The High Minded Are Out To Lunch--Again

The recent self-examination of the Israeli Defense Force by the Israeli Defense Force was (hang on to your seat, bucko) self-exculpatory. But, self-exculpatory does not equal either a whitewash or a mass of crass tergiversation.

While stopping short of calling the IDF effort a blatant crock of caca, Amnesty International showing its typical partiality strongly implied that conclusion in its response to the IDF report. The group's press briefing referred to the report as "lacking credibility" and branded it as failing to account for either the totality of all (purported) civilian casualties or the observations made on the spot by Amnesty International sources.

Amnesty International holds the conceit that its observers are so Noble and High Minded that there is no way any of their spot reports could reflect any sort or semblance of agenda beyond a Lofty Thinking concern for the well-being of innocents caught in harm's way. This dubious assumption goes unquestioned by those who rely on the same High Minded notions as the fine folk at Amnesty.

The real problem of Amnesty International's critique is the group's failure to consider the culpability attendant upon Hamas' choice of battlefield. Amnesty must be aware, at least dimly, that Hamas acts under the color of government in the Gaza Strip. After all, they shot their way to power fair and square so the best trigger men won the election of blood. This means that Hamas had the responsibility to act in a way which protected the people living under their sway.

This responsibility was not only abdicated, it was tossed in the trash heap. Hamas made no effort to restrain those of its membership or those aligned with other armed factions to fire rockets against Israeli civilian targets. It did nothing to halt or even slow the flow of munitions and weapons to men dedicated to kill Israelis even if they died in the effort.

Beyond that, Hamas elected to place defensive positions in civilian structures. Hamas made the decision to allow the emplacement of offensive missiles in or near mosques, schools (including those operated by the UN) and residential areas. Hamas allowed, even encouraged the intermixing of civilians and armed personnel so as to assure that the IDF would have no option other than the killing of civilians in the effort to neutralise Hamas gun and bomb slingers.

It is quite true that there is an obligation, a duty, laid upon military forces to restrict to the greatest practical extent the harming of unarmed people including wounded combatants as well as non-combatants. There are those within the Legion of the High Minded who argue that a military must be willing to accept higher levels of casualties in order to assure that not a single civilian hair be harmed.

The duty placed upon military commanders and those under their command to refrain from inflicting harm on civilians is balanced by a long recognised duty that the defending forces and government take all necessary measures to protect their non-combatants. While the IDF may have been less, much less than ideally scrupulous in avoiding unnecessary damage and loss of life to civilians, Hamas was even more guilty of having taken no measures to protect those under their authority and, logically, protection.

The record of history is filled with excesses of civilian death during time of war. The days of Frederick the Great who sought to wage war so that neither the peasant in his field or the merchant in his counting house would notice its presence are long gone. Changes in the technology of war are the minor factor in this death of "civilized" or at least, civilian-free war.

The greater responsibility lies with governments. Governments, whether the offender or the defender, have proven increasingly willing to place civilians at the same or even greater risk as the front line grunt.

Hamas has taken this tendency to its logical (albeit criminal) extreme of actively choosing to fight a war in the most heavily populated portion of its mini-state. Hamas made the cynical and cold-blooded decision to assure maximal civilian loss of life and property in the hopes of winning the battle for international sympathy and support. Hamas knowingly and with calculated aforethought sought to place the IDF in a position where it would either have to bear the international onus of killing civilians or lose an unacceptably high number of its own soldiers.

Hamas well understood, indeed, counted upon the unfortunate democratic weakness which afflicts not only Israel but the US and other countries. The political unacceptability of too many body bags.

The US could not accept the number of bags coming home from Vietnam. This lesson was not lost upon others.

It was not lost on countries and pretenders such as Hamas who seek to wage a war of political will against a democratic adversary. Hamas bet its collective butt on the proposition that the IDF would both kill civilians and end the operation before it became or could become conclusive.

Right now, Amnesty International, whether its leadership knows it or not, is willing to acknowledge it or not, is acting according to the Hamas authored script. It is a propaganda arm of an admitted terrorist organisation pretending to the role but not the responsibilities of a legitimate government: Hamas.

What the IDF did with its report was self-justification. What Hamas did to provoke the necessity of the report was frankly criminal. What Amnesty International and others of the High Minded and Lofty Thinking sort are doing is not criminal, but it is facilitating the success of criminals.

It is regrettable that Amnesty International lacks the intelligence necessary to assure that its sentiments are not perverted by a gang of True Believing thugs.

Israelis Have Cause To Be Very, Very Nervous

Israelis have more reasons today to be reaching for the bottle of tranquilizers than ever before in the history of their country. The reasons are all good. And, all emerge from what old Soviet terminology called, "the correlation of forces."

Today, as for several years now, the correlation of political, diplomatic, military and global opinion forces are oriented against Israel's national and security interests. The revision of the previously pro-Israel correlation has been accelerating. This political delta V shows no sign of slackening.

To put it bluntly but accurately: The continued existence of Israel as currently constituted is not a priority--or even a significant consideration--for most of the world's politically articulate elite. Even in the US which has been Israel's more-or-less voluntary champion since the state's foundation, there are clear signs that the tide of elite opinion no longer runs fast and hard in Israel's favor.

In 1967 American applause for Israel's highly effective war of preemption and territorial expansion was instant, loud and long sustained. The Egyptian attack of Yom Kippur 1973 assured there would be no diminishing of American support for Israel, even if there was more than a little irritation in the higher echelons of the US Government over Israel's intransigence at relinquishing the Occupied Territories.

The Arab/Palestinian reliance upon terror tactics directed against Israel and (to some limited extent) its supporters may have been justified from the perspective of its employers (and the employers of terror's employers,) but it was counterproductive in that it both increased Israeli political will as well as that of the US to continue its support. Not until the First and Second Intifadas allowed, even encouraged the media of the US and much of the world to portray the Israelis as a species of terrorist employing overwhelming violence against children, youth and women did the correlation of forces start to shift away from Israel and in favor of that hazy group, the Palestinians.

For fifteen or so years now Israel has been losing the battle for the support of the politically articulate elite of Western countries generally. In so far as the Israelis have lost, the Palestinians have won. It has been and continues to be a zero-sum game.

The West--particularly members of its chattering class with their new found love affair with multi-culturalism and "diversity" (whatever that may mean) has been bombarded with images which at least purport to show the Israeli Goliath trampling the Palestinian David into a bloody mudhole. The venality, incompetence and ideological blinders of "Palestinian" leadership have gone by, if not unnoticed, then, at least, without comment.

The greed, corruption and utterly incompetent negotiating skills of Yassir Arafat and the posse of "Abu's" who surrounded him that are in largest single measure responsible for the current morass in which the "Palestinian" population tries to survive has not been appreciated by many, even most of the public opinion molders of the West including the US. These unphotogenic realities have been plastered over by images of IDF soldiers firing "non-lethal" rounds at Arab teenagers, videos of IDF bulldozers levelling Arab homes and IAF fired missiles hitting what seem to be civilian structures in Gaza.

When faced with the power of emotion invoking images, words of reason have no defense. And so the correlation of forces shifts tectonically in ways that cannot be countered even by the power of the Israel Lobby or the patently bloodthirsty policies of the ideologues running Gaza, and, to a lesser but still critical extent, the Palestinian Authority of the West Bank.

The Israelis should have seen it coming. They and their government well know the power of pure emotion to drive opinion and policy in democratic governments. After all, it was the power of emotion which assured support, particularly that of the US, for the creation of Israel.

It was the power of emotion and the historical facts upon which that emotion was both based and exploited by the founders of Israel which gives the words of Iranian president Ahmedinejad their force of authority both in the Muslim countries and, unfortunately, in much of the West. In the midst of the nest of hate and loathing Ahmedinejad's venomous spewing creates, there is an egg of truth.

The egg of truth is simply this. Without the slaughter of the innocents performed by Nazi Germany and its eager helpers elsewhere in Europe during World War II, there would have been no Israel. The lives of the six or so million Jews snuffed out by the Nazis and their supporters from France to the Ukraine bought the sympathies and understanding of post-War western governments--particularly the US--for the establishment of the State of Israel.

Yesterday Ahmedinejad made that accusation before a deeply divided audience in Geneva. The Iranian Orator-in-Chief was wrong in branding Israel a racist country headed by a racist government. He was all-too-correct in claiming that Europe and the US paid their debt to the dead of world Jewry by facilitating the creation of Israel.

Rightly or wrongly the emotional torrent of disgust and guilt which greeted the belated public revelation of the Nazi extermination of the Jews of Europe gave force to the Zionist goal of assuring Jews had a state, a state which would provide both refuge and protection to a dispersed and persecuted people. Moral revulsion would not have been enough. The task demanded the full enlistment of powerful emotion. The pictures and survivors' stories of the Nazi inferno enlisted and focused emotion such that even the still more than a little antisemitic American public approved of Truman's recognition of the new Jewish state.

Emotion, periodically restoked both by dramatic resurrection of the Holocaust and well guided fondness and admiration for the heroic Israelis and their state blooming in the desert went a long, long way to assuring continued, virtually unquestioned support for Israel and its government. The negative emotion of fear--fear of being branded "antisemitic" by the Israel Lobby or some other group of Israel supporters has also gone a long, long way to assuring that it is impossible for the US to treat Israel as though it were a standard issue nation-state with self-defined national and strategic interests.

Ahmedinejad is not engaging in hate-mongering when he challenges the West, including the US, to examine the degree to which emotion drove the process of off-loading a long festering and finally very, very bloodily expressed antisemitism upon the Mideast. History is not that simple, that lacking in irony.

In token of that irony and complexity, an American diplomat, Loy Henderson, as well as that towering figure, George C. Marshall, warned President Truman that the emotion of the moment, understandable and justifiable as it might be, would eventually evoke a countering emotional climate in the Mideast which would vex the US for generations yet to come. Both men (as well as others occupying positions of grave responsibility in those years of transition) warned of unending Arab hatred being the inevitable price to be paid for what Arabs and their governments would necessarily see as a foreign body inserted by outsiders in the Arab flesh.

Ahmedinejad is doing just what Henderson, Marshall and the others warned would be the case. It is true that other, many other Mideast voices over the past sixty years have made the same charges and spouted the same hate. Ahmedinejad not only has a propensity for very blunt and infuriating statements, he is adept at capturing the attention of the media and has the good fortune of riding a rising tide.

The tide is rising in Israel's disfavor in large measure to the success of the Iranian Revolution and its ongoing campaign of getting away with flipping the bird at the US, the West and standards of international deportment generally. The success, defiance and over-the-edge rhetoric assure that no Arab leader--including those of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, can afford to be seen as any less resolute, any less absolutist in their opposition to Israel and its supporters--the US in particular.

A second reason for the tide to have turned against Israel is the behavior of the government of Israel and its military forces. Both have been widely portrayed as militaristic and militarily ineffective. The net result of both the 2006 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the recently concluded incursion into the Gaza strip has been to elevate the perception of Israel as a bully and its military as being a weapon both blunt and ineffective.

The unveiled threats by Israel to singlehandedly abate the latent Iranian nuclear program in a manner akin to their 1981 air strike on the Osiris reactor in Iraq has done nothing to dispel the widespread view that Israel is an out-of-control aggressor willing to place the peace of the world as well as the global petro-economy at risk. At the same time there is little or no belief that Israel could undertake such an attack with the slightest chance of even partial success without the full cooperation of the US.

The effect of Israeli posturing and tough talk coupled with the rather non-credible nature of the threats has been counterproductive to both Israeli interests and the chance for success in the pursuit of the "Two State Solution" to the Israeli-Palestinian dilemma.

The latest roadblock to the "peace process" (The Geek feels intestinal revulsion for that buzz phrase as it is inherently meaningless.) is the refusal by the Palestinian Authority to recognise Israel as a Jewish state prior to two-state oriented negotiations. On the surface the PA's refusal to do so is irrational. After all any number of states dub themselves "Islamic republics." And, Israel was diplomatically recognised by the US and other countries as a Jewish state.

However, the PA position is anything but irrational. Faced with the Iranian paradigm of total rejectionism and Iran's support of Hamas, no PA official with hopes of continuing in office (or even staying alive) can do less. The intransigence of Iran has meshed perfectly with that of Israel to block meaningful progress in the search for a solution to the Palestinian affair.

The falling stock of Israel in the eyes of many in the Western politically articulate elite limits severely the pressure which can be brought to bear on the PA, let alone Hamas. Given the existential threat which Israelis perceive to exist in the Iranian nuclear project, there is little or no political inducement for any Israeli politician with a hope for his or her political future to be seen as backing down.

Unless and until the Israeli government can take effective action to recover its previous glory in the eyes of European and American opinion molders, it must rely on the formidable capacities of the Israel Lobby to keep US politicians on the reservation.

The limits of the Lobby may be in sight as the American public becomes increasingly weary of war and rumors of war, as it seeks, perhaps, to return to the presumed innocent and glorious days of isolationism. Certainly, there is little or no reason to believe that the American public would support an attack by one nuclear power (Israel) against a wannabe owner of nukes (Iran) which resulted in a worsening of our current economic disaster zone.

Equally there is no reason to believe that the Obama administration, which is facing new and growing problems in Pakistan and the Gulf of Aden while trying to solve the old ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, wants to add an Israeli strike on Iran to the mix. (And, one has to wonder if any perception of American support, even that of the tacit sort, would simplify our challenging dealings with China, Russia and LatAm.)

The incoming Israeli Prime Minister has made his career from tough talk and tougher action. It has been just that sort of robust rhetoric and fierce action which has produced the radical change in the correlation of forces. The challenge for him is not figuring out the weapons mix which will best delay Iranian nuclear ambitions or how to play Hamas against the PA. The challenge for Bibi is that of reconstructing the old correlation of forces.

Good luck, Bibi.

The challenge for the US is to retrieve the long abandoned reputation for even-handedness with which we were once seen in the Mideast.

Good luck, Barack.