7-26-06, 9:01 am
U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton kicked up quite a stir recently when he suggested that the killing of Lebanese civilians can simply not be compared with the killing of Israeli civilians.
Asked to comment on the Israelis’ killing of eight Canadian citizens, a Montreal pharmacist and his family, he said, 'I think it would be a mistake to ascribe moral equivalence to civilians who die as the direct result of malicious terrorist acts,' drawing a distinction between the Israeli civilians killed by “malicious terrorist acts” and the ten times as many Lebanese civilians who have died as a result of the “sad and highly unfortunate consequences of self-defense.”
Although Bolton has often been derided as an extremist for his views on the United Nations, in this he was simply articulating the dominant mainstream position. Pundits routinely distinguish between acts where there is supposedly a deliberate intent to kill civilians and those where, although civilians might die in large numbers as an utterly predictable consequence of the act, there is no specific intent to kill civilians. One is condemned as terrorism, something that places the committer of the act completely beyond the pale of civilization, while the other is merely collateral damage, an unfortunate but necessary part of the civilized way of war, engaged in by virtuous people and governments whose righteousness is not even subject to question. In order to truly respect the distinction between civilian and fighter that is at the heart of the laws of war, it’s necessary to eliminate the doctrine of collateral damage.
One obvious flaw of the doctrine is that it provides great cover for actual war crimes. Israel has deliberately targeted airports, ports, bridges, and tunnels. Of the close to 400 Lebanese killed, the vast majority were not fighters, although a very large number are children. Israel has bombed residential areas in south Beirut and throughout southern Lebanon, the only concession to their civilian population being the dropping of leaflets warning residents to evacuate the entire area. Recently, a family fleeing a border village was targeted, with three killed, because they were driving in minivans – among Israel’s rules of engagement is indiscriminate targeting of trucks, minivans, and motorcycles, supposedly because Hezbollah either uses such vehicles often or could use them to carry missiles and launchers. Trucks are also used to carry food and medical supplies, but that, apparently, is just tough luck.
But beyond narrow questions of fact about whether a particular killing really is collateral damage lie deeper flaws with the doctrine. First, in its application it is consistently entangled with racism and an ignorant and blind cultural supremacism. We “know” that Israelis and Americans don’t intend to kill civilians, just as we “know” that Hezbollah does. If nothing else, we point to the fact that Hezbollah’s missiles, with which it has been attacking Haifa and other northern cities, are extremely inaccurate and cannot possibly be used to reliably attack a particular military target.
Of course, when the United States bombed North Vietnam, its weapons were also incredibly inaccurate, yet there we still “knew” that targeting civilians was not the “intent.”
How about the idea that Hezbollah and Hamas would much rather kill soldiers than civilians, they just don’t have much ability to do that (although Hezbollah has fought well against the IDF in southern Lebanon)? If Israel’s bombing of civilian areas, targeting minivans, is justified because it doesn’t want to sustain the casualties that would come with a more discriminating approach, why not justify Hezbollah’s rocket attacks because it doesn’t have the technology to do better? What, other than our intrinsic knowledge that Israelis are like us, thus civilized, and that Hezbollah is a bunch of Arabs, thus uncivilized, prevents us from giving Hezbollah’s excuse more credence than Israel’s?
The other major flaw is the idea that, as Sahr Conway-Lanz documents in his recent book, Collateral Damage, basically you can do anything you want to civilians as long as you claim to have no intent to kill them. Much of the book involves tracing the bit-by-bit evolution of the doctrine in roughly the 10 years after World War 2. In the Korean War, which really put the doctrine firmly on its feet, as he shows, rules of engagement evolved to the point that, in the last half of the war, entire cities were targeted for destruction by virtue of the reasoning that said the cities produced something necessary for the war effort and that they contained roads that troops might travel on. In other words, that they were cities. And yet, even though the American public wanted to retain the idea that targeting civilians was wrong, these decisions never aroused any serious revulsion.
As Conway-Lanz suggests , the sensible criterion by which to judge whether one is targeting civilians is not something totally unmeasurable like supposed absence or presence of intent to kill them, but rather concrete steps taken to minimize or eliminate the possibility of killing civilians. With this criterion, assaults like Israel’s on Lebanon, or the first U.S. attack on Fallujah, where 60% and more of fatalities are civilian, could not possibly make the grade.
It would be an important step toward putting such questions on fairer ground and remedying the extreme bias implicit in our basic framework regarding questions of war. It would also allow for an unbiased definition of terrorism. So, of course, the powers that be will resist it tooth and nail.
From Empire Notes
