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July 25, 2006
Three Horns of a Trilemma
The dilemma of a free people in wartime is generally shown as a continuum between Security and Liberty. To gain more Security, you have to sacrifice more Liberty, and any gain in Liberty likewise constitutes a loss of Security; at least, that is the general claim, and I'm willing to take it at face value for present purposes, even though it leaves out the messy reality of inefficient, ineffective, or incompetent governments. But that view is quite obsolete, now, for Western nations; there is another element of sacrifice that must be put into the pot: Humanitarianism.
To be quite blunt about it, there is no fundamental threat to the security of the United States that is not immediately solvable. Don't believe me? What's your example? Let's take the hard and intractable problem of terrorists who hide amongst civilians. There are a number of scenarios here, and none of them fundamentally threaten the United States, or pretty much any Western nation.
In Lebanon, Hizb'allah has so deeply embedded itself in the civilian infrastructure that troops (I'm being more generous to Hizb'allah's terrorists than is really merited) are barracked in civilian houses; armories are in civilian houses; observation posts are co-located with UN observation posts to make it difficult for Israel to strike without hitting the UN post; spokesmen and decision-makers are housed in the largest city in Lebanon, often amongst either civilians or government officials; many of Hizb'allah's capabilities are "owned" by the Lebanese army, rather than by Hizb'allah itself. How can the problem of Hizb'allah terrorism be solved? Surely, Israel cannot destroy Hizb'allah, because doing so would mean thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of dead Lebanese civilians.
Here is how Israel can solve the problem: it can kill, easily, thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Lebanese civilians, if it must do so to solve the problem. If Hizb'allah retreats to Syria, Israel can do the same to Syria, if necessary, and so on. The only thing that stops Israel from doing this is its Humanitarian nature.
Like most Westerners, Israelis cannot imagine a condition where they would be willing to slaughter innocents, presumed innocents, possible innocents, even outright enemies in such numbers. This is a good thing, most assuredly, because if it were not so, those people would certainly have been slaughtered in every Arab country surrounding Israel, and in the occupied territories as well: no nation on Earth has resisted the number, severity and consistency of attacks on its civilians as has Israel. All to be called "evil" and worse, by people who would be far more barbaric in the same circumstances.
Similarly, with Iran's support of terrorists and pursuit of nuclear weaponry, the US could end the problem in about half an hour and with zero US casualties. It would take a bit longer if we wanted to avoid using nuclear weapons, and we would take a few casualties, but the result would be much the same. How much of an insurrection would have followed Saddam Hussein's fall had we simply leveled every city and killed everyone other than coalition troops? We could have done so; it is within our capacity.
Fortunately for the world, and for our conception of self, we have not had to resort to that level of barbarity. Anyone who thinks that we are not capable of it, though, should first read up on Dresden and the Pacific campaign in WWII, the last time we were called upon to exercise our barbarianism. I assure you, we were nearly as peaceful in 1938 as we are today, yet seven years later we leveled entire cities with our only second thought being whether we could get enough bombers and incendiary bombs in place to be thorough about it. Afterwards, we slept the sleep of the Just. We can do so again, and will do so if pushed to it.
If you think that maybe some Western nations, perhaps the sainted France, are actually beyond this, it only indicates that you haven't been reading about France's actions in the Ivory Coast over the last few years. As to Germany, no comment should be needed. Other Western nations are similar, though for many their tests have been so far back in time, or they have been so overmatched, that it's not readily apparent. The West is civilized not because we are above bloodshed, but because we have collectively crammed our arms in blood up to the shoulders for hundreds of years. The survivors have learned, mostly, how to live with each other.
For the Arab world, the ability to slaughter wholesale, as opposed to personal service, is a very recent development. That ability was developed in the West, as war after war drove our astoundingly creative and inventive forebears to develop astoundingly creative and inventive new ways to protect themselves from the old ways of being killed, followed by developing astoundingly creative and inventive new ways to kill each other. The Arabs simply bought the old leftovers the West no longer needed, as have the Africans. Suddenly, between the end of WWII and the middle of the 1960s, the Arabs went from resourceless barbarians in the trackless desert, killing each other with knives and small arms, to barbarians in a trackless desert over a sea of oil, killing each other with tanks and aircraft and chemical weapons.
But they were stopped cold by Israel, which had partaken of Westernism in fact, rather than by distant observation. In war after war, even when taken in the utterly worst possible military posture (1973), the Israelis mopped the floor with Arab nations outnumbering it something like 50 to 1 or more. Unlike the Arabs, Israel could build the weapons it used: Israel had the understanding of the Western way of war; the Arabs had only the tools. That is still true. But the Arabs have in consequence fallen back on their barbarian natures, updated with suicide bombs and rockets fired from the roofs of hospitals. They have not absorbed the Western way of war, so they have not absorbed the necessity of living without killing each other wholesale. They only have the tools of wholesale slaughter, not the morality to prevent themselves from engaging in it.
So the question John Podhoretz asks is, will we be capable of giving up, at least for a while, some of our Humanitarianism, to preserve our Security and our Liberty? My question is slightly different, because I assume that we can give up our Humanitarianism and still sleep the sleep of the Just; we've done it before. My question is, will we give up our Humanitarianism a little bit early, or altogether after the balance between Liberty and Security becomes moot, because we have neither?
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