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Tuesday, August 1, 2006
Complacency won’t subdue ruthless foe
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Hezbollah and its Iranian and Syrian puppet-masters have won the moment. In provoking Israel to bomb a village, killing 37 children and at least 20 adults, terrorists willing to use civilians as human shields have found the leverage they need to win.
They can’t win on the battlefield. Not al-Qaida, not the Baathists in Iraq, not Hezbollah, not Hamas, nor Syria, nor Iran nor any other assemblage of jihadists.
Civilian deaths, and especially the deaths of children, are useful to terrorists. They influence world opinion and arm the anti-war left in America with powerful images of the suffering war inflicts on innocents. Those compelling images can shift battlefield advantage, one example of which is Israel’s 48-hour suspension of air attacks in southern Lebanon.
It’s unfathomable cruelty to use civilians as shields, as Hezbollah does, but that is the nature of this enemy. Every death that weakens Israeli or U.S. resolve, and every death that tilts world opinion against the United States and Israel, is of military value.
And if Hezbollah fires rockets from civilian areas and draws retaliation killing civilians, it can hope, too, that the attack will encourage the Lebanese to identify with Hezbollah. The deaths of women and children are all-around victories for terrorists.
And yet, despite the risk, Israel can’t sit back and do nothing — and no matter the consequences, if any, for the November elections in this country, the Bush administration should not lean on Israel to stop pursuing Hezbollah until it’s rendered militarily inert.
We are in a long war, both the United States and Israel, and if world and domestic opinion shapes the battlefield, we lose.
Europeans and Americans have lived for decades without having to commit, as the Israelis do daily, to the life-or-death question of which siege, which provocation, which round of suicide bombings is an immediate threat to their survival, and which can be suffered, lest retaliation evoke the disapproval of a “neutral” world quick to judge as “disproportionate” any response unintentionally harming anybody not certified as a credentialed, card-carrying terrorist.
Peace, or the illusion of it, combined in this country with a volunteer army that frees all citizens of the obligation that prior generations shared to put themselves at risk, has nurtured a detachment that carries consequences.
One disturbing consequence is that, just as members of the U.S. Supreme Court think it useful to look to international law for guidance when interpreting the U.S. Constitution, some Americans, and a sizable chunk of the left, now see themselves as arbiters of international disputes.
To the liberal mind, as it has evolved through decades of the tenured professors who took their anti-war, anti-Vietnam radicalism to campus, no nation or culture is inherently superior, except militarily and economically.
The United States does not enter any dispute with moral advantage or intent presumed to be noble. To the left, this country — but for world opinion and international bodies positioned to temper democracy’s predatory impulses, military and economic — would abuse and exploit, conducting wars for oil simply to avoid the cost and inconvenience of energy independence.
Unlike the Israelis, Americans are now free, as referees in a sporting contest, to sit out conflicts that don’t meet their test of worthiness, that happen not to fit in with their lifestyles, that fall on the watch of a president they dislike or that aren’t predetermined to be essential to the survival of this country or to the free world.
We are a nation seriously complacent, far too susceptible to photos and to emotion to sustain a war on terrorism against an enemy given to butchery, to suicide as a weapon, and to treating civilian innocents, including women and children, as soldiers on the battlefield.
We are a compassionate people who simply cannot imagine any human inviting an enemy to kill women and children. But that is the face of the evil that we encounter and that Israel encounters in the war on terrorism.
We can recoil in horror. We can pretend that if the militants saw our compassionate side, knew us as we know ourselves, they’d see too, as our anti-war left does, that war is not the answer.
But when confronted with an enemy willing to serve up children, war is the answer. And until Hezbollah is defeated, we should not try to persuade Israel otherwise.
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