War is the Answer
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
For the last hundred years the best and brightest
of the civilized world have been engaged in the
business of peace. In the days before the Nobel
Peace Prize became a joke, it was expected that
scientific progress would lead to moral progress.
Nations would accept international laws and everyone
would get together to replace wars with
international conferences.
Instead technological progress just gave us
better ways to kill each other. There have been few
innovations in the moral technology of global
harmony since Immanuel Kant's "Perpetual Peace" laid
out a plan to grant world citizenship to all
refugees and outlaw all armies, invasions and
atrocities with the whole shebang would be overseen
by a League of Nations.
That was in 1795 and Kant's plan was at least more
reasonable than anything we have two-hundred years
later today because it at least set out to limit
membership in this body to free republics. If we had
done that with the United Nations, it could
conceivably have become something resembling a
humane organization. Instead it's a place where the
dictators of the world stop by to give speeches
about human rights for a show that's funnier than
anything you could find eight blocks away at the
Broadway Comedy Club.
Since the League of Nations folded, the warring
peoples of the world have added the atom bomb, the
suicide bomber, the jet plane, the remotely guided
missile, the rape squad, the IED, the child soldier
and the stealth fighter to their arsenals. And the
humanitarians have murdered a few billion trees
printing out more useless treaties, conventions and
condemnations; more dead trees than accounted for by
every piece of human literature written until the
19th Century.
There is no moral technology to prevent war. Or
rather war is the moral technology, that when
properly applied, ensures peace.
The humanitarians had gone down a dead end by trying
to create perpetual peace by outlawing war, but the
peace-shouters who wear their inverted Mercedes Logo
don't really want peace, some of them reflexively
hate war for sentimental reasons, but their leaders
and most committed activists don't hate war, they
hate the people who win the wars.
The plan for perpetual peace is really a plan for
perpetual war. It necessitates that the civilized
nations who heed its call amass overwhelming
quantities of firepower as deterrents against war,
which they will pledge to never use because if the
threat of destroying the world isn't enough, their
bluff will be called and they will fold. And if they
don't fold, then the world will be destroyed because
the humanitarians said that peace was better than
war.
It also necessitates that the actual wars that they
fight be as limited as possible by applying
precision technology to kill only actual armed enemy
combatants while minimizing collateral damage. And
that humanitarian objective also necessitates that
the other side reply with a counter-objective of
making it as hard as possible to kill them without
also killing civilians.
The humanitarian impulse makes the anti-humanitarian
impulse inevitable. The more precisely we try to
kill terrorists, the more ingeniously the terrorists
blend into the civilian population and employ human
shields. The more we try not to kill civilians, the
more civilians we are forced to kill. That is the
equal and opposite reaction of the humanitarian
formula.
In Afghanistan, the Rules of Engagement were
overhauled to minimize Afghan civilian casualties.
This was so successful that not only did the
casualty rate for American soldiers dramatically
increase because they were not allowed to fire
unless they were being fired at, but the number of
Afghan civilian casualties killed by American forces
also fell dramatically. It was a great triumph. But
sadly the number of Afghan civilians killed by the
Taliban increased dramatically and more than made up
for the shortfall.
When the Taliban have won the war, the number of
civilian casualties will be tremendous once Obama
pulls the troops out and the cheerful bearded boys
march into Kabul and start killing every woman who
can read. But it was still a better thing than the
unacceptable levels of civilian casualties under
Bush. It was a better thing that the Taliban have
free reign to kill as many Afghans as they want than
that American soldiers should have been able to
fight the Taliban without the humanitarian
handcuffs.
Because sometimes you have to destroy the village to
save the village, and that is true whether it's
American planes bombing a terrorist hideout or
humanitarians letting the Taliban take the village
and kill every tenth woman in it.
And yet for all this monumental effort, for all the
soldiers dead because they weren't sure if the man
planting an IED in the road was a terrorist or just
a decent upstanding poppy farmer checking the soil
composition, for all the Afghan civilians killed by
the moral technology of inaction, your unfriendly
neighborhood peace-shouter is about as satisfied as
a cannibal at a vegan banquet. Give him, her or it
five valuable minutes of your time and it will begin
shrieking about drone strikes, kill lists and the
murderous rampage of a technology that is as far
from Shock and Awe as you could possibly imagine
without going completely Gandhi. If anything it
hates drone strikes more than it hates Hiroshima.
Mass killing justifies its smug contempt for the
machinery of war, but anything that smacks of an
attempt to moralize warfare challenges its
principles and urges it on to greater displays of
outrage.
Israel, in the name of peace, turned over the
lives of millions of people to the control of a
terrorist organization which taught their children
to believe that their highest purpose in life was to
die while killing Israelis.
The Oslo Accords turned stone-throwers into shooters
and suicide bombers. It allowed the kind of people
that most of Israel's Muslim neighbors had locked up
and thrown away the key to, inside the country and
gave them charge of the economy and the youth. Every
peace dove, every peace song, every peace agreement,
made the rivers of blood that followed not only
inevitable, but mandatory.
For decades, every time that Israel was on the verge
of finishing off the terrorists, there came a call
for a ceasefire or a peace agreement. The call was
heeded and the violence continued because all the
peace agreements and ceasefires were just prolonged
unfinished wars. They were a game of baseball that
never ended because no home run was ever scored.
Instead the New York Yankees were being forced to
play the Martyrs of Muslimtown for thirty years with
the umpire stepping in every time the hometown team
was on the verge of winning the game. Each peace
agreement did not mean peace, it meant that the
Muslimtown Martyrs would have another few years to
go on killing and being killed.
Peace meant that the war would never end. Instead of
perpetual peace, it made for perpetual war.
In 1992 Israel deported 400 Hamas terrorists. It
didn't kill them, lock them up or bake them into a
pie. All it did was kick them out of a country they
didn't recognize and closed the door behind them.
That deportation became
the leading human rights cause of the day. The
UN issued a unanimous resolution condemning the
deportation. The Red Cross brought them blankets.
Newsweek accused Israel of "Deporting the Hope for
Peace."
And so Israel took the 400 Hamas terrorists, the
hope for peace, back. Over the next 20 years they
shed rivers of blood and rivers of blood were shed
because of them. There was never any peace with them
and they made peace impossible.
But the humanitarians had gotten their way, as they
always got their way, and their way was the blown up
bus and the shattered cafeteria, the burning
building and the suicide bomber making his way
through a crowded mall, the child's mother lovingly
tying on his martyr costume complete with Alfred
Nobel's great invention, the jet plane releasing its
cargo of bombs and the television screaming for war.
But all these were far better than that 400 Hamas
terrorists should sniffle into their Red Cross
supplied cups of dark coffee on the hills of
Lebanon.
To those who croon to that old Lennon song, peace is
always better than war, and good intentions lead to
good results. The only way forward is to keep
extending your hand to the enemy and doing it over
and over again no matter how much effort the doctors
have to put into stitching it back together again
after the last handshake.
Peace is still better than war. It is better that
Israel and Hamas fight escalating mini-wars every 3
years than that Israel finish off Hamas once and for
all. That price wasn't worth paying 20 years ago
when all it meant was that 400 terrorists would have
been forced to get jobs slinging Halal hash in
Lebanese Hashish joints. It certainly isn't worth it
today.
A flock of peace doves wings to Israel with
proposals for engaging Hamas. But it's Israel that
is supposed to figure out a way to live with its
explosive bride. All the proposals call for some
gradual process by which Hamas will be courted,
engaged and weaned off terror to become an
upstanding member of the international community.
And that's all well and good if you have soy for
brains.
Hamas is not interested in being engaged. Its
goal is the destruction of Israel. This isn't
posturing, it's not sullen resentment over being
blockaded by Israel or outrage over the latest round
of fighting. This is the essential ideology of
Hamas, derived from the core Islamic principles over
the proper role of non-Muslims in the Muslim world.
It is not interested in a two-state solution, job
creation programs or any of the meaningless shiny
toys that diplomats wave when they arrive in the
region. Its goal is to make Islam supreme over all
other systems by destroying a non-Muslim state in
what it considers to be Muslim territory.
Perpetual peace was not made for such conflicts.
Peace was made for reasonable people who are willing
to give and take. It was not made for those who only
take.
Peacemaking is not a policy, it is a religion that
we are all obligated to believe in. It is an immoral
moral principle that ends in war. Peacemaking in the
World War II cost more lives than Hitler could have
ever taken on his own. Peacemaking in the War on
Terror has cost a hundred times more lives than the
terrorists could have ever taken on their own.
The business of peace is the industry of death.
Behind the peace sign is a field of flowers with a
grave for every one. Behind the peace agreement and
the ceasefire is another war that will be worse than
the last.