). How do we distinguish them from other civilians? The UN and the MSM don't seem to be even trying.
In any conflict situation, each side will take best advantage of its assets. The Israelis have high-tech firepower, so they want a stand-up fight out in the open where they can blast anything that moves. Hezbollah has plenty of motivated irregular light infantry; they want to fight from concealment. That's the military reality, and fighting from concealment against superior forces has been used from time immemorial, by all nationalities including the Americans.
We must learn how to defeat this tactic rather than bitch and moan about those naughty people who won't fight the way we want them to. The Pentagon has been working on it for some time. The latest term is "Fourth Generation warfare", and a group of officers in the Pentagon have done impressive work sorting out the issues and developing concepts for winning 4G conflicts. Unlike the commentators here, they're working to solve the problem rather than fecklessly whining about it.
It's been done. Didn't work.
During the Viet Nam war, the US started using gasoline to blow up the famous tunnels. For technical reasons, it's tough to blow up a tunnel by putting an explosive charge at the mouth of it if the engineers who built it have two right angles in the tunnel run. The shock wave gets tangled up--technical terms only--and interferes with itself. So the US pumped the explosive--gasoline vapor--into the tunnel under low pressure and at low speed and then lit it. Worked well. So the bad guys started taking civilians down the tunnels. So the US switched to tear gas. Run the folks out and separate them.
The liberals howled about "chemical warfare". They NEED dead civilians and they will not be denied and their buddies on the other side--whichever is fighting us at the time--will oblige. Take that to the bank.
The solution is to ignore the issue as if it does not exist. Once the value of a dead civilian to the other side is zero, there won't be any perverse incentives. However, the liberals are in charge of the viewing-with-alarm department and can't allow us to zero out the value of a dead civilian, thereby saving their lives.
What a fatuous thing to say.
Fatuous? Not at all. Inconvenient? You bet.
If dead civilians are necessary to impugn US policy, dead civilians will be provided. The other side knows how the game is played. They also know our liberals don't give a rat's patootie about the civilians the other side kills.
I read an article about Low Intensity Conflict by a woman working in Central America. She didn't like it. Among other things, it worked. Plus, she said, those of us who are used to raising the consciousness of the American people by pointing to mass casualties among civilians will have to find new tactics. One of which, of course, was to try to load Low Intensity Conflict with all kinds of bad juju so it could be ended by the uncaring politicians and the in-on-it liberals. Not enough dead civilians.
Anyway, you go ahead and try to remove the perverse incentives and see who your most vocal opponents are. Or don't, just think about it.
Bullcrap. That sort of hyperpartisan pablum is a sad example of how some VC threads degenerate into bizarre rants. Your statement is nonsense, just as if I said that conservatives need dead soldiers in order to make patriotic speeches, so they stick it out in Iraq in order to make more bloody shirts. That kind of garbage might get your fellow travelers all fired up, but it doesn't have any relationship to the real world or a rational conversation.
Feel free to reply, but I'll tell you now I won't bother to respond. Your tantrum has already received more attention than it deserved.
I spent time in Central America in 1987, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. I thought it was only far-lefties who were fond of talking about eggs and omelets. I came home and started looking around. Nope. Generic, ordinary liberals were no different.
Our folks needed dead civilians so badly, they made them up. One demo in San Salvador attacked by the cops with machine guns.... How many killed, I asked. Um. One hurt. My son, then nine, could have done better with his BB gun and no BBs, I said. It was not well-received. Point is, the incident was a flat lie. Death squad killings, that year, were down by about 99%. Of our group, I was the only one not disappointed.
Argue against evidence if you wish, Colin. You can even think anybody believes you.
I spent time in Central America in 1987, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. I thought it was only far-lefties who were fond of talking about eggs and omelets. I came home and started looking around. Nope. Generic, ordinary liberals were no different.
Our folks needed dead civilians so badly, they made them up. One demo in San Salvador attacked by the cops with machine guns.... How many killed, I asked. Um. One hurt. My son, then nine, could have done better with his BB gun and no BBs, I said. It was not well-received. Point is, the incident was a flat lie. Death squad killings, that year, were down by about 99%. Of our group, I was the only one not disappointed.
Argue against evidence if you wish, Colin. You can even think anybody believes you.