Being Bad
January 6th, 2009 by Nick SaintI’ve been mulling over a lengthy Gaza post for a long time now, which has served as an excuse not to post much about the situation at all. But I can’t not say something about this, from Jonathan Chait, because it expresses what seems to be a commonly held view that isn’t remotely defensible:
I wrote a couple of posts over the weekend that mostly dealt with the morality of Israel’s incursion into Gaza, which I think is beyond question. The wisdom, on the other hand, is very much open to doubt.
That is simply bonkers. I won’t get into what I actually think about the incursion, but the idea that this might be morally justifiable but strategically unsound strikes me as a non-starter. If the incursion is bad strategy, it is bad morally. It is not at all controversial that the incursion, and the bombing before it, have resulted in the deaths of many civilians, including some who are too young to have supported Hamas in any capacity:
Sadly, this sort of thing is an unavoidable byproduct of any serious warfare, given the technology that has been available for the past sixty years. And I’m not arguing that war is never justifiable. But the situation in Gaza is one in which civilian casualties are necessarily going to be extremely high. There are surely ends which would justify such means, but you can’t divorce the justifiability of those means from the likelihood that they will actually achieve those ends, which is what Chait is clearly doing. When you are causing this much suffering, it’s not enough to be aiming for a lovely outcome; you need to be pretty damn sure you can make it happen.
January 6th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Excellent point.
One thing I’m not clear on the relative ‘worth’ of a civilian casualty compared to a soldier casualty.
If a missile attack will kill 8 civilians and a ground assault on the premises will result in 4 civilian casualties and perhaps 4 soldier casualties, how does the morality math work out? What about 2 and 6 or 6 and 2, etc, etc.
I don’t think modern democracies can go to war the old fashioned way for conflicts like this - there’s no tolerance for casualties, so the whole plausibility of going to war is built on putting the burden of the dead on the side without air superiority.
January 6th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Worth noting in the previous post that the hypothetical air assault/ground assault is in pursuit of a target, a person who is targeted for killing, as they say.
What’s awesome is how suicide bombers are framed as cowards for ‘not fighting fair’ and killing civilians while on the flip side, you’ve got a jet cruising at 600 miles per hour firing precision bombs into urban centers so there won’t be military casualties that cause public sentiment to turn against the war.
Just commenting on the framing of various actions rather than on the actual merit of the actions themselves.
January 6th, 2009 at 10:57 pm
[...] I posted on the absurdity of Jonathan Chait’s claim that the Gaza incursion was morally justifiable [...]