What's the goal of the Israeli war? Ostensibly it's to eliminate Hamas. You can get rid of the government, but the idea that you can eliminate it as a political organization is delusional.
Every Israeli but the delusional knows this. The goal is, for better or worse, much more nebulous. Nobody wants to acknowledge the real goal, but everybody knows what it is.
The goal is, as many have said, deterrence. Make sure something of this scale does not happen again for the foreseeable future: from Hamas, from Hezbollah, from Iran, from powers farther afield who, for all we know, may be underwriting them.
Nobody vaguely Left wants to hear the 'd-word' ever again, with its echoes of Cold War paranoia and paradoxical belief in peace through strength, but deterrence worked, and nothing else ever did.
How do you deter them? By making the price so high that no one will think of doing it again. You destroy the capability of making war, and that holds things until they grow back, at which point you have to do it all over again. There is no other way.
People are saying that the collateral damage is much too high and that Israel should be making much more precise hits rather than damage. This IS the precision version. Even the targets properly hit can cost 100 civilian lives when the targets are deliberately placed in civilian areas, but even when the targets aren't hit, you've inflicted enough damage that people realize the price of pursuing this horrible business, not more than that, but enough to make people realize that pursuit of horror results in the horror inflicted back at them.
The war against Hamas isn't a far away deterrence war, this is right next door where if you flinch about human lives, they won't. If you want to see the true damage version of this? Look up what Russians did in Chechnya and Ukraine and Afghanistan, look up what the Serbians did in Srebrenica, look up what the Syrian government did to Aleppo, look up Iraq's 'War of the Cities', look up America's firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo (and let's not forget atomic damage), look up what the WWII Soviets did to the Baltics and Poland, look up what the Japanese did in Nanjing or Manilla or Chiangjiao, look up what the Germans did in Warsaw and Stalingrad and Lidice. Look up 'Operation Tannenberg' or the 'Katyn Massacre.'
Whether you're 'the good guys' or 'the bad guys,' this is what you do when you're in wars of survival. Once you're 'in it', there's no getting out until its over. Nazis commit the bad version of this, but anti-Nazis commit versions of it nearly as bad, because that's the only way you stop Nazis.
This is why, when there's no war, you endure every humiliation to avoid violence and conflict, because once you get there, you have no choice but go all in with no half-measures. You can't domesticate war, and you can't expect any enemy to abide by rules of warfare. You can't pretend there are victors in war. You can't pretend there is honor in war. War is humanity at its most shameful, and we will never, ever be rid of it. In the late-19th century there was a large-scale attempt to rid us of it from the followers of Tolstoy and Marx, and it only clamped the right wing control of governments down farther until those right wing authorities grew so divorced from reality that they made world war over nothing. After World War I, that attempt at pacifism grew into the mainstream, Hitler exploited it, Lenin and Stalin exploited it, Hirohito and Tojo exploited it, and the result was the deadliest conflict in human history. It was as much idealism that lead us there as it was bellicosity, and the more idealism there is, the more nihilist war makers can exploit it.
There is no such thing as peacetime any more than there's such thing as justice or security. There is only deterrence. What we think of as wartime is certainly war for the country fighting for its life, but in asymmetric warfare? It's the conflicts we fight far away so that war, that stinking cataclysm of a thing, doesn't spread around the globe. The country fighting for its life will fight much harder. Hamas will kill children intentionally, and Israel will drop more bombs next door than the US ever does in wars fought far away. That is the way war is fought, and the side that wins is the side more desperate to win. For the country that isn't desperate, they don't have to win, they just have to fight so that countries at peace know better than go to war too.
So many people would read that and ask: how can people view life so cheaply? Look around. When there are 9 1/2 billion people, brought into being at the expense of a million other species, when a billion of them could easily lose their lives in global warming and perhaps another billion from artificial intelligence misapplied, where is the evidence that all lives matter?
War and deterrence, properly fought, is the struggle to make sure that as many lives will matter as can matter. There is no such thing as the good guys or the bad guys in war, but there is probably a side that is slightly more good or bad than the other, and as dirty as it makes you feel, that is the side to which we have to pledge allegiance unless the side that 'isn't great' becomes truly bad.
A certain TV host said that people who say that the Palestinian people are not collectively responsible for Hamas are disgusting.
For fuck's sake, of course they're collectively responsible. Not all Palestinians, certainly not the young, but whichever Palestinians so prized their dignity that they'd vote Hamas are collectively as responsible as Israelis who so prize their honor that they'd vote Likud. And even if that's just a quarter of the population each, that's still an enormous segment of the population. Just as every Islamist, pan-Arab, and hardcore socialist fanatic who excuses Hamas and Hezbollah brought Palestinians to this state, every Israeli right winger brought us the massacres at Be'eri and the Nova Music Festival, and so did every American right winger who excused them. Every Palestinian who voted Hamas knew exactly what they were in 2006 no less than every Netanyahu voter knew who he was by the time he first became Prime Minister in 1996.
It took 125,000 Germans dying in the Battle of Berlin to replace Hitler, mostly civilians, and who can argue that lives weren't ultimately saved through it? If you want to get rid of Hamas, you have to live with the thought of terrible death. And if, over time, Israel grows into a Halachic state - controlled by the ultra-Orthodox and hard-right fanatics who make Netanyahu look sensible, don't think it couldn't be a net good to accept a few ten thousand casualties to get rid of them too.
...and, let's add, if the US becomes one party rule and pursues truly mass war around the globe, not like Iraq or Afghanistan but....
Life is a continual struggle to make life less cheap than it is, but what do you honestly think that struggle entails?
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