Tigerhawk has some thoughts on this lefty canard:
During 2006’s Hezbollah war I wrote this post, which remains sadly germane to the present fighting with Hamas:
The left claims that the powerful states of the world, especially the United States and Israel, need not fear for their security because they can use their military power to deter aggression. To a post-Cold War lefty, the magic of deterrence supposedly obviates the need to intervene preemptively, or to remove regimes that commit “petty” acts of war against us or even declare themselves to be our enemy. See, e.g., the most frequently offered reasons why we should not have removed Saddam, or should not consider military options to deal with Iran. We can, after all, obliterate any power that actually attacks us, so why worry?
What your basic anti-defense lefty does not admit, however, is that effective deterrence requires not only the capability to retaliate, but that the threat to retaliate be credible. The former without the latter is worthless.
The requirement that retaliation be proportional reather than “massive” destroys the credibility of the threat to retaliate and therefore the effectiveness of the deterrance. Why? Because it allows the attacker to determine the price he will pay for launching the attack. If the attacker knows that he can absorb a blow equal to the one he delivers, then he will not be concerned that the defender has the capability to retaliate massively.
This is like limiting the penalty for property crimes to restitution. Why not rob the bank? If you’re caught, you only have to give the money back.
The advocates of “proportionality”, therefore, are undermining the effectiveness of threatened massive retaliation as a means for preventing war. If the left succeeds in promoting this ridiculous idea as a new norm of international behavior or requirement of international law, it will have destroyed the effectiveness of deterrence, the one means that we know reliably prevents war in the first place. Surely this is not what the left and the Europeans hope to accomplish.
Surely not…
[Update a few minutes later]
Michael Totten asks what a proportionate response would look like:
The Israeli counterattack is, indeed, disproportionate, but it could hardly be otherwise. “At last count,” J.G. Thayer wrote, “one Israeli and two Palestinians (sisters, ages 13 and 5) died from rocket attacks. So a proportionate response, one presumes, would have required Israel to kill a single Palestinian and two of its own citizens.”
There were, I suppose, other “proportionate” responses available aside from killing one Palestinian and two Israelis. The Israel Defense Forces might have launched thousands of air strikes against targets in Gaza to match the thousands of Qassam rockets fired at the cities of Sderot and Ashkelon. It’s unlikely, however, that this is what Israel’s critics have in mind.
So what do they have in mind? What would a legitimate and “proportionate” response actually look like? Surely they don’t believe Israel should scrap its sophisticated weapons systems, build Qassam rockets, and launch those at Gaza instead.
It’s hard to know what they believe, other than that Israel is intrinsically evil.
[Late morning update]
More thoughts from Alan Dershowitz:
The firing of rockets at civilians from densely populated civilian areas is the newest tactic in the war between terrorists who love death and democracies that love life. The terrorists have learned how to exploit the morality of democracies against those who do not want to kill civilians, even enemy civilians.
The attacks on Israeli citizens have little to do with what Israel does or does not do. They have everything to do with an ideology that despises – and openly seeks to destroy – the Jewish state. Consider that rocket attacks increased substantially after Israel disengaged from Gaza in 2005, and they accelerated further after Hamas seized control last year.
In the past months, a shaky cease-fire, organized by Egypt, was in effect. Hamas agreed to stop the rockets and Israel agreed to stop taking military action against Hamas terrorists in the Gaza Strip. The cease-fire itself was morally dubious and legally asymmetrical.
Israel, in effect, was saying to Hamas: If you stop engaging in the war crime of targeting our innocent civilians, we will stop engaging in the entirely lawful military acts of targeting your terrorists. Under the cease-fire, Israel reserved the right to engage in self-defense actions such as attacking terrorists who were in the course of firing rockets at its civilians.
The world (and much of the media) is nuts when it comes to Israel.
[Afternoon update]
Heh. Disproportionate humanitarian aid:
No indication yet that any aid packages have been strapped onto the 6300 (and counting) missiles those humanitarians from Hamas have fired into Israel since 2005. It seems to me this Israeli aid is very disproportionate. We’ll be back to let you know if the New York Times thinks it should stop until Hamas catches up.
I won’t hold my breath.
