…the “War on Terror” would involve flying planes into Afghan skyscrapers.
…The “American Revolution” would have been restricted to raising illegal taxes on the Brits in 1775.
…The Union would have had to stick with bombarding Confederate forts.
…We’d have had to have just retaken Kuwait and leave Hussein in power to be deposed over a decade later (oops)
…We’d have had to have to restrict ourselves to torpedoing German ships throughout the World War II.
..We’d have had to have to bomb a Japanese harbor and go home.
The “proportional” argument strikes me as childish.
Silly people may ‘get violent’ to serve their want for revenge, but smarter folks do so to solve problems. The limit is not “how much will it take to exact proportional revenge”, but “how much will it take to solve the problem”.
That said, the ‘smart’ folks manage to solve most of their problems without resort to violence. Unfortunately that is not always possible, and even when it is possible, it is not always the best option. Peace is not the greatest good.
“The “proportional” argument strikes me as childish. ”
Strikes me as disingenuous. The people who make this argument know exactly how bullshit it is.
“…how much will it take to solve the problem”.
Far more than the Israelis will ever be allowed to do.
Well, sure; and it’s also disingenuous — even if one accepts that the “proportionality” argument, out of Christian theology, is somehow beholden on Jews. It’s that the use of force must be proportionate to the harm inflicted, but to the objective to be reached. (Which, to be fair, seems to be reasonable secular ethics, as well.)
Stepping back for a sec, the only way that Sharon’s withdrawal from Gaza would have made any sense is if the policy in response to any attack would have been a sufficiently disproportionate attack, to deter future ones — immediate, heavy artillery fire, rather than occasional use of pinpoint weapons. That’s not what happened, and even in OCL, the only use of artillery was as battlefield prep for the infantry.
Proportional responses seem designed to prolong conflict rather than end conclict.
Right,
Becuse disprportionate responses have, so far, ended the Israeli – Palestinian conflict.
When one nation kills one of our spies, we should anihilate the entire human race other than our own citizens in reply.
When one group of people using the only weapons available, shoots impotently at their oppressors, the oppressor has EVERY right to murder women and children.
Right.
BTW Mitch, our reaction to people flying planes into buildings, was to attack a nation not involved, and that worked out so well.
The point being Mitch, you leap to the OTHER extreme – which is no less ridiculous.
NO ONE rational would suggest – though of course you argue against the fringe (I guess because you are the OTHER fringe) – or maybe because you can’t argue against the rational – anyway, no one rational suggests that responses be impotent, or even that they be limited to a response which will not accomplish the objective.
However, no one rational suggsts for a moment that brutalizing people in response to trivial damage, is ethical – well, no one except apparently you.
It leads to hatred that lasts centuries – but hey, no matter, kill em’ all, SCARE them into submission – all in the name of fighting terror.
Nietzche – Berg meets monster. The ends justified the means.
Penzie, in this universe, demonstrably, the IDF responses have been disproportionately small and controlled, so much so that the residents of Gaza have come to expect warning calls from the Defense Ministry — see http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/03/gaza-diary-israel — telling them to get out, and are downright peevish when they don’t get the calls.
Just look at the numbers. In an area as packed as Gaza is, the IAF wouldn’t be killing vastly more terrorists than the civilians that the terrorists are hiding among and behind if they weren’t not only trying very hard to nail the former without harming the latter, but good enough to do it, most of the time.
Just as a thought experiment, consider Hamas doing something uncharacteristically sensible: not firing missiles at civilian targets for forty-eight hours. Does anybody really doubt that the IDF would stop OCL?
Dear Penigma:
You’re an idiot.
Sincerely,
The World.
Peev,
The problem with your “argument” – indeed, with most of your “arguments” – is that it has nothing to do with what I’ve written.
It is entirely a matter of responding based on some template that exists only in your mind and, often as not, is only obliquely related to anything I’ve written.
It is, at the very least, a sign of very poor communication. At worst, it’s pretty narcissistic.
Peev? A narcissist?
Perish the thought.
1) Death
2) Taxes
3) Peev missing the point and launching in to non sequiturs.
Problem is that people assume proportionality to be linear. It isnt. Logarithmic at best. Using nuclear weapons to annihilate Gaza? Disproportional to the situation. Carpet bombing everything to stone age? Disproportional to the situation. Rolling the tanks into Gaza, killing as many Hamas they can find, bombing the crap out of Hamas, Bombing the crap out of the tunnels and any weapons, keeping the fence up, overwhelming victory? Absolutely justified.