Noah Pollak nails a particularly egregious element of the West’s inconsistencies in denouncing the inhumanity of war. Here we deal with the astounding difference in civilian to combatant casualty ratios between US forces and Israeli in targeted killings: 50:1 (50 civilians killed for every targeted combatant vs. somewhere between 3:1 (at worst), and less than 1:1 (more combatants than civilians killed) in the latest operation in Gaza. Comments at the end.
Re: Call Off the Drones?
NOAH POLLAK - 05.05.2009 - 4:36 PM
There is a statistic in the David Kilcullen quote that Max excerpts below that I find absolutely arresting:Since 2006, we’ve killed 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we’ve killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area.
I’m used to parsing the civilian-to-terrorist kill ratio as it is obsessively applied to Israel and its enemies, but even by those standards, we are dealing in Pakistan with a military campaign that far surpasses anything the IDF has done in its destructiveness to civilians. We’re talking about a 50:1 ratio of civilian to terrorist deaths. In the famed “Jenin massacre,” fully half the Palestinians killed were terrorists, for a 1:1 ratio. In 2004, Sheikh Yassin, the “spiritual leader” of Hamas, was killed along with two bodyguards and nine bystanders — a 3:1 ratio. At the time, the British foreign secretary denounced the operation, saying that Israel “is not entitled to go in for this kind of unlawful killing and we condemn it. It is unacceptable, it is unjustified and it is very unlikely to achieve its objectives.”
During the 2006 war with Hezbollah, Israel killed — exact numbers are unknown — around 1,100 civilians and 600 Hezbollah, for less than a 2:1 ratio. And during the recent Gaza war, out of around 1,200 Palestinian casualties, over 700 were terrorists — better than a 1:1 ratio, which is astonishingly good, given the way Hamas fought. The example of Israel and Hezbollah is, in this context, analogous to the United States and Al Qaeda: both face virulent terrorist organizations that thrive in territories uncontrolled by the weak governments of Pakistan and Lebanon. Now imagine that Israel had been conducting a Predator drone war over the past few years that had killed 14 Hezbollah leaders and 700 Lebanese civilians. Is there any chance that this would not be a constant source of global hysteria?
And so, as far as the U.S.’s drone war is concerned, I have a few questions: Where are the shrill denunciations of disproportionate force and extrajudicial killings? Where are the UN investigations? Where are the condemnations from Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the UN Human Rights Council? Where are the front-page New York Times exposes of American war crimes? Where are the indictments of U.S. officials by European judges? Why hasn’t Pat Buchanan compared the United States to the Nazis? Why hasn’t the Guardian compared Waziristan to a concentration camp? Where are the bloody front-page pictures of dead Pakistani children? Where are the sympathetic stories of lives ruined and communities destroyed because of the United States’ indiscriminate use of force? Why hasn’t Andrew Sullivan commenced a discourse on America’s violations of international law? Where is the hand-wringing from liberals about how our attacks are only perpetuating the cycle of violence and recruiting more terrorists? Why aren’t Zbigniew Brzezinski and Steve Clemons lecturing us that diplomacy is the only solution? Why isn’t anybody detailing the outrageously disproportionate force the Army is employing against a group of rural tribesmen armed only with RPG’s and rifles?
I think there might be a double standard at work here.
Double standard doesn’t begin to get at the problem. First of all, at one level this needs to be understood in the context of what Charles Jacobs calls, the Human Rights Complex, which argues that if you want to gauge the intensity of moral outrage at Human Rights violations, look not to the victim, nor how much that victim suffers, but to the perpetrators: if they’re white, the indignation will wax, if they’re of color, it will wane. Here we find an interesting variant: apparently the Jews are the super-whites. Given that a couple of generations ago, before WW II, they weren’t considered white, that’s quite a journey to traverse in the universe of Western moral thought.
Among other things, this “little” detail illustrates a number of points:
1) The Israeli army has the most stringent standards on collateral civilian casualties in the world. They have called off strikes where the civilian casualties are way below the US average.
2) Israeli leftists are by far the most self-critical on the planet. When even a small number of civilians are killed Israelis demonstrate, write scathing articles in the major newspapers, publish lengthy articles in scholarly journals denouncing the unacceptable damage done to innocent civilians.
3) The American left has much more energy to protest Israeli violations than those of its own country. The NYT’s, for example, ran a fine article on the problems of the US in Pakistan, which presented these drone attacks as the most effective policy we have so far… without even mentioning the civilian casualty toll.
4) This problem may have something to do with both a combination the weak will to self-criticize among US progressives, and the bully effect of being able to pick on Israel at no cost.
5) And, last but not least, this does confirm my argument about moral Schadenfreude as the current most popular form of left-wing Judeophobia around these days. Nothing, apparently, makes progressives so happy as getting hysterical about Israeli crimes against Palestinian civilians. After all, won’t that bring peace?