SIVACRACY.NET: Alan Dershowitz: Degrees of Civilianship?

Alan Dershowitz, writes: 'Civilian Casualty'? It Depends'

There is a vast difference — both moral and legal — between a 2-year-old who is killed by an enemy rocket and a 30-year-old civilian who has allowed his house to be used to store Katyusha rockets. Both are technically civilians, but the former is far more innocent than the latter. There is also a difference between a civilian who merely favors or even votes for a terrorist group and one who provides financial or other material support for terrorism.

Finally, there is a difference between civilians who are held hostage against their will by terrorists who use them as involuntary human shields, and civilians who voluntarily place themselves in harm's way in order to protect terrorists from enemy fire.

These differences and others are conflated within the increasingly meaningless word "civilian" — a word that carried great significance when uniformed armies fought other uniformed armies on battlefields far from civilian population centers. Today this same word equates the truly innocent with guilty accessories to terrorism.

Oh, there are so many problems with this argument. Chiefly, it seems completely divorced from the real world, where soldiers and officers are not prepared to -- nor should we expect them to -- distinguish among Dershowitz' "types" of civilian. They have enough to worry about distinguishing civlilians from combatants.

Perhaps most troubling is that Dershowitz (and the leaders of Israel in recent weeks) have been invoking the exact immoral argument that Hamas and the IRA have been using for decades in support of the slaughter of innocent Israeli and British civilians: "They are all potential militants; some are just more culpable than others."

Hamas is wrong. The IRA was wrong. Dershowitz is wrong.

Yes, we need a better understanding of the role of civilians in unorthodox combat situations. But this is not a new thing. Let's not pretend that armies have not faced these issues since Lexington and Concord. Dershowitz, alas, does not help clarify the situation. He is too busy being clever.

Comments

As I have aged and had children I have come to consider myself a pacifist. I don’t support our war in Iraq, Israel’s in Lebanon or anyone else’s. I can’t say that I support the troops either. I struggle with this. It’s hard to square pacifism against the pure evil we deal with in the form of the jihadists who torment our society and others as well. I am still working on it.

The rationale for my pacifism is also my reason for disagreeing with both Dershowitz and Siva. The problem I have with Dershowitz is that I don’t think there is ever any morally justifiable way to kill a civilian; expedient maybe, but never moral. Siva appears to believe, falsely, that our soldiers can act in a morally sanitized way and achieve victory. Victory is the purpose of warfare.

Victory does not go to the party who fights fairly. Victory does not go to the party who win hearts and minds. Victory goes to the party who fights viciously and unfairly to kill the enemy. It goes to those who destroy his shelter and his society. It goes to those who make him fear for the safety of his wife and children. It goes to those who kill his wife and children when fear is not enough. It goes to those who strike fear in those who aid and abet him and, finally, kill even them when fear is not enough. Repugnant as that sounds, you shouldn’t advocate war, any war unless you can internalize that and be willing to go all the way with it.

Our nation has not had a decisive victory since WWII because we hide from that reality. We defeated the Germans and the Japanese because we burned their cities and factories, indiscriminately killed untold millions of civilians, occupied their countryside and brainwashed their children to our point of view. The reason this nation lurches from one incursion to the next is because we can’t decide whether to permanently occupy the moral high ground or the countryside of our enemies.

Posted by: Jardinero1 | July 24, 2006 03:02 PM

Well put. Thanks.

Posted by: Siva Vaidhyanathan | July 24, 2006 03:16 PM

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