NEWSPAPER COLUMNS
 ¶ Most Recent
¶ Miscellany
|
SUNDAY SPECTATOR
August 4, 2002
In the darkness
To fight a war successfully even a "war against terror" requires not only tactical but moral clarity. This is something about which I think the greatest military strategists have themselves been clear from Sun Tzu to J.F.C. Fuller. It is part of the mysterious reason the "better" side more often than not defeats the "worse" side in combat; for even getting better armed staffed and organized is a product of mental clarity. You have to know what you are doing and why. You may have to keep secrets from the enemy but you can never afford to keep secrets from yourself. This clarity is lost when out of anger or from some other essentially moral failing we do things that we know can't be right. Something has been bothering me for the last week; a relatively small event in the context of Israel's struggle for survival. The debate about it has already mostly passed and our thoughts have moved on to the next round of killing. But let's run the tape back for a moment to the assassination by F-16 of Salah Sheheda the Hamas terrorist commander in Gaza City on July 23. There could be no reasonable objection to the targeting and killing of Sheheda himself a man who went to his maker in the blood of many hundred innocent victims. His lieutenant in Hamas Zahar Nasser was also killed in the air strike. Here was another legitimate target though I think in his case a fortuitous "extra". The Israelis would never have ordered a special airstrike just for him. The Western outcry was not about these men but about the dozen who died with them: members of Sheheda's family and other non-combatants nine of them children. All were killed in the collapse of the building -- large house or small apartment block depending on the observer -- in which they were staying with Sheheda that night. I wrote about the strike in this paper as journalists must do before all the facts could be in. The full Israeli investigation will take months and is unlikely to have access to credible witnesses on the ground. I am still unable to get for instance a reliable answer to the question whether the innocents who were killed normally slept in the building. But it is plain that the Israeli aircraft fired a very substantial missile. It is now impossible to believe that the destruction of the whole building was not fully intended. Whereas I was told at the time by a source within the Israeli government that much smaller wire-guided rockets were used; a story I wouldn't have fallen for with more time to check since the rockets in question are never mounted on F-16s. (That's one source I'll never trust again.) George Jonas over lunch and in a column for the National Post brought home to me the full moral peril in the mission. If one accepts the Israeli position that Sheheda was not just a legitimate target but an urgent one; that he was in the middle of planning huge terrorist attacks that might have cost hundreds more lives and which could be confounded by his demise -- then the mission was defensible. As I argued myself: "To get to [him] on the ground would have meant a Mogadishu-style helicopter drop into the heart of the city or going in the long way with tanks; in either case carnage on several times the scale of Jenin. The method chosen was the most economical of human life." The strike could moreover be defended in the law of war. In the explicit words of the Fourth Geneva Convention part 3 article 28: "The presence of a protected person may not be used to render certain points or areas immune from military operations." By hiding himself out among such "protected persons" as the children and others sleeping around him -- by using such people as "human shields" as he did by daily habit -- Sheheda made himself legally responsible for their deaths. And let's not forget what the Israelis are up against; not only the terrorists but the rank hypocrisy of the international media. Most commentators and reporters too apply legal and moral rules exclusively to the Israelis. It is as if they are capable of committing "war crimes" and Palestinians are not. Palestinian behaviour is often unconsciously excused in the way a dog might be excused by a fine old lady from the RSPCA: "Of course he bit you! You were teasing him weren't you?" Yet in principle fair enough. It doesn't matter what the enemy does how murderous and indefensible his behaviour may be. What makes the Israelis so "Western" in their outlook is their refusal to allow such excuses for themselves. They continue to obey rules and decencies even when their enemy ignores them. Or they usually do. With his gift for cutting to the heart of such issues Mr. Jonas said to me The terrorists are always planning attacks. In retrospect it is hard to credit the Israeli argument that the elimination of Sheheda could be so urgent. Through years prior to the Al Aqsa Intifada they even had him in an Israeli gaol. (Though it wasn't the present government that foolishly let him go.) One is thus left with the uneasy feeling the "collateral damage" was quite intentional; that a message was being sent to the whole membership of Hamas and even to Palestinians at large: "If you can kill our little ones then we can kill yours." I shall let that last paragraph stand though it makes me uncomfortable. Who am I to preach to Israelis what is right and wrong from my safe room? For the little ones being slaughtered by terrorists are theirs not mine. Nor is the anger that could be behind such a policy something I am in a position to judge. This terrible understandable anger that I have felt in communicating with Israelis recently. But I am an ally. If we are going to win this thing if we are going to prevail if our common Western civilization is going to be vindicated we must not be dragged down. On this the rabbis are as clear as the priests: "an eye for an eye" is a prescription for savages. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
|
Top