On Sun, 27 Jan 2002, Gautam Mukunda wrote: > No, not really. That's why we have such things as laws of war, why there > are honorable and dishonorable ways of conducting a war - and of beginning > one, for that matter. In particular, in the case that you are describing, > the Hessians were foreign mercenaries suppressing a just rebellion against a > dictatorial government. They were, in other words, fighting an _unjust_ > war - as such, the bounds of what those fighting a just war could do to them > are considerably more expansive. The Arab countries were fighting an > _unjust_ war - they were launching an unprovoked attack on an innocent > state. In and of itself, that is immoral and attacking on Yom Kippur was an > aggravating factor.
Not surprisingly, I'm going to disagree on a couple of points. 1. The US rebellion wasn't a "just war" until we had won it. It wasn't an unjust war, either -- just a war. But rebellion is by definition illegal -- unless you win. Until we had won, everything Washington's army did was by the political standards of the time illegal, disloyal, and immoral. 2. Employing mercenaries was a common practice at the time, hardly against the "rules of war" then understood. > Even more strikingly, the Hessians were already at war. Tactical surprise > (what George Washington achieved) is the objective of any commander. What > the Arab countries did is more analagous to the Japanese attack on Pearl > Harbor in 1941. They _began_ an unjust war of aggression with a surprise > attack that in and of itself violated the laws of war, and compounded the > offense against morality by launching it during a time of religious > festivities. There is a very large difference between what you do when a > state of war exists and how you begin that state. By choosing to attack in > the way they did, the Arab countries did no more than dramatize their moral > collapse. There's all the difference in the world. Except America never erected a western state in the middle of traditionally Japanese territory. I believe that to focus on Israel's innocence is to miss a larger point of the *West's* complicity in an act we would now consider wrongheaded -- planting a state in the middle of somebody else's territory without their permission. Israel-as-Israel was innocent, but I can't imagine how the Arabs will ever see Israel-as-Western-usurpation as anything but aggressive and wrong, unless the West -- not just Israel -- does something to make up for it. We cannot abandon Israel, so we must try to find another way. To paraphrase Dan, the West paid its debt to the Jews with Arab land. Now our debt transfers to the Palestinians themselves. It's a debt that precedes the acts of any Palestinian terrorists and IMO is not voided by such acts. Moreover, since the British were never able to come up with a partitioning plan that Jews and Palestinian Arabs could agree upon while Britain still controlled the area, it's fairly obvious that the West knew when Israel was founded that that act would very probably spark Arab-Israeli warfare. Anyone who knows anything about the Middle East should have been able to deduce that such warfare would likely be nasty and multigenerational. The West did the Jews a small favor by declaring the state of Israel, but not much of one. "Here, fellows, here's a state of your own. That is, if you can keep it against all the people we're going to endlessly piss off by flexing our colonial muscles this one last time." None of this justifies Palestinian terrorism, but perspective makes a big difference. If we look at Israel vs. the terrosists and hatemongering mullahs, then Israel is well within its rights to defend itself. If we look at Western Civ. vs. millions of Palestinian refugees, then they are right to demand satisfaction from the West. Since to abandon Israel would be wrong, we need to find some way -- perhaps a Palestinian Marshall Plan of sorts -- to make it worth Palestine's while to give up armed resistance to Israel's presence. As for the 1967 war, it may have been wrong, but I can't see why anyone expects the Arabs to view such things as anything but responding to a prior evil. Marvin Long Austin, Texas
