The point of the column was that there are measures entirely closed off to us because of the nature of our civilization and that this puts us at a unique disadvantage when fighting a stateless foe of unique ruthlessness. I am not upset — far from it — that they are closed off to us. That's why I described our humanitarian focus as the highest achievement of civilization.  But it is preposterous not to understand, when you fight by Marquis of Queensbury rules and your opponent feels free to kick you in the groin and shoot your dog, that your more civilized approach might represent a form of self-shackling when your aim is victory at all costs.

It's tough to argue with someone who writes an entire column without including a declarative sentence.  So I hesitate to accuse John Podhoretz of advocating (or even considering) genocide.  He constructed his column in such a way that he can scurry away from the inferences a logical person would draw from the string of questions he asks.  Among those questions are:

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?

Podhoretz has a point (or maybe not, depending on whether he acknowledges the implications of what he's "asking").  If you have sufficient manpower and firepower you can flood a city or a country with stormtroopers, give them orders to round up and slaughter all the fighting-age men they find, and thereby utterly crush "the enemy."  That tactic was used pretty effectively (though not completely decisively) by Saddam Hussein against the Kurds in the 1980s and against the Shiites in the aftermath of the first Gulf War.  Saddam's response to the attempt on his life in Dujail was pretty much in line with what Podhoretz contemplates (though Saddam went a couple years younger than Podhoretz might, and murdered 13-year-old boys).

But it's not as easy as you might think.  You end up killing a lot of women and children, too.  That's partly because they get in the way as you go after the men.  It's also because, once you initiate mass slaughter for the purpose of "intimidat[ing] them and mak[ing] them so afraid of us they would go along with anything," you realize that there's no point, really, in sparing people based on their age or their gender.  You also realize, after you've been murdering and oppressing people for a while, that murder and oppression aren't discreet events.  You can't use them once for demonstration purposes and then abandon them.  Once you have your boot on a man's neck you'd better keep it there.  Who knows what he might do to you if you let him up off the ground?

Of course, there are alternatives to that kind of prolonged campaign of murder and oppression.  You can inflict death and destruction from above, before sending in ground troops to sift through the wreckage and order around the terrified survivors.  After all, "could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?"

This is the point Podhoretz wants to make, but is shrewd enough not to state outright:  we could have justifiably incinerated the men, women and children of Ramadi and Fallujah and west Baghdad in the spring of 2003.  We could have justifiably segregated Sunni men from Shia men and slaughtered the former wholesale as the insurgency got underway in the fall of that year.  That would have been justified because it's necessary to defend our lives and our liberal democratic values.  We know this because we could never have defeated Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan without sustained counter-population bombing.

If you're confused by the sudden substitution of Nazi Germany for Iraq, don't be.  You can do anything at all to Nazi Germany; people might get upset if you did the same things to Iraq.  If you're killing hundreds of thousands of civilians in Nazi Germany everyone knows you have to do it (at least they do now—Christopher Hitchens notes that, contrary to Podhoretz's bellicose fantasies, many people weren't so cavalier about it back then).  But if you suggest in a newspaper column that it's a shame we're not killing hundreds of thousands of Iraqis then people might reasonably ask why so many innocent people should die.  They might wonder how that squares with choosing to launch a war to bring the benefits of freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people.  They might wonder if, for certain pundits, all that rhetoric was just a cover for bloody-mindedness and an excuse to chortle as the bombs fell.

Better to frame the whole thing as a series of questions, and make sure you mention the Nazis as often as possible.  That way you can make your point without having to take responsibility for your feeble-minded endorsement of criminality.

There's truth in this piece by Jonathan Chait, but that truth can't sustain the argument he tries to make.

I agree that it's "silly" (in his words) to judge the morality of a war based on the casualties inflicted by each side.  I think Israel's attack on Hezbollah is justified, given Hezbollah's periodic and sustained rocket attacks on Israeli civilians, its cross-border raid to kill and capture Israeli soldiers and its alliance with a country working to acquire nuclear weapons and currently led by a man who ruminates publicly on the impending destruction of Israel.  And it's true that Hezbollah relies on its ability to disappear into the civilian population, and is therefore responsible for civilian casualties the Israelis inflict while seeking out military targets in southern Lebanon.  But I think Chait moves into dangerous territory when he writes:

If those strikes are carrying out their intended effect, then it's a justifiable response. If they're not, then it's not justifiable.

But proportionality has nothing to do with it. If Israel was attacking Lebanon's infrastructure at random, then it would be wrong even if it killed fewer Lebanese than Hezbollah killed Israelis.

I think this is the logic that causes reasonable and humane people to start signing off on everything a government does in the name of a noble end.  I'm not in Lebanon, I'm not in Israel, I'm in no position to judge whether every Israeli airstrike is a necessary part of its operation against Hezbollah.  Neither is Chait.  He writes:

Israel says it has massively degraded Hezbollah's store of rockets. We shouldn't take Israel's word on that, for obvious reasons. (Any country overstates the effectiveness of its military operations from time to time.)

That's an admirable level of skepticism when it comes to what any government—not just Israel—claims about its own military operations.  But Chait also says:

Israel says every one of its air strikes has a specific strategic and military rationale. The attacks on Lebanon's civilian infrastructure are not "collective punishment," they're an attempt to prevent Hezbollah from transporting the captured soldiers to Iran and to prevent Iran and Syria from resupplying Hezbollah. Where Israel has bombed civilian areas, it has been in an attempt to strike Hezbollah's rockets.

I'm not sure what evidence he has of that, other than the same assurances from Israel that he discounts when it comes to the purely operational aspects of the Israeli campaign.  Frankly, it wouldn't surprise me at all if part of Israel's bombing campaign was "collective punishment" designed to impress upon the Lebanese government and the people of Lebanon that it is very dangerous to turn a blind eye to Hezbollah's attacks on Israel.  Would that be justified, given the nature of the threat Hezbollah poses?  It's a more difficult issue than simply assuming out of hand that every Israeli airstrike has a purely tactical purpose.  It gets to the question Chait never addresses, which is exactly what the limit is when it comes to defending a country and its citizens.

He's absolutely right about the lower limit, but what's the upper limit?  It's not helpful to jump, as Chait does, to history's most terrible and destructive moments:

During World War II, Germany sunk a lot of American ships and declared war on us, and in return we flattened its cities, killed or captured hundreds of thousands of its solders and occupied its land. That was hardly a proportionate response.

Let's be clear about Nazi Germany—its attacks on the United States may have been minimal but by the time we began massive bombing raids against German cities it was clear that the Nazis had both the capability and the intention to slaughter millions of people and to subject Europe to unending tyranny and genocide.  Before a single American bomb fell on Germany the Nazis had already invaded Poland, killed tens if not hundreds of thousands of non-Jewish Poles, ghettoized and begun the systematic slaugher of millions of Polish Jews, opened Dachau and Auschwitz, invaded Norway, invaded Denmark, invaded Holland (leveling Rotterdam for demonstration purposes in the process), invaded Belgium, invaded France, carpet bombed London, invaded Yugoslavia, invaded Greece and Crete, invaded Russia, murdered hundreds of thousands if not millions of Soviet Jews, murdered hundreds of thousands if not millions of Soviet prisoners of war, issued the "Night and Fog" decree authorizing the secret deportation and exection of suspected resistance fighters in western Europe, declared war on the United States days after Pearl Harbor, and come very close to destroying the British empire in 1940 and the Soviet Union in 1941.

I don't mean to minimize Hezbollah's criminality when I say a comparison to the Nazis is out of proportion.

Chait's point isn’t to put Hezbollah in the same league as the Nazis (at least not in terms of its capabilities; its intentions are monstrous).  But it's telling that he immediately reaches for that analogy.  You can pretty much justify anything when you're doing it to Nazi Germany.  I doubt Chait’s reference to Allied bombing of German cities outraged many people, even though that bombing killed about 100,000 German children during the Second World War.  Chait concludes:

We won't know for some time whether Israel has really taken a chunk out of Hezbollah. Either way, balancing the number of dead Israelis against dead Lebanese tells us nothing.

I don't think Chait is really arguing this—he's really arguing that he knows Israel will keep civilian casualties within a level that he defines to be acceptable.  He should make that argument, instead of constructing a more complicated one that justifies any attack at all as long as it “works.”

Sometimes I need a mental vacation from all the nastiness engulfing Iraq.  That's when I close my eyes and think of Lebanon.

From a blogging standpoint Iraq is more than enough to keep me busy.  But I spent the afternoon and early evening writing a piece on Iraq for Time, so I'm a little sick of the subject.  I will say that I was shocked by (but don't doubt) the UN report that nearly 6,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in May and June.  A lot of people are waiting for "civil war to break out."  I'm not really interested in the semantics of what constitutes a "civil war," but certainly 100 civilians dying every day for two months constitutes "something awful."  Things could easily get a whole lot worse and right now they’re headed south fast.  But it's bad enough already and arguing over what to call it—or what we'll be calling it if 150 or 200 or 300 civilians die every day in August—is beside the point.

What's more relevant, I think, is what I wrote about yesterday and touched on in the Time piece:  there's no reason to believe a plan exists for getting this under control, or that there can be a plan for getting this under control.  The current plan may actually be stoking the sectarian conflict.  If you want an impeccably reported summary of the security situation read this story by Tom Lasseter.  If they awarded a Pulitzer for Best BS Detector then Lasseter would be weighed down like Mark Spitz.

With Iraq as my daily example of how wars can unfold, it was a little dismaying to read that President Bush believes Israel's campaign in Lebanon "would complete the work of building a functioning democracy in Lebanon and send a strong message to the Syrian and Iranian backers of Hezbollah."

On the one hand, Israel can’t just sit back and take it while Hezbollah stages cross-border raids and fires rockets into Israeli cities.  And Hezbollah is allied with (or directed by) Iran, so as the Iranians gain power and influence in the region and move closer to getting a nuclear weapon Hezbollah’s presence on Israel’s border becomes a lot more dangerous—maybe catastrophically dangerous.  But there is a massive gap between the damage Israel is inflicting and the damage Hezbollah is inflicting—hundreds of dead civilians and entire neighborhoods flattened in Lebanon, versus 15 dead civilians and a few buildings damaged in Israel.  There’s a reason—beyond simple prejudice—that the average Arab is baffled by Israel’s view of itself as the underdog.

I have no problem at all with Israeli strikes against Hezbollah.  But I think some of what the Israelis are doing has little to do with going after Hezbollah and a lot to do with making the point that if you aid or shelter guerillas who attack Israel then the Israeli military will stomp on you.  That would be fair play if the Lebanese government had the power to control Hezbollah, or was directing Hezbollah.  But it doesn’t, and it isn’t.  So there’s a cruelty to this even though there’s also a cold political logic that goes beyond sheer bloody-mindedness.

This is realpolitik—about as far as you can get from grand theories about making the Middle Eat a better place.  Certainly the Israelis are sending a signal to the Syrians and the Iranians—the signal is, “we can make things very painful for you, and don’t think you can get away with using proxies to do your dirty work.”  But I have a hard time imagining that they’re interested in “complet[ing] the work of building a functional democracy in Lebanon.”  The Israelis, spurred on by the Bush Administration and others, recently completed the work of building a democracy in Gaza—how’s that working out for everyone?  Yes, the Hamas-led government is no one’s idea of a stable liberal democracy.  But why anyone still assumes that “stable and liberal” proceed inevitably from “democracy” is beyond me.

Israel wants two things from Lebanon.  First, a government more scared of Israel than it is of anti-Israeli guerillas, Syria and Iran.  Second, a government capable of taking on whatever remains of Hezbollah after Israel leaves in a few weeks or a few months.  They’ll probably get the former; they may not get the latter.  Israel’s invasion in 1982 chased out the PLO, but it also wrecked the country (even more than it already was wrecked), led to the rise of Hezbollah and mired Israel in a long counter-insurgency in southern Lebanon.

With that precedent available I’m not inclined to view this new violence as a turning point that will bring the benefits of liberal democracy to Lebanon and the rest of the Middle East, ushering in the era of perpetual peace.  I don’t think the Israelis view it that way, either.  I think they’re about smashing Hezbollah, intimidating Lebanon, and warning Syria and Iran.  Beyond that I don’t think they much care how it makes anyone feel, or what it makes anyone do.  Call that what you want, but don’t call it naïve.