Frankly, I've never thought the idea of "proportionate response" was much besides "Defend yourself militarily -- but make sure folks don't think you're being a bully to people who keep trying to kill your civilians." Oh, and add some moral equivalency, muddled history, and biased advocacy media.
Anyway, various arguments about proportionality and related ideas basically advocate the preservation of whatever enemy organization (Hezbollah before, Hamas now) is being pounded by the justifiably irate Israelis at the moment. In the grand scheme of things, note also Jules Crittenden's timely and astute question: "What if the destruction of Hamas is the best thing that ever happened to the Palestinian people?"
1) Request that 50% of Israel's air-to-ground missiles be duds to ensure greater proportionality.
2) Allow Hamas another 1,000 free rocket launches to see if they can catch up with the body count.
3) Have Israeli soldiers congregate in border barracks so that Hamas's random rockets have a better chance of killing military personnel, to ensure it can claim at least a few military targets.
Predictably, the global elites are calling for a truce in Gaza.
UPDATE: See what blogfriend Dignified Rant has to say about proportionality. This bit is piquantly relevant: "In my view, it isn't a disproportionate response if your enemy keeps trying to kill you."
3 comments:
"Proportionate response" is the most idiotic phrase I've ever heard with regard to military operations.
You hit the other guy so hard that he doesn't get up again. And then you clean up the mess and make things nice for everyone. That's the only way to be successful if you want to counteract the effects of a dangerous enemy.
"You hit the other guy so hard that he doesn't get up again."
Absolutely. Leave the other guy with the capacity and will to fight, and you'll end up re-fighting the same war again and again.
But I can't say this without being labeled a right wing nutjob. ;-)
Still, can you imagine if "proportionate response" was around during WWII? Good grief.
"Proportionate response" might be nutty, but there is also something nutty about body counts that are at around 12 people in Israel and 700 in the Gaza Strip...almost 100 of those are kids.
Israel has every right to be mad...but the number of civilian casualties in Gaza is indefensible. Whether or not it's true that Hamas at times is using civilians as "human shields" in some situations, the truth is that the Gaza Strip has almost NO bomb shelters, because it is a ridiculously poor place and has been kept this way in part by Israel's policies vis-a-vis the area. Israel is rife with bomb shelters. Israel can say as long as it wants that it "had to" operate in this manner, but history will at some point make it clear that Israel made a choice to slaughter more innocents than can be justified by almost anything...
if the Unabomber was holed up in his house with 3 wives and 10 kids, having friends continue to mail his bombs for him so he was still a threat until dead (instead of being the weird loner he turned out to be), do you really think anyone would have said that the U.S. Federal Marshals were justified in blowing up his house and killing all of the occupants because the Unabomber was using the people inside as human shields and it was on him that the people died?
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