Interesting scenario

[orangat]

Are you honestly trying to deny that Israel is has been subjected to continuous terrorist attacks against its civilian population?
Really? I am not being facetious here. I am asking you this seriously. Is that your belief?

No, it's so ass backwards that the settlements are both a catalyst for and a defence against terrorism.
It's a lose/lose.

I can't answer that. As soon as it looked like Israel might be doing just that, the terrorists and the states that sponsored them caused the situation to be untenable as far as a lasting peace was concerned. Now we'll probably never know.

But let me ask you this: do you think there is any chance that Israel will ever make any unilateral gestures while hundreds of rockets per day rain down on their civilian population?

Actually, making any act of goodwill is "doing the right thing." Unless, I guess, it happens to be Israelis doing it. Then it's most likely just another Jewish ploy to kill more Arab babies.

If a neighbouring state overran 78% of your country and established over 400,000 illegal settlers in illegal settlements in the remaining 22% while stealing most of the water resources, where does that conquering state get the moral authority to defend itself against its neighbouring country?

Are you honestly trying to deny that Israel hasn't always given back as good or almost always better than what it receives?

How has it has become so twisted that pulling out from illegal settlements is treated as a magnanimous gesture instead simply the right thing to do. The establishment of illegal settlements is simply a means to create a foothold for future expansion and to bolster Israeli propaganda that Palestinians are attacking Israeli 'neighbourhoods'.

[Goofball]

If a neighbouring state overran 78% of your country and established over 400,000 illegal settlers in illegal settlements in the remaining 22% while stealing most of the water resources, where does that conquering state get the moral authority to defend itself against its neighbouring country?

Are you honestly trying to deny that Israel hasn't always given back as good or almost always better than what it receives?

How has it has become so twisted that pulling out from illegal settlements is treated as a magnanimous gesture instead simply the right thing to do. The establishment of illegal settlements is simply a means to create a foothold for future expansion and to bolster Israeli propaganda that Palestinians are attacking Israeli 'neighbourhoods'.

I fear we are diverting Tribesman's thread and taking it in a direction he didn't want it to go, so I'll belay the discussion for now. Meet me in the next Israel/Palestine thread (we usually have one every other day at least, so we won't have to wait long) and I'll be happy to put the gloves on and step in the ring.

[Tribesman]

So, if I want to conquer Mexico, should I just send paramilitary units down there to take over a couple of appartment buildings and fire out of the buildings since I know no action can be taken against me?

Do you recall the Iranian embassy siege in London ? did they take no action , did they bomb the hell out of the neighbournood , did they just blow up the one building , or did they manage to ge rid of the terrorists and release the people by another method .
So was the response rational , proportionate and most importantly effective .

[Don Corleone]

So, if I want to conquer Mexico, should I just send paramilitary units down there to take over a couple of appartment buildings and fire out of the buildings since I know no action can be taken against me?

Do you recall the Iranian embassy siege in London ? did they take no action , did they bomb the hell out of the neighbournood , did they just blow up the one building , or did they manage to ge rid of the terrorists and release the people by another method .
So was the response rational , proportionate and most importantly effective .

Aha!!! But if you had asked the SAS commander for a 100% guarantee absolutely no civilians would be harmed before he started, it would still be held by the DRMLA. He couldn't have made that guarantee. Because he took reasonable precautions in planning Operation Nimrod, however, the risk of collateral damage was minimal and in this particular case, none came to pass.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

"Rational, proportionate, and most of all effective." -- Tribesy

I concur with 2 of 3.

A response should be rational. With violence, emotion too easily leads to its mis-application. Or, as has been said, revenge is a dish best served cold.

Effective is the sina quae non of the whole thing. I am not yet convinced that the only end result of controlled violence against a terrorist or guerilla organization is improved recruiting and morale for the irregulars ( a theme I get in this forum fairly frequently), but unintended counterproductive consequences are -- or should be -- cautionary. "Effective" should include more than just immediate effects.

Proportionate is my sticking point. Not because I believe that attacks against me and mine justify any and all forms of counter attack -- reducing Baghdad, Damascus, Tehran, Qum and Kabul to glass on 9/12/01 (as some including my dad suggested) would, for example, have been a bit much.

Nevertheless, too many people view "proportionate" as a synonym for reciprocal. Reciprocal is ...Terror/Guerilla group A kidnaps and kills 2 of my soldiers so my nation identifies a sub-leader and his driver and immolate the pair of them with a Hellfire as they drive to work. Reciprocal is an endless cycle of I can be just as mean as you...Nyah! It solves nothing.

For me, the correct "proportion" is to marshall my intelligence, scope out the threat, and then make concrete steps towards eradicating it. It does not mean wiping out the bystanders or persecuting everyone with moderate amounts of melanin in their skin tone. Some take that stance, and that too is out of "proportion."

Your principle on violence, that no killing of the innocent can be tolerated or accepted and that violence should be withheld if such harm is likely, Tribes', inevitably boils down to:

Violence is only justified in direct personal defense in response to and during a specific instance of aggresssion by another.

While laudable as a principle and in almost full conformity with the dictates of my own church, it is functionally impractical, as Don C. noted above. Such a standard is not even maintained in police work, much less on a formal or informal battlefield.

[Duke of Gloucester]

There is compromise between not taking any action just in case innocent people are killed and acting in a way that doesn't care whether innocent people die. It also might be interesting to have a definition of innocent.

[Don Corleone]

DG, I agree. I said, you have to take all reasonable precautions to prevent collateral damage to innocent civilians. The problems in the world stem from the defintions of the terms reasonable, innocent and civilian.

Right now, as we speak, Saddam Hussein and his generals are defending their gassing of 10s of thousands of Kurds not by denying that they did it, but by saying in light of the dangers they faced from Iranian invaders teamed up with Kurdish insurrectionists (and they agree these rebels were a minority), they essentially had no choice, and that in fact they never actually targeted any civilians.

So, as nobody can prove they actually targeted the civilian Kurdish population, the final outcome will be decided by what the trial court judges decide what were reasonable precautions, who was innocent and who were civilians and what the Baathists should have reasonably decided in light of that.

Similiarly, Israel's recent foray into Lebanon shows what happens when people take the attitude "well, hey, I'm not actually targeting the civilians". Clearly, Israel was acting beyond any reasonable bounds of restraint.

But French (Norman, to be precise) farmers died at Normandy. Heck, French nuns died during Normandy. Does that mean Operation Overlord was immoral? Thousands of innocent German civilians died in Berlin and other German cities in the spring of 1945 (and let's leave Dresden out of this for a moment, because that was a clear case of actually targeting civilians).

At some point, in the face of certain types of evil, inaction is every bit as morally reprehensible as action that allows for the possibility of some innocent civilian casualties. Examples?

Rwanda, Darfur, El Salvador and Nicaragua, Cambodia, Siberia... all the places in the world in histor where we as a global community knew full well evil was happening and we were too cowardly to act. We can console ourselves with the fact that we harmed no innocent civilians by refusing to intervene, but do you think that makes the millions of survivors of these horrors feel any better?