http://www.the-idler.com/IDLER-02/7-25.html shows why the Israelis were right to consider Salah Shehada as a legitimate military target. It doesn't show why it was all right to consider anyone within 100 yards of him a target. Put it this way: suppose the Palestinians decided to target a settlement leader as a legitimate enemy target (and yes, I know, the Palestinians consider anyone in a settlement a legitimate enemy target; leave that for the moment) and decide to kill him by killing everyone in the settlement, men, women, and children. Would the Israelis, or anyone else, say, well, it was unfortunate but there it is?
Perhaps so. Collateral damage, or civilian casualties, are inevitable in war, and God knows the United States, from having been the champions of the Laws of War in the 19th Century was the instrument of their total overthrow in the 20th. There was universal condemnation of the bombing of Nanking and Rotterdam and other cities as WW II began; by its end we would glory in the fire raids that destroyed much of Tokyo. Is dropping incendiary bombs into a residential neighborhood a more legitimate act of war than firing a missile at an apartment containing an enemy leader -- or blowing up a settlement with everyone in it?
To our credit, when we decided -- wrongly in my view -- to intervene in Somalia by trying to apprehend General Adid, we didn't carpet bomb the city. We sent in heroes. Black Hawk down! And went in with more to get them out. Perhaps there would have been fewer casualties -- certainly fewer American casualties, but possibly fewer Somali as well -- if we'd just hosed down the area Adid was in with machine guns and rockets; would that have been preferable?
War is a dirty business. Sherman said war is hell, and meant it, and intended to see that everyone in the South accepted that fact. End the war by any means necessary: if that requires the bombing of Nanking, or Rotterdam, or Coventry, or Berlin, or Tokyo, or Dresden, then so be it; and the long tradition of International Law and the Laws of War begun by Hugo Grotius after the horrors of the Thirty Years War was a mistake best ended quickly. That was Sherman's view, and it was the view of Roosevelt and Churchill. It is the view of the Palestinian leadership. And apparently the view of the Israeli leadership as well.
The logic is this: best end it quickly. Following the Laws of War only prolongs the war, leaves people with the illusion that they can fight on, that the peasants in the field and the burgers in the towns can be safe while war rages on, and this is no longer true. End it. Hiroshima saved lives: Japanese as well as American. And of course that is true.
But it is true only if we accept the "Unconditional Surrender" war aims as legitimate; the Japanese would have negotiated peace long before 1945. They would have accepted the loss of all their overseas conquests, and heavy war reparations in the bargain, and even the occupation of some of their homeland (so long as that didn't include threats to the person of the Emperor) by mid-1944. With Germany the situation was similar: had the Allies broadcast peace terms that didn't include the dismemberment and occupation of Germany, Hitler wouldn't have lasted long after Stalingrad.
But without unconditional surrender and occupation, Macarthur in Japan and Lucius Clay in Germany would not have become American proconsuls charged with rebuilding those countries into liberal democracies and thus helping bring about the end of history...
My point is this: the Laws of War can endure if defeat is endurable; if the war aims of the victors do not include the total destruction of the enemy. If one side's war aim is extermination and enslavement of the other, as was usually the case in classical warfare, then there are no Laws of War, and the only military courtesies to be extended to a defeated enemy are to his mercenary officers and those of his troops who might join your army. All else is booty including women and children.
In the Middle East the war aims of the Palestinians do appear to be the extermination of Israel as a state, and if you listen to some of the Palestinian spokespeople, the physical extermination of the Israelis. The Israeli war aims, as expressed in the long and ultimately futile Peace Process, were some kind of negotiated stable arrangement. Unfortunately, during that peace process the Israelis sent mixed signals: the Settlements, which weren't just strategic border incursions, but were islands of hostility all through the occupied territories: and whose existence was not apparently on the negotiating table. And so long as those exist and expand, the Palestinians may legitimately believe that the Israeli war aims are unlimited.
If each side believes the other to have unlimited war aims and the ultimate goal of extermination, enslavement, or expulsion of the other from the area, then defeat is not acceptable, and the Laws of War do not apply.
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