An old Flanders and Swann routine was premised on England needing a better national song. Eventually the two came up with “The English, the English, the English are best! I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest!”
That’s pretty much my reaction to the outrage vented at Israel over the accidental bombing of the aid workers. It is the ultimate confirmation, if any were needed, that Israel is by far the most admirable and most morally upright nation on earth.
Apart from the craven hypocrisy of the accusers, the most striking thing is the high standard to which they hold the nation they hate. Seven dead in what was clearly an accident. Israel’s acknowledges the incident and apologizes. What other nation is held to a standard that would make such an incident even newsworthy?
Even Israel’s enemies expect her to be perfect, which shows only how close to perfection that beautiful country comes.
If it were Hamas, or Iran, or the Russians, or even the U.S. that had done this no one would bother to mention it. It would be lost in the noise, the assumed horrors of war.
I am going to commit moral equivalence. Do you remember “Shock and Awe”? This was the massive bombing campaign unleashed on Iraq by the U.S. preparatory to the invasion in 2003. We watched on TV as bombs and missiles blew apart much of Baghdad. The friends I watched with cheered the explosions. The TV news people reporting the event live could not keep the excitement, the timbre of patriotic pride from their voices.
I cannot find documentation for how many civilians died in that initial attack. I have seen numbers circa 6,000 for the pre-invasion death toll. Ultimately from March 2003 through June 2006 civilian deaths by violence amounted to somewhere between 150,000 (the Iraq Family Health Survey) and 600,000 (the Lancet Survey).
Not all of these were directly attributable to the forces of the U.S.-led coalition-of-the-all-too-willing. But all flowed from Bush’s decision to go to war. When you buy a war, you buy it all, all the civilian deaths, all the atrocities, all the disease and starvation, all the ruin.
We imposed this horror, let us never forget, on a nation that had never attacked us, and had in recent memory been our ally against Iran. Remember always we did this based on no real threat beyond embarrassingly thin intelligence reports claiming the Iraqis might be striving to attain “weapons of mass destruction.”
These reports, like most critical output of the U.S. national security apparatus in recent decades, turned out to be untrue. Whether those who cited them as a justification for killing hundreds of thousands of innocents knew they were untrue is not known. Perhaps the secret is buried in Hunter’s laptop.
None of the 150,000-600,000 civilians killed in that war had rampaged into an American town, wantonly and deliberately killing men, women, and children, raping and beating and carrying them off as hostages, hostages kept so badly that many must now be dead.
Is it possible to recall a more disgusting display of hypocrisy by a U.S. President than Biden’s demand that Israel “be more careful” to avoid civilian deaths. This from a man who supported the invasion of Iraq, looking on with that familiar smirk as Bush signed the document authorizing hundreds of thousands to be killed.
George Bush signing a resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq, Oct. 16, 2002. Biden, then a senator, looks on. Mark Wilson/Getty Images
As with most of what comes out of Biden’s mouth the sheer, nonsensical meaningless almost obscures the dishonesty. How? How be more careful? Does Biden know anything about the procedures Israel does use to avoid civilian casualties? Has he any clue why Israel has been so successful in doing so. Can “be more careful” practically mean anything other than calling off the war and letting Hamas rebuild to rape and murder again?
By reasonable estimates the proportion of civilian to combatant deaths in the pacification of Gaza has been roughly one for one, and maybe a bit better than that. And this in urban warfare against a guerilla army whose conscious strategy is to blend into the civilian population. What would “be more careful” look like.
What was the civilian to combatant ratio in the U.S. war against the guerillas of the Viet Cong, another war against a country that never attacked the U.S., another war justified by phony intelligence reports? Does anyone imagine U.S. behavior then was even close to as good as Israel’s today?
How much napalm has Israel used in Gaza?
“Israel, Israel, Israel’s the best! I wouldn’t give tuppence for all of the rest!”
In recent years there's been a spate of articles and books about subterranean warfare, tunnel warfare, depicting it as an effective answer to Western, particularly American, military technique. Writers in venues as diverse as Popular Mechanics ("The Future of Warfare Lies Underground"), the Defense Technical Information Center ("Subterranean Warfare: a Counter to US Airpower"), and OpenDemocracy ("Tunnel Warfare: the Islamic State's Subterranean War") have united to present underground war as a near-insuperable obstacle to conventional air- and surface-based military operations. The terrific casualties subterranean fighters can inflict on troops attempting to root them out, together with their invulnerability to aerial weaponry and shelling, cancel — it is argued — all the advantages possessed by modern armies relying on fire and maneuver. The Gaza Strip, transformed over years of work into a labyrinthine integrated bunker complex, may serve as a test case for tunnel-war theorists. Certainly it has taken Israel as long to winkle Hamas out of its tunnels as it took US forces to exterminate the Japanese in their caves by "corkscrew and blowtorch" on Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa. On the other hand, the IDF's losses have been minuscule by comparison, and the fighting has produced only a small fraction of Okinawa's civilian casualties, despite Gaza's larger population.
I am finding Blinken and Biden's lectures very hard to take. The United States has tried to prosecute a series of wars from risk-averse distances of 15,000 feet and higher. Of course this resulted in quite a few "accidents." I remember a number of them during the Air War for Kosovo. And just four or so years ago (while not even prosecuting a hot war) the United States capped off the sacrifice of 13 US Marines and over a hundred Afghan civilians with an attempted revenge strike three days later on what turned out to be a family's home which killed nine civilians including seven children. I would like to see a Page One piece in an outlet like the WSJ listing the U.S.'s many civilian-killing bombing and drone misfires.