A pet shop owner in Yongin, Korea, about 25 miles south of Seoul, set off an international incident recently with an advertising sign featuring . . . a puppy. In the sign, a dog’s head replaces that of Mao Zedong in the portrait hanging at the northern end of Tiananmen Square. Last Tuesday, China’s Foreign Ministry summoned a South Korean diplomat to protest, and the shop’s owner immediately pulled down the sign and apologized to Beijing.
What’s wrong with this picture? First, China’s authoritarian state tried to censor an image appearing in a democracy—and the democracy bowed. Yet there is something even more far-reaching and disturbing in this incident. Since 1954, the People’s Republic has maintained that the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence—mutual respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in others’ internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit, and peaceful coexistence—are essential to its foreign policy.
Beijing always says China’s rise will be peaceful, that it does not pose a threat to anyone else, and that it will never interfere in the domestic affairs of another nation. But if its definition of “non-interference” includes the right to ban advertising for a pet shop in a backwater location in another country, then the world is in for a load of trouble.
I guess when a palestinian (notice I do not say ‘a Hamas missile’ – as Hamas is the democratically elected gov’t) missile falls on an Isareli school, Israel gets to shell or missile a palestinian school.
But then, the international community will say ‘Not fair! Israeli weapons are more powerful than palestinian missiles! This is disproportionate!’
So Israel will then have to create its own kassams, and beg the palestinians to tell them exactly how much TNT, ball bearings, and strychnine they put in their missiles. The Israelis will also have to get non professional rocketeers to launch them.
This proportionality business can get pretty complicated.
The interwebs are a funny thing.
No matter how loopy or deranged a blogger becomes, if he has a past reputation for being OK, it seems he can ride that for, well, forever.
I think it is important to also stress that terrorists who deploy themselves and their arms among civilians (as Hamas does – perhaps with the cooperation of the Palestinian civilians who elected them in the first place) are guilty of war crimes and responsible for all civilian deaths and injuries that result.
you are too kind to mr sullivan….he has ‘fallen for’ nothing…he has knowingly embraced fallacious and deceptive misinterpretation of a doctrine to ‘make’ his point and ‘win’ an argument …
…the demonstrable truth – as your links and cites affirm – is that the man literally doesn’t know what he’s talking about….between sarah palin’s obstetrics history and his revisionist pseudo-analysis of ‘just war’ and ‘proportionality,’ it’s astonishing that he is still treated as a serious public intellectual…
as mr pollak rightly points out, there may, indeed, be lots of cogent and substantive criticisms of israel to be made…why on earth can sullivan find and/or articulate them…?
The element of “proportionality” is a false measurement for another reason. It is Hamas’ intention to eliminate Israel, no matter what Israel did to Hamas. Israel’s stated and practiced intention these past 3.5 years since disengagement was to let Hamas rule as long as no rockets were fired. Therefore, one must involve the mathematics of proportionality the intentions of the violence. For if Israel doesn’t respond harder and stronger and more powerful than Hamas, then Hamas will continue to be able to attempt the elimination of Israel and the death of as many of its Jewish citizens as they can. This is the real disproportionality most miss, and which, in the end, justifies Israel’s 100:1 actions.
I’m confused about this proportionality nonsense. When one is at war, the ultimate goal should be to defeat one’s opponent. Why does Israel need to be proportional in any way? Their societies (if you could call Hamas’ corruptocracy that) are diametrically opposed to each other. Why exactly does Israel need to exercise restraint other than to appease the left wing idealogues? Did the definition of ‘war’ suddenly change since the beginning of human history?
“The original idea, first articulated in 1907…”
An innocent mistake. Ever heard of Augustine and Aquinas? Just war theory is a thoroughly Catholic framework.
Speaking of this sequel, Lebanon III: The South, I see that Billy Kristol, the Bund‘s public face, is predicting an Israeli victory. Commentarians, that alone should scare the living hell out of you.
All this crap about proportionality and just wars is just that: crap.
I notice that his authority is the Catholic Catechism. To what extent this is an authority or that it supersedes other authorities is debatable. I suspect it is chosen because it has the most rigorous conditions, but even Sullivan concedes that it may not be applicable to fighting a terorist regime. But it is worth evaluating what it states. The first condition, that the harm of the agression be “lasting, grave and certain” is explained as the harm not being “temporary or mild.” Thousands of rockets and mortars fired into Israel over the course of years seems to fit the bill. Sullivan argues that the harm is not grave, making the value judgment that the number of casualties Israel has suffered is allegedly not sufficient. This is highly debatable and subjective. Nor does Sullivan even consider other factors, such as significant areas of a nation’s territory being rendered unliveable and significant portions of its population living under the terror of a daily bombardment. That Israel has acted illicitly under this condition is very far from clear.
The second condition is there cannot be other effective means short of war to end the aggression. After years of attacks, even during the so-called truce which Hamas unilaterally abrogated, this condition is met easily.
The third condition is that military force have serious prospects of success. This requirement seems unrealistic. (Was Poland fighting against the Nazis illicit because it had dim prospects for success?). However even the catechism states that what is required is only a substantial possibility of success, not a guarantee. And if this argument is being raised at all, shouldn’t the burden be on the other foot and shouldn’t the prospects for a non-military solution be demonstrated before claiming that a war is illegal because it may not be a total success?
The fourth condition is that “The use of arms must not produce evils and disorders graver than the evil to be eliminated”. This requirement seems the most detached from reality. What war satisfies this condition? Did WWII? Did Kuwait? The American Revolution? The War of Spanish Succession? In any event, stopping an enemy from firing rockets and mortars at your people seems like a powerful enough goal. People are free to disagree but that is hardly evidence of illicit war.
Personally I don’t find the Catholic Catechism to be a very persuasive standard. But even so it doesn’t make the critic’s case.
Andrew also answers a question different from the one he asks. He asks, “Is the evil inflicted by the war greater than the evil prevented?” Yet he answers a different question: “Is the evil inflicted by the war greater than the evil to which it responds?” The first question refers to future evil, and requires that the military action bring about less evil than would have come about through inaction. The second refers to past evil, and requires that the military action bring about no more evil than the evil to which it is responding. The second essentially boils down to a tit-for-tat requirement.
If one actually intended to answer the question posed, one would have to consider what sort of evil would come about if Israel had taken no action. This, of course, is speculative, but if Israel’s action prepares the ground for a sustainable peace, then arguably it is justifiable even according to this criterion. The criterion itself, however, is insufficient. It should not ask about evil generally, as though a government should measure the evil visited upon its enemies and make sure it’s no more than the evil it has suffered. A government’s primary purpose is not to worry about the evil suffered by others, but about the evil suffered by its own people. Thus the question should be: Will the Israeli people suffer less, in consequence of the military action, than they would have suffered otherwise? Here it seems quite plausible that the answer is yes.
I don’t mean to say that governments should take no account of the evil suffered by others. I merely mean that it’s not their primary responsibility. It is the primary responsibility of Hamas to consider how it should prevent the evil endured by its own people, but Hamas is manifestly failing in that responsibility. Thus the criticism should be against Hamas for leading its people into this situation in the first place, and for placing their weapons stockpiles in areas that maximize the evil suffered by their own people. Any way you look at it, Hamas is to blame.
Also bear in mind we’re talking about “evil” here, which is not the same as “suffering.” To cause the suffering of innocents is generally regarded as more evil than to cause the suffering of combatants.
It bewilders me why anyone would take such a morally bankrupt individual as Andrew Sullivan seriously.
Ahithophel: Perfect point.
“It breaks my heart to see the terrible suffering in Gaza and in Israel. As a religious Jew I find it all the worse, because it confirms to me how easy it is to pervert the loving message of Judaism into a message of hatred and domination. I remain in mourning for the Jewish people, for Israel and for the world.”
Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine. (rabbilerner@tikkun.org)
Since the “evil prevented” is the extermination of all Israeli Jews at the first available opportunity by Hamas with the connivance of the Palestinian Arab population, it’s hard to imagine what counter measures would NOT be justified. The argument against real Judaeo-Nazism is that it would probably dishearten the Jews, possibly irretrievably, not that it fails the beagle test.
Next phase of the Israeli genocide: Cut off water for half a million people.
Why is this publication so determined to engage a mental and moral freakshow like Sullivan?
There are all kinds of writers with which you could have engaged on the issue, instead, you pick a man who should be ostracized by all Conservatives and Republicans alike.
You are boosting that man’s public persona, when he should be covered in shame.
There’s some sort of weird fascination that some here have with him.
And one thing more, TO ONE AND ALL, don’t take Sullivan’s presentation of what just war consists of at face value.
Nor believe that he represents in good faith what the Catholic Church’s position of just war is.
In other words, don’t conflate Sullivan’s views with the Catholic Church.
And for that matter, don’t conflate the words and actions of some present ranking members of the Catholic clergy with just war theory.
Rest assured, Aquinas and Augustine, both Doctors of the Catholic Church, would wholly approve of what Israel is doing, and only would have lamented that it wasn’t done much earlier.
In my opinion, “proportionality,” should also attempt to take in to consideration the value of “life” for the Israelis vs the leadership and supporters of Hamas.
Last I checked, there were no Israeli suicide bombers.
Who values life more?
Sullivan long ago lost any moral compass or ability to think and write clearly. Truly, he has jumped the shark (or, in his case, perhaps the beagle).
Why is this publication so determined to engage a mental and moral freakshow like Sullivan?
The moral “freakshow” has been Israel and its American Bund, bent on genocide and imperial conquest.
Never mind all this high-fallutin’ hoo-hah about just war and proportional response.
Go read the Instapundit piece where he discusses the “Chicago Way”, i.e. you use a knife, we react by using a gun.
This is the rationale for the IDF.
All those folks who don’t have time to indulge in Pollak’s and Sullivan’s navel gazing can do the math. At the moment its about 550 Palestinians and 5 Israelis. Outside the US these numbers are simply shredding Israel’s credibility. I’ve been a supporter of Israel all my life but you can’t justify this action which is, to quote the musician Daniel Barenboim, morally abhorrent and strategically wrong. What’s Israel going to do kill all the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza which for years it’s turned into a version of the Warsaw Ghetto. The Israelis are entitled to security but this isn’t going to give it to them any more than ousting Arafat from Lebanon, fighting Hezbollah a couple of years ago, and all the other demos of their great military did. Hamas is an idea and you can’t kill an idea. You’d think the Israelis above anyone would know that but one has to say there is some merit in that comment of Harry Truman who was probably the major western statesman that brought Israel into existence.
Just war, hmmm. Here is Walter Russel Mead on the Jacksonian way of war:
‘For the first Jacksonian rule of war is that wars must be fought with all available force. The use of limited force is deeply repugnant. Jacksonians see war as a switch that is either “on” or “off.” They do not like the idea of violence on a dimmer switch. Either the stakes are important enough to fight for—in which case you should fight with everything you have—or they are not, in which case you should mind your own business and stay home. To engage in a limited war is one of the costliest political decisions an American president can make—neither Truman nor Johnson survived it.
The second key concept in Jacksonian thought about war is that the strategic and tactical objective of American forces is to impose our will on the enemy with as few American casualties as possible. The Jacksonian code of military honor does not turn war into sport. It is a deadly and earnest business. This is not the chivalry of a medieval joust, or of the orderly battlefields of eighteenth-century Europe. One does not take risks with soldiers’ lives to give a “fair fight.” Some sectors of opinion in the United States and abroad were both shocked and appalled during the Gulf and Kosovo wars over the way in which American forces attacked the enemy from the air without engaging in much ground combat. The “turkey shoot” quality of the closing moments of the war against Iraq created a particularly painful impression. Jacksonians dismiss such thoughts out of hand. It is the obvious duty of American leaders to crush the forces arrayed against us as quickly, thoroughly and professionally as possible. ‘
Frankly, folks, I don’t understand all the ‘proportionate war’ nonsense at all. Notice it mostly comes up for discussion when Israel is involved.
For some reason Truman’s comment didn’t embed. This is it.
” The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I’ve found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.”
In a way he’s making a wider comment about the human condition but it’s hard to argue his comment doesn’t have some merit in the current situation.
JohnR223 Says:
January 5th, 2009 at 5:31 PM
Are we living in 1815? Proportionate war is not nonsense. It’s a cornerstone of counterinsurgency military theory. It’s why we put most of the insurgents in Iraq on the payroll rather than turning the country into a car park as was being suggested by a lot of juveniles who have never smelt a dead body in their lives.
Augustine of Hippo, one of the most important figures in the evolution of the Western Christian church, developed the just war theory. Thomas Aquinas, a Christian philosopher, gave it more definition. However, there is a basis in the Hebrew Scriptures for the just war theory (Maimonides code in the Laws of Kings). The just war theory is not uniquely “Catholic”. It is part of the heritage shared by Jews and Christians alike.
John
Smells more like 1939 to me.
Ideas can most certainly be killed. Ideas make claims about reality, in particular what kinds of actions will change reality in specific ways. When the prescribed actions lead less and less often to the anticipated change, the idea dies of suffocation. So, if the actions of jihadist “martyrs” have effects opposite to those intended–for example, if the entire West were to set as an absolute rule that organizations that refuse to respect the civilian/military distinction or that aspire to impose Islamic rule upon others will be resisted at every point along the way, those groups will not achieve their goals, and the ideas will become less plausible. If we support those victimzed by those ideas and practices, we can further build a critical mass of people who find the ideas unacceptable. Even more, if we mock those ideas, subject them to constant opprobrium and ridicule, analyze them ruthlessly, etc., then we will separate the core believers from the margins–those who join out of a sense of its success, or a sense that it answers some sense of alienation. And as we marginalize the core believer, we can isolate and render them harmless. In the end, no believers, no ideas–like Nazism, just a few fringe lunatics trolling the internet. In short, desecrate what they consider sacred, and treat them as the enemies of humanity that they are, and make it safe for others to do so. The ideas won’t survive intact, as if in some Platonic realm. I would agree, though, that Israel can’t do this alone–nor are they claiming to. Right now, they are really just pushing back, which is also necessary, otherwise the idea gains strength from a sense of its “inevitability.”
John — taking numbers out of context, as you do in your post at #25, is never useful. If you can only approve attacks that result in a symmetry of deaths on each side, you’re in for a long, unsatisfactory life (or, who knows, a short one).
The forces of the United States caused a majority — in some categories a huge majority — of the 1,540,000 civilian deaths suffered by Germany, and the 580,000 suffered by Japan, as a result of combat action in World War II. By contrast, only 1700 US civilians died as a result of combat action in WWII. Indeed, we declared war on Germany, as well as Japan, after the loss of only 2350 sailors and civilians in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Neither Germany nor Japan had success, after Pearl Harbor, in attacking the United States. They had to be content with sinking our ships and shooting down our aircraft. By contrast, we sent relentless fleets of aircraft to drop thousands of bombs on their countries and the territories they occupied, and kill millions of people, both soldiers and civilians. We invaded their territory, destroyed their economic infrastructure, and forced them to surrender at gunpoint, all while remaining unmolested in our own continental stronghold. Moreover, we inflicted great destruction on parts of Europe and the Far East whose only error was the bad luck to be occupied by the predatory Axis. The people of Belgium, the Netherlands, and Poland had done nothing to deserve their fate; they were merely unfortunate enough to be occupied by the German army, one of our top targets.
You will not find much symmetry in successful warfare. What you betray with your comments is your prior political bias against Israel. Unlike Hamas, Israel does not attack for the purpose of killing civilians. Israel attacks for military purposes. Hamas is gravely at fault for launching its attacks on Israeli citizens from heavily populated Palestinian areas, and forcing Israel to choose between inflicting collateral damage on Palestinian civilians, or accepting a mounting death toll among her own.
If you are prepared to insist that any people on this earth should simply stand by and accept the destruction of its national life, and its eventual decimation by a guerrilla force, then I am sorry to have to say that you have no moral compass, and are not worth listening to. Israel has shown, in a thousand ways since 1948, that she desires and hopes to live in peace with the Palestinian Arabs. The “idea” of Hamas that you say cannot be killed is a vicious and depraved one: it is a hope of killing Jews and destroying Israel. No other nation is asked to simply live with such an idea being acted on against its people, with explosives, on a daily basis. There is no moral justification whatsoever for imposing that condition on Israel.
JE Dyer – On the face of it, your comment is an excellent response to John. Before we can be convinced, however, we need to know: how many dead bodies have you smelled?
At the moment its about 550 Palestinians and 5 Israelis. Outside the US these numbers are simply shredding Israel’s credibility. I’ve been a supporter of Israel all my life but you can’t justify this action which is, to quote the musician Daniel Barenboim, morally abhorrent and strategically wrong. What’s Israel going to do kill all the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza which for years it’s turned into a version of the Warsaw Ghetto.
This is the essence of the Abused Child Syndrome. The abused child bitterly (and rightfully) resents and detests his victimizer, yet knows no other way to express his anger than to do what was done to him. As an adult, he resists the temptation to do what was done to him. He restrains himself, but he is unfamiliar with different strategies of dealing with conflict, stress, and pressure.
When the situation gets dire enough, the victimized adult child lashes out in the way his victimizer did, and repeats the actions. Israel doesn’t know diplomacy, defection, cooperation, or compromise. They are the survivors of genocide, and the children of those survivors. They live in an all-or-nothing world. They can’t imagine anything else.
Pushed to their limit, they tell themselves that they tried as hard as they could, but now the gloves are going to have to come off. And when they do, they act just as their victimizers did. They dehumanize their adversary. They herd him into a ghetto. They impose collective punishment. They build walls around him. And then they find their final solution.
Israel doesn’t know diplomacy, defection
Typo: “deflection” is what I wanted to write.
Just look at Israel. Hey Commentarians, have you ever been there? Israel is Zero-Sum Thinking in action. In Israel, there are no solutions. There are only winners and losers, and that’s the case at every level of life there. You are either a sucker or a winner in Israel. It’s Warsaw Ghetto thinking writ large, and it informs every single thing that every Israeli ever does.
What governs is INTENTION.
If a fellow wielding an old kitchen knife, rushes at Andrew Sullivan, having often and passionately declared the intention of cutting Andrew throat, Andrew is responding proportionately in whipping out a Gluck automatic and pumping bullets into his assailant until he stops advancing. That is proportionate, even if his assailant never so much as nicked Andrew’s earlobe.
SmokeVanThorn — are we talking human bodies, or those of vermin and game animals?
nacl — No, no, it’s Andrew Sullivan you’re talking about. No response by him to a knife-armed attacker would be proportionate. Morally, he is obliged to let the attacker kill him.
When someone attacks you, the best response is to hurt them bad enough that they don’t want to do it again. Obviously, Israel needs to hurt the Palestinians a lot more before Hamas gets the message … or that the Palestinians quit being patsies and destroy Hamas themselves.
JE – You’d have to ask John – he’s the one who suggested that a course in advanced corpse sniffing is a prerequisite for credibility on this issue.
JE Dyer An excellent example of the Jacksonian approach – with the result of the Germans and Japanese being peaceniks now. This definately passes the smell test.
Interesting comments. Though I don’t think I agree with the damage done to Japan’s civilian population during WWII, I’ve read reports that stated that the civilians would attack if necessary, making them ‘semi’ combatants.
However, Israel is trying to attack terrorists and injuring innocents. How many innocents would be ‘unacceptable’? I think that is the answer that we must get at. Where is the line we could draw to say Israel has gone too far?
Ah, non-responsive and ad hominem arguments piling up on each other like a multi-vehicle accident on a fog-enveloped freeway. But thank you, Commentarians. You only confirm my decision to flee the moral wasteland of neoconservatism for the verdant territory of the Old Right.
To “John” and “John Hartland”, kudos.
To the State of Israel, this little bit of “commentary” from a Chronicles reader, one who is obviously sympathic to your cause:
“The problem with Hamas and Hezbollah and their ilk will remain so long as Israel plays by its enemies rules and hits back with tit- for-tat raids. It is well on its way to total exhaustion and loss of will for even for minimal retaliation. Already today, after but a few days of nervous bombing, the cabinet is putting out feelers to Hamas for a ceasefire. What is needed to change the dynamic of the Middle East is what will not happen: a massive miltiary shock, one of stupendous scale by Israel, unlike anything seen before including 1967, and sustained over time. Israel should clean out the pigsty that is Lebanon once and for all, purify it, annihilate Hezbollah. It should reoccupy Gaza, hunt down and kill every terrorist befouling the land. Let the Europeans and the Americans scream and bray. Intractability and implacability would rewarded, for the Left fawns over and worships power and brute force above all things, and Israel could silence it with enough ruthlessness. But alas, the Israeli government has not the belly for this, and it is why Israel will be engaged for decades in fighting the long defeat. At the current rate, in a hundred years’ time Palestine will again be what it was in the 1930s, with a few Jews living in Arab-controlled lands and subjected to pogroms every now and again. All the rest will have emigrated. The jihadists have known since before Oslo that Israel is psychologically spent, unable any longer to face the demographic arithmetic. It lacks self-confidence as a nation, is morally exhausted. I find it very sad that a country which was once so vibrant and creative and exciting an idea is coming to the end of its tether, being destroyed by mindless savages.”
Come home, brethren. There’s no future in it, and dang, is it ever expensive.