War Without Rules - Gaza

David French has a well reasoned article at National Review about Israel's moral obligations in the Gaza conflict.

My hunch is that the average Joe on the street these days is oblivious to the notion of rules of war, or more specifically the Law of Armed Conflict.  War is nasty business, a reality of a world in rebellion, but it is a reality that must be faced.  There are people who want to kill other people and who cannot be reasoned with. In this age of relativism based on tribal grievance, patriotism and nationalism are seen as evil and the distinction between having a military and being "militaristic" is sometimes blurred.  (More)

Much of the focus on the current escalation of conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas is on civilian casualties and in much of the media Israel gets a disproportionate amount of scrutiny when civilians are killed.  (Even when the civilian injuries are faked).

French briefly summarizes the Laws of Armed Conflict, which include three key rules, all of which Hamas violates to gain advantage:

Necessity - Force is used only to accomplish a military objective.
Distinction - Military targets are distinguished from civilian targets and military personnel are uniformed to allow the opposing forces to distinguish civilian from combatant.
Proportionality - The use of force should not exceed that which is necessary to accomplish the objective.

French argues based on these rules:

1. Every Hamas rocket attack is a war crime. Hamas rocket attacks — which are aimed directly at Israeli civilians — clearly violate the rules of necessity and distinction.  This is rarely spelled out in news accounts.  The rocket attacks against civilian targets in Israel are not merely resistance to an opposing force, but war crimes.  How many media accounts have you read that refer to Hamas acts as war crimes?

2. Hamas’s use of civilian buildings changes the status of targets from civilian to military.  One example of how Israel is trapped by the media in a no-win dilemma:  The New York Times noted that Israel targeted media offices without providing the context that the building was housing four terrorists who were in fact killed by those strikes.  Hiding terrorist operations in hospitals, schools and other civilian areas forces the opposition to either refrain from acting or act in a way that can lead to an accusation of war crimes.  But in fact, by placing military actors in civilian locations, Hamas is violating the rules of war again.

3. Hamas bears legal responsibility for civilian deaths in Gaza.  By violating the rule of distinction, it is Hamas that intentionally places its own civilians in harms way and thus the responsibility for civilian casualties rests with Hamas.

The last line of French's article provides the ultimate clarity.  "For some time the international community has viewed the laws of war as a one-way ratchet — always tightening Israeli (and American) rules of engagement even as they’re deemed irrelevant to terrorists. This is the essence of “lawfare” — the abuse of international legal norms to accomplish otherwise unattainable battlefield objectives — and it only prevails when Western governments and militaries allow it to prevail."

Clearly asking American troops to serve in dangerous places while hamstringing their ability to act with increasing restrictions on engagement is unfair, particularly when the current administration cannot utter the word "terrorist", much less hold terrorists accountable for their war crimes.  The conflict in Gaza provides a vivid example of a dangerous double standard that increases civilian casualties and makes it more and more difficult for an ally democracy to survive.

In a fallen world, there has to be some sense of how to wage a "just war".  Pacifism is Utopian and fails to account for human depravity.  But war without rules, when war is a sad necessity, allows human depravity to descend to its ultimate depths.  Western democracies have tried, imperfectly, to deal with the necessary evil of war in a limited and restrained fashion.  Leftist dictatorships and terrorist organizations do not care about such restraint.  Which is why their tactics  must be exposed and their regimes resisted.

Israel is on the right side of this conflict, if for no other reason than that the actions of Hamas are indefensible.