By Donald Kirk
The vast majority of victims in wars are not members of the armed forces on either or both sides but civilians caught in the crossfire, in attacks and counterattacks intended to annihilate the enemy.
So it is in Israel, or rather in Gaza, the 25-mile-long sliver of land on the eastern Mediterranean that’s wedged between Israel and Egypt. By now Gaza is ravaged by Israel’s assault on Hamas, which had ruled the Gaza Strip since driving out the relatively moderate Fatah in elections staged in 2007 supposedly under the aegis of the State of Palestine.
The rationale for the Israeli attacks, by air and land, is that Israel has got to destroy Hamas once and for all to stop it from repeating the kind of barbaric attack that it launched into southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 and kidnapping another 240 as hostages. The Israelis by now have killed about 30,000 civilians in Gaza while thousands more are deprived of food, medical care and places to live and work with no relief in sight.
By now much of the world is wondering if the Israelis, beyond fighting to destroy Hamas, are exacting revenge. The Israelis, however, speak with regret of the collateral damage in which civilians have died. How else, they ask, can they exterminate the last of Hamas, closing down the tunnels in which the terrorists have operated with impunity, snuffing the war machine that’s counted on Iran for arms and ammunition?
That question leads to unpleasant comparisons that may not justify anything but show the guilt shared by all sides in all wars. It’s difficult to explain why the Americans had to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 or why the Brits and Yanks fire-bombed Dresden in February 1945. For that matter, what about the American bombing of North Korea during the Korean War in which just about every city and town in the North was destroyed?
We can play the game of whataboutism forever. It’s easy, maybe even correct, to say that the war against Japan would have gone on much longer, with many more casualties, if U.S. President Harry Truman had not decided to unleash a weapon that he knew would kill tens of thousands of civilians. It was Truman’s decision again to counter the North Korean invasion of South Korea in 1950 with a ferocity that neither North Korea’s Kim Il-sung nor China’s Mao Zedong had anticipated.
The U.S. during the Vietnam War was by comparison relatively restrained. Sure, the Americans expended more bombs against Communist forces in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos than in all of World War II, but most of the bombs fell on jungle regions. Hanoi was never "flattened" like Pyongyang despite the bombing that preceded the signing of the "Paris Peace" in January 1973.
Crueler than the bombing was the use of Agent Orange, the chemical that defoliated jungle regions, depriving North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces of cover but also killing and deforming thousands of civilians. The U.S. military could claim truthfully that they did not know Agent Orange would be so devastating, that American soldiers also died years later from the air they breathed pursuing the enemy, but the scientists who devised it for Dow Chemical and Monsanto had to have had an idea of the effects of what they said were herbicides for killing plants.
Whataboutism, though, will not exonerate the Israelis for slaughtering civilians, not in the eyes of the world. No wonder President Biden wants them to knock it off. He is thinking of the reaction against the U.S. for its alliance with Israel, the biggest recipient of American military aid that is powering the Israeli assault on Hamas.
Still, what are the Israelis to do? They can’t just let Hamas lick their wounds, and then rebuild to strike again. Nor can they do nothing while other terrorist groups, notably Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, also threaten them with arms provided by Iran.
Those are questions that all sides might be asking while Kim Jong-un in North Korea rains rhetorical threats against the South. Kim would be an idiot to make good on his bold words, knowing the holy hell that would descend on him, his regime and his country. The Americans inculcated that lesson in the North after Kim’s grandfather invaded the South at the instigation of the regimes in Beijing and Moscow on which Pyongyang depends to this day.
Donald Kirk (www.donaldkirk.com) writes about war and peace in Asia mainly from Seoul and Washington.
'Justifying' civilian casualties
19
0
22.02.2024
By Donald Kirk The vast majority of victims in wars are not members of the armed forces on either or both sides but civilians caught in the crossfire, in attacks and counterattacks intended to annihilate the enemy.
So it is in Israel, or rather in Gaza, the 25-mile-long sliver of land on the eastern Mediterranean that’s wedged between Israel and Egypt. By now Gaza is ravaged by Israel’s assault on Hamas, which had ruled the Gaza Strip since driving out the relatively moderate Fatah in elections staged in 2007 supposedly under the aegis of the State of Palestine.
The rationale for the Israeli attacks, by air and land, is that Israel has got to destroy Hamas once and for all to stop it from repeating the kind of barbaric attack that it launched into southern Israel on Oct. 7, killing about 1,200 and kidnapping another 240 as hostages. The Israelis by now have killed about 30,000 civilians in Gaza while thousands more are deprived of food, medical care and places to live and work with no relief in sight.
By now much of the world is wondering if the Israelis, beyond fighting to destroy........
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