This time I began by running a Technorati search using the keywords “Qana” and “IDF,” then sorting the results according the blogs with the most authority. Matt Drudge reports that two IAF pilots intentionally missed targets for fear civilians were in the area, but that wasn’t the sort of thing I was after.
Fortunately Instapundit soon provided it. It has a post by Andrew L. Jaffee at netwmd.com, who starts off with the sentence “Remember the Qana “massacre,” which turned out to be quite questionable — an event trumped up to smear Israel’s right to self-defense (see here and here, also) — before moving on to a story about a stringer for Reuters who photoshopped a picture of Beirut after an airstrike to increase the amount of smoke. (This story has been making the rounds all day long and has hard core MSM haters chortling with glee. I don’t quite get it. The guy shouldn’t have done it and Reuters has fired him, but nobody denies that the air strike in question actually occurred.)
But it’s that first sentence I want to explore. Qana turned out to be quite questionable — past tense, definite, a known truth. How can we be certain? Well, there’s a story dated August 3 that reports as fact the speculation which the IDF has since abandoned, that the building in which so many died collapsed eight hours after the attack. The author supplies no evidence for this. Nor is the headline “Media Fraud – Kana Residents Were Murdered By Hezbollah” substantiated by anything other than an assertion dressed up as fact that Hezbollah militiamen deliberately prevented anyone from leaving the building until it collapsed. The author cites no one who was anywhere near Qana save a report from Brent Sadler of CNN, who is said to have reported that no bomb landed closer to the building than 20 or 30 meters. The author’s source is a “Middle East expert” affiliated with the right wing magazine Front Page; his source, in turn, is apparently IsraelInsider, which I cannot access at the moment, though I’ve provided a link to it. However, I can access the CNN transcript of Sadler’s broadcast. Not only does he say nothing of the kind, he can find scant evidence that Hezbollah had any military presence in Qana:
[Soledad] O’BRIEN: Israel says that its warplanes today hit a vehicle believed to be carrying a senior Hezbollah militant. It was not. In fact, the vehicle was carrying Lebanese army soldiers. The aide to a general was killed.
The airstrike came after Israel agreed to a 48-hour halt in its air campaign. That, after scores of people were killed on Sunday in Qana, Lebanon.
Let’s get right to CNN’s Brent Sadler. He’s in Qana this morning.
Brent, good morning.
BRENT SADLER, CNN BEIRUT BUREAU CHIEF: Good morning, Soledad.
Behind me you can see the building that was destroyed. Inside that building, during an Israeli airstrike, were scores of Lebanese civilians, many of them children, taking refuge from Israeli bombardments.
This is a Hezbollah sympathetic area. It is Qana, and Qana all around as you enter this area has been tremendously damaged by Israeli air activity over the past number of days. But specifically, world attention is being focused on the events leading up to the strike against this building.
The Israelis say that Hezbollah was firing Katyusha rockets close to this location. We see no proof on the ground, but I wouldn’t expect we would be able to given the fact the whole area is covered with concrete, and it’s difficult to see any tracks of any activity by Hezbollah.
I can tell you that the past several hours we’ve been here, Soledad, I can hear Israeli drones. They are pilotless surveillance aircraft flying over head. And I spoke to a representative from Amnesty International, and she said that given the fact those drones had been very active in the days, according to eyewitnesses, before the strike against this building, that the Israelis should have known that there were civilians in this area when that strike was ordered.
Now, why has Qana touched off such raw emotion? Why has world attention swung fiercely around the diplomatic level after this attack? You have to turn back the pages of history, Soledad, and take a look at what happened in 1996, April 18th, during another Israeli air and artillery blitz set out to destroy Hezbollah.
It was called Israel’s Grapes of Wrath offensive. During that offensive, Israel shelled a United Nations compound here also at Qana, killing more than a hundred Lebanese civilians who were taking shelter with U.N. peacekeepers. That’s why so much attention has been focused on this town of Qana.
Back to you, Soledad.
Jaffee’s other two links are to his own blog. One of his posts wrings his hands over the media’s unmitigated gall in showing emotionally-charged images of the dead at Qana; the other essentially quotes the HonestReporting.com communique I discussed in Part 2.
Well, the hell with this. I’m not going to waste any more time on ideologues who just make things up and quote themselves. It’s a good thing these people are so good at sneering and character assassination. They can’t craft a fact-based argument worth a lusty crap.
14 Comments
This kind of goes with what you have been discussing lately.
I’m sure everyone has heard about or read Washington Post Pentagon correspondent Thomas Ricks’ report, suggesting Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of its rockets in order to win the PR War (which I commented on in the “Civilians in the Path of War” http://warhistorian.org/wordpress/?p=344). At first I thought to suggest such a thing was pure lunacy. But the more I consider it… well, desperate times… desperate measures.
It seems the role of the non-combatant has indeed changed because of the emerging PR War that has to be won.
Here’s the main part of the transcript:
HOWARD KURTZ: Hold on, you’re suggesting that Israel has deliberately allowed Hezbollah to retain some of it’s fire power, essentially for PR purposes, because having Israeli civilians killed helps them in the public relations war here?
RICKS: Yes, that’s what military analysts have told me.
KURTZ: That’s an extraordinary testament to the notion that having people on your own side killed actually works to your benefit in that nobody wants to see your own citizens killed but it works to your benefit in terms of the battle of perceptions here.
RICKS: Exactly. It helps you with the moral high ground problem, because you know your operations in Lebanon are going to be killing civilians as well.
For more: http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0608/06/rs.01.html
Here’s some food for thought from one of our most popular military historians:
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson080406.html
Here’s another striking passage in the CNN transcript you supplied:
KURTZ: Tom Ricks, “The New York Times” reported the other day, quote, “Israel is now fighting to win the battle of perceptions,” which to me says the battle of headlines. And, in fact, an Israeli cabinet minister was quoted, not by name, as saying, “That the narrative at the end, is part of the problem.” I’m starting to hear echoes of Iraq.
RICKS: Echoes of Iraq, yes. But also the Israelis are very sophisticated in their handling of the media. They consider it part of the battlefield, officially. The word “narrative” always comes up with conversations with Israeli national security officials. They consider shaping the narrative, the battle for the narrative, to be key as part of any war fighting. So they see the media as part of the battlefield. And, in fact, there’s some belief from our reporters that they have occasionally targeted the media.
As for Hanson, I rarely find his views worth the time of day. His generalizations are so sweeping, his ability to engage with other points of view so lacking, that everything he writes reads like self-parody. And when he refers to the opinions of the soft-spoken, ever civil Jimmy Carter as “ravings,” it seems like a classic case of Jungian projection. Believe me, there’s a reason I excised VDH from my blogroll long ago.
But surely there must be reasonable voices on the political right or pro-Israeli side (I use both terms because I don’t think they’re interchangeable.) Though I gave up on my experiment today in disgust, I want to believe I just stumbled into a bunch of mediocrities with more ideological conviction than intellectual honesty. Who is worthy of engagement out there?
Mark,
I’m not sure what, exactly, you’re trying to engage with. Either Qana was a case of deliberate targeting of civilians, a clear war crime, or it wasn’t. There’s no evidence that it was. If it wasn’t, it either was a case of massive indifference — impeachable, as you say — or negligence. If it was negligence, it was either a failure of intelligence — correctable, perhaps — or a battlefield mistake.
I’m still not sure what you’re looking for: evidence of Hezbollah presence? The IDF has released some information which ought to help. Evidence of Hezbollah absence? Tough to prove, given the biases inherent in any post hoc investigation.
What are you trying to find? Apologists with rigor? If you dismiss the context — as you seem to in part 2 — there’s nothing to discuss really, because Qana isn’t comprehensible as an isolated incident.
Jonathan, I’m simply after the answer to the question I posed in the title of the Cliopatria post: What happened at Qana? Different versions have surfaced and I wanted to see if it was possible to get to the bottom of it. It was. Easily. Because when you strip away what seem obvious attempts to muddy the picture — the supposed 8-hour lapse between the attack and the building’s collapse, the assertions that no Israeli bombs actually struck the building, the allegations that Hezbollah essentially ensured that the civilians would die by blocking their escape until the building collapsed, the charges that the media and/or bleeding heart NGOs distorted what occurred — then the facts of the case become clear.
Probably you haven’t followed my earlier exchanges on this blog about just war theory, especially the imperative to employ firepower discriminately and to observe the principle of “double effect.” For the sake of convenience, I’ll copy the relevant passage here:
8. The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants. Civilians are never permissible targets of war, and every effort must be taken to avoid killing civilians. The deaths of civilians are justified only if they are unavoidable victims of a deliberate attack on a military target.
Re this last, a principle called “double effect” is often invoked as a standard for conduct. Michael Walzer’s formulation is perhaps the best: “Double effect is a way of reconciling the absolute prohibition against attacking noncombatants with the legitimate conduct of military activity,” which may unavoidably expose noncombatants to harm. Its key contention is that “the intention of the actor is good, that is, he aims narrowly at the acceptable effect [e.g., the death or incapacitation of combatants]; the evil effect [death or injury to noncombatants] is not one of his ends, nor is it a means to his ends, and, aware of the evil involved, he seeks to minimize it, accepting costs to himself.” (Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations, 2d ed. [New York, 1992], pp. 153, 155.)
Ever since this campaign began, my concern with the IDF has been that its emphasis on air strikes and artillery bombardments do not conform to the principle of double effect. But such a discussion, to be useful, has to be grounded in fact — in a specific event — and Qana fit the bill.
You say that in Part 2 I dismiss the context. How so? The laws of war contain two main strands: jus ad bellum (the law concerning resort to war) and jus in bello (the law concerning the conduct of war). One can have a just cause for going to war, but if the means employed are impermissible the war is unjust. It’s not a question of the end justifying the means, which is basically what HonestReporting.com wants to argue. That, and apparently the fact that if your enemy targets noncombatants that vitiates your obligation to avoid striking noncombatants.
So that’s my position. If someone wants to argue with me about these or other points, that’s fine. I welcome it. But it’d be impossible to have a productive exchange until the facts of the case were reasonably well established, and that’s what I tried to do.
Hope this makes things a bit more clear. Thanks for writing.
Mark -
Didn’t mean to hit a nerve with VDH…. I was surprised by your response, but that’s ok.
I do agree he generalizes and is very hard on decent folk like Jimmy Carter. Not sure how that constitutes anything really…
“Believe me, there’s a reason I excised VDH from my blogroll long ago.”
Surprised you would ask such a thing. I can’t just “believe” you, c’mon, so could you be more specific in terms of where he is getting it wrong? If you have a post archived simply provide that link as I admit I am kinda new to your blog having only visited it since January. I’m sure you can be specific and point out his historical errors or is it simply his writing style that irritates you? I’m just curious.
I mentioned him as I thought I saw his book(s) listed as required reading for one of your classes. (If I am wrong I apologize.) Would love to be a fly on the wall when (if) his books are discussed in your class…
LOL
Chris
The weapons used in war must discriminate between combatants and non-combatants.
Weapons can’t discriminate anything. Combatants do that. The question, which you cannot answer from a single case like Qana (at least not with press reports), is whether Qana represents a failure of doctrine or an individual case.
You misunderstand what I take from the context which you seem to dismiss: I’ve NEVER argued that the violation of rules of war by one party releases the other from their obligations. To the contrary, I’ve argued the opposite many times. But there is a tactical reality in South Lebanon which may indeed make it impossible for the IDF to wage a perfect war even if they try.
You’re right, I haven’t been following your arguments about “just war”; I don’t follow anyone’s arguments about “just war” because I’ve never seen it argued honestly or sympathetically. It’s a bludgeon, however subtle the wording, based on Catholic doctrine (medieval, if memory serves), primarily used to delegitimize modern wars we don’t like.
Hi Chris,
You didn’t hit a nerve, exactly. It’s just that I regard Victor Davis Hanson as a very gifted historian who has transformed himself into a very good polemicist — “good” in the sense that he’s chosen his political cause and doesn’t let complexity, nuance, or fair-mindedness intrude into his work. Good polemicists are in no short supply, and I sharply question their value to a society that urgently needs to improve its level of public discourse. The times and the issues demand it. Good historians, on the other hand, are not so plentiful, and those with Hanson’s ability to engage with the general public are more rare still.
That said, I do assign Hanson’s Carnage and Culture in my History of War undergraduate survey. I don’t necessarily agree with his thesis — in fact, I agree with it less and less with each passing year — but it is a good book to use for its purpose. Our graduate students have to read it, and some of Hanson’s other work, for their PhD general exams (usually called preliminary exams at other universities). I can talk about why that’s so at another time. Hell, I’ve probably already written about it in a previous post somewhere.
Hanson’s scholarship is one thing. VDH’s Private Papers, his web site and quasi-blog, is another. Initially he was a natural for my blogroll. But I am selective with that blogroll — it’s limited to 12-14 blogs — because the value of a blogroll to visitors is compromised if it gets too lengthy. After a while I realized that VDH’s Private Papers were so predictable you didn’t even have to visit them to know what Hanson thought. Often his posts were simply variations on a theme. So when a young Australian PhD candidate named Brett Holman created a blog to organize his research and thoughts concerning his dissertation, I dumped Hanson for Holman.
Hi Jonathan,
I certainly accept your correction about people, not weapons, doing the discriminating. But my main point, as you sure must have grasped, is that some weapons do not lend themselves to the work of discrimination. A rifle in the hands of an infantryman is more likely to hit a specific target than a couple of 2,000-lb. bombs toggled by an F-16 pilot.
I do not expect the IDF to wage a “perfect war” in southern Lebanon, and I agree that the conditions there are unusually difficult, which perhaps ought to have been a consideration the Israeli government pondered more fully before undertaking the campaign. But this is a point to be further explored in a post, not a comment.
Just war doctrine dates back to Augustine of Hippo, but as you aver, it was refined by medieval scholastics such as St Thomas Aquinas as well as the 16th c. theologian Francisco de Vitoria. It continues to be the basis of Catholic thought on the ethics of war, but as early as the 17th c. it began to inform secular thought in the early stages of international law — the Dutch jurist Hugo Grotius is usually most closely associated with this development.
Afterward came 18th c. jurists such as Emmerich de Vattel, whose work heavily influenced Francis Lieber’s instructions for Union armies in the field (though Lieber sometimes derided Vattel as “Father Namby Pamby). Then came the Hague and Geneva conventions and the codification of modern international law governing armed conflict. When I speak of just war doctrine, therefore, I do so in the sense of the moral tradition that undergirds not just specifically Catholic thought but international law and the ethical guidelines adopted by many militaries. (My first exposure to just war doctrine, for instance, came when I visited the US Army War College as a college sophomore and discovered that officers were required to take courses in the ethics of war.)
When I went to Kings College London in 1984-85 to get my MA in War Studies, I chose the ethics of war as my “special subject”; i.e., area of concentration. Like you, I was often frustrated by the way in which the ethics of war were applied not so much in dishonest ways per se, but rather as a platform from which to rule virtually all wars out of bounds. I always insisted that if we expected to ethical prescription to have any practical effect, we had to take into consideration the practical demands of legitimate military necessity. This my adviser, Dr. Barrie Paskins, habitually reduced to “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, eh, Mr. Grimsley?”
As a practical matter, however, we make moral claims all the time whenever we discuss war. Just war theory is, to me, the best way we have yet found to organize and ponder those claims in a systematic fashion. The fact that some people employ it self-servingly or tendentiously does not negate its value, nor does that fact that at the end of the day it will always be a grenzmoral, a way of setting rough boundaries on an activity that will always remain deeply problematic from an ethical perspective.
Thank you for writing. I hope you will do so again.
One of my first HNN projects was to serve as a juror for the Truman trial.
Like you, I was often frustrated by the way in which the ethics of war were applied not so much in dishonest ways per se, but rather as a platform from which to rule virtually all wars out of bounds.
I don’t have a problem with pacifism, as a consistent position, but it does seem to underly a lot of “just war” discussions: pacifists want to have collective self-defense (and sometimes more) without condoning violence….
Thanks for the clarification on the history, legal and personal.
A rifle in the hands of an infantryman is more likely to hit a specific target than a couple of 2,000-lb. bombs toggled by an F-16 pilot.
I’m not sure of that. Usually you have lots more infantry in one place than F-16s, so the odds of error have to be multiplied by population; target selection for F-16s usually isn’t done “on the fly” either; in the case of Qana, nobody’s arguing that the Israelis missed…. One-ton errors are more spectacular and widely noted because they’re wholesale and easy to investigate; 9mm errors become background noise. Don’t get me wrong: I’m no more impressed by the “smart bomb” revolution than you are, but I also don’t want to understate the immense difficulty of sending ground forces into such a hostile environment (as we’ve seen in Iraq, Vietnam, etc.)
I’ve never had the impression that pacifism undergirds just war theory. In fact, in secular discourse they are generally considered two distinct positions and within Christian tradition are most assuredly regarded as such — along with a third position, holy war. Holy war has few outright proponents these days, but I think it frequently gets smuggled into discussions concerning resort to war.
My own sense is that most just war thinkers are trained in philosophy and can seldom resist the itch to craft such finely honed moral arguments that, if literally translated into policy prescription, would be useless. Their value lies mainly in organizing the problem for better analysis. Thus, some Oxbridge don comes up with a rarefied, exquisitely polished modified Kantian perspective, and then someone like me figures out how to bring it down to earth.
Re the advantage of infantry over aircraft, an infantry unit is more likely to be able to confirm the presence of enemy combatants; an F-16 pilot is more obliged to rely on the intel he receives in his pre-flight briefing.
If the infantry unit dumps rounds down-range, shoots everything that moves, or indiscrimately employs grenades, satchel charges, etc., then the civilians in the area might be better off taking their chances on a GBU-24B 2000-lb. smart bomb or even a GBU-28 “Bunker Buster.” But a good unit will exercise fire discipline, targeting the combatant position only, and using the minimum firepower necessary to do the job.
Does this require good leadership and well-trained, well-disciplined troops? It certainly does. But if war, as we are constantly told, is a continuation of politics by other means; and if killing large numbers of civilians compromises the ability to achieve the political objectives for which one is fighting, then soldiers have compelling practical as well as moral reasons to conduct engagements in this manner.
One last point: most people cannot kill other human beings without enduring significant psychological damage. Soldiers are haunted by the enemy combatants they kill; they are even more haunted by the knowledge that they have killed civilians. We break faith with our airmen, soldiers and seamen when we fail to conduct operations so as to keep civilian casualties to a minimum.
Mark, I think you make a very persuasive case, but I am not yet convinced of the rigor of your argument.
First of all, I think the following statement is overly simplistic: “But a good unit will exercise fire discipline, targeting the combatant position only, and using the minimum firepower necessary to do the job.” Perhaps. But on the other hand, when you’re taking fire, I often get the feeling that you’re more interested in putting rounds down range in the general direction of your enemy in order to get him to put his head and weapon down and allow you to advance and take his position. “Targeting the combatant position only” and “minimum firepower” seem kind of like a wish-list. The reality is certainly messier. You just have to look at some of the urban combat in the last two decades to recognize that it can be utter chaos and bullets can end up hitting up all the wrong people (including your own).
Moreover, if the reality of combat is definitely going to be messy, then the nature of combatants and noncombatants is also going to be murkier. Some Hezbollah guerillas will stand and fight, as they currently are, but others will also go to ground and blend in with the population, whose sympathies are probably not with the occupying force. After all, they already endured 18 years of Israeli occupation – they are not all suddenly going to become willing collaborators (not the least because most of the old collaborators were probably executed when the Israelis pulled out in 2000). It will be very difficult to distinguish combatants from noncombatants until it is too late.
So, you are going to have thousands of Israeli troops amongst a population who may be noncombatants but also happen to be unneutral. Given such a situation, how many “noncombatants” will still end up in a crossfire? More to the point, how many will die because of suicide bombings when Hezbollah attacks Israeli units who are handing out relief supplies? This would not be novel – Iraqi insurgents happily kill a number of noncombatants just to strike at U.S. troops on humanitarian missions. Putting boots on the ground is not a panacea for noncombatant casualties. I know that you recognize this as well, but your comments seemed to project a certain simplicity that I do not think will exist in reality.
While I agree that combatants should make every effort to safeguard the lives of noncombatants, I do not think that soldiers should be expected to willingly sacrifice themselves to save enemy noncombatants. I don’t think you’re going to find many soldiers that selfless. Moreover, I think the very notion violates the implicit compact a State makes with its citizens when it establishes a military. When citizenry agree to allow themselves or their children to become part of the military, they do so in the expectation that they will carry out missions that will ultimately serve to safeguard their loved ones and neighbors. They also do so in the expectation that their government will make every effort to safeguard their lives. This may sound selfish, but as one friend, who put in his twenty years and three tours in Iraq, put it: “The military is a job where you could possibly get killed, but it is still a job, and your employer owes you a certain degree of loyalty. Being in the military is not a suicide pact.”
The air campaign cannot fulfill Israel’s strategic objectives of eliminating Hezbollah as a belligerent force on its northern border. Without a doubt, ground forces are needed and the Israelis are belatedly committing their troops. Furthermore, more care should be taken in selecting targets. But given the hyperkinetic pace of 21st century warfare, such mistakes are hardly deliberate. One only needs to look at how badly some U.S. air strikes have gone (the Chinese embassy in Serbia, U.S. ground troops at Al Nasiriyah, and numerous noncombatant domiciles in Afghanistan and Iraq) to know that more technology and speed do not necessarily mean more accuracy. But given the elusive, parasitic, and murky nature of the guerilla enemy it should not be surprising.
Before exonerating the IDF, however, the facts I want to know about Qana are not the ones you have unearthed. What I want to know is: Why was that building targeted? Who supplied that intel that got that building targeted? Was the building spotted, or did the pilot have to pick it out himself? Who was supposed to be in that building? Before judging what happened at Qana, I think it would be nice to know more about why it got bombed in the first place and the real time assessment and targeting that occurred.
Re my “overly simplistic” statement: I had it reviewed by an officer who served a tour in Iraq, and he thought it passed muster.
Re your questions about Qana: they’re good ones. It seems to me that the key issues are first, whether there was actually a military target in the area, and if so, how consequential was it? (There are obviously targets whose destruction is imperative, like Katyusha rocket sites, and targets for which a military case could be made but which are of comparatively marginal importance; e.g., a bridge over a creek.) It would not be enough to invoke a plea of military necessity, the necessity would have to be compelling enough to offset the death or serious injury of civilians who might be hit.
The other issue is just as you have it: How good was the intel on which the attack was based, and how rigorous a standard for good intel must be met before an attack is made?
At the moment I don’t think we have any evidence for the second issue, one way or the other. But re the first, I am unaware of any reports that confirm the presence of a military command center, firing position, ammunition cache, etc. Have you run across anything?
Mark, I think your counter questions are also good ones. I do not have any idea what the Israeli G-2/G-3 decision-making process was and I am looking forward to learning about the intelligence assessment and authorization that led to the bombing at Qana.
Having said that, what exactly does a Hezbollah military command center look like? I get the feeling it’s not quite like a U.S., Israeli, or British regimental command post. Photo and video analysis has always seemed like an art, not a science, to me. For instance, I would probably be the last person in the world to have recognized that those greyish blurs on the U-2 photos were Soviet missile sites in Cuba in 1962.
Regarding the quality of intelligence permitting an attack, I think that is an issue that is purely subjective and case-by-case relevant. Without a doubt, however, it must be a hell of a decision whether to spare fire for fear of potential noncombatant casualties or allow a high-value target to potentially survive.
As for the nuances of ground combat, I think we’ll just have to agree to disagree regarding our evaluation of how difficult it would be for ground troops of occupation in an unfriendly country to distinguish and safeguard the lives of ambiguous noncombatants. I do not, however, question your friend’s professional judgment. My opinion of the matter is simply different.
JIH – Thanks for hanging in there with me and for generating such a good exchange.
It occurs to me that probably you haven’t seen a post I did on Cliopatria yesterday. It’s generated 30+ comments and given me a chance to explore these issues with a number of other people, most of whom are respectfully skeptical/challenging in the same way as you have been. The post is here; I guess I should mention its existence on this blog as well.
Thanks again.