On July 19th the New York Times ran an article headlined: "With Israeli Use of Force, Debate Over Proportion." I can’t say with certainty that the Times has never run an article headlined "With Islamic Terrorist Use of Force, Debate Over Proportion," but it seems improbable given that paper’s track record.
"Proportion" has become the new buzzword in journalistic circles. Apparently, journalists think that in war, as in sports, the more closely matched the players, the more fair the game. But of course war is not a game. In war, combatants and civilians die. This has always been the case and is likely to remain the case throughout our lifetimes. In 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, United Press correspondent Henry Tilton Gorrell witnessed the killing of civilians as war tactic. He reported the gory details, writing at the time:
General Franco’s forces shelled Madrid regularly at 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.
You could set your watch by it, the methodic German influence obvious. Franco meant to paralyze activity in central Madrid and force closure of the shops so that he could starve the town. But he couldn’t break the spirit of the women of Madrid, who would stand in line patiently for hours, scattering only when shells burst nearby. I regularly saw people in a queue laid out by shell fire and then watched it reform even as they were taking away the dead and wounded. One had to eat, after all, and the women of Madrid willingly risked their lives to feed their young ones.
In between fixed shelling, there were intermittent bombardments, designed to catch the people off-guard. One such occurred as I sat in a restaurant with a Swedish correspondent who had come to Madrid on leave to have a look at the war. I had just bought a morning newspaper from a newsboy when the shelling started. A round crashed into the pavement outside and broken glass, china, tables, and chairs flew all over the place. When I got up, the Swede was trembling violently under the table. It wouldn’t do to stick around, for one shell meant that there would be another and another in a few seconds, so I prevailed upon him to clear out. Leaving, we saw the body of the newsboy from whom I had just purchased the newspaper, torn and bleeding outside. A woman also had been hit. All that was left of her were bits of flesh and remnants of her dress, shoes and stockings. The Swede had seen enough of the war, and sprinted back to his hotel where he checked out immediately. He left the city that afternoon.
During what turned out to be nineteen consecutive days of bombardment, I returned daily to that same restaurant – one of the few that remained open. It was about 3:55 p.m. one afternoon that I spied two very pretty young ladies in yellow dresses walking together on the opposite side of the street. They were beautiful women and a treat to sore eyes, so I decided to invite them to share a meal. I left the table and was about to step into the street when there was a rush overhead as of a freight train coming to an emergency stop, followed by an ear-splitting explosion. An eight inch shell had crashed into a building not a hundred yards away. Broken glass was all over the pavement and the smoke was such that one couldn’t see across the street. When the smoke finally cleared, there were the two ladies in yellow dresses, now a bleeding and torn mass of flesh. One of them was headless; the other was without arms or legs. It had been a close call for me, but instant death for those women.
That report from journalist Henry Gorrell was from a European war just 70 years ago, a war in which civilians were considered targets and killed indiscriminately as part of a campaign of terror. Henry continued to report on war in Europe until 1945, and told many similar stories. Such was the nature of war then, and throughout recorded history.
It is only a recent phenomenon – and an almost exclusively Western phenomenon – that weapons technology permits rules of engagement (ROE) that stress reducing collateral damage. Western sensibilities feed into a process called "weaponeering" in which we strive to match the improved accuracy and payload capacity of our weapons to the target parameters and contain the destructive effects to a small area around the desired target. Civilians are never the desired target. Militaries using Western weapons under Western-style ROE do kill civilians, but only as an unintended consequence of waging war.
This brings us back to the concept of proportionality. "Proportionality" does not mean that one side must limit itself to the tactics or body count of the other. Proportionality is not meant to create a tit-for-tat cycle that will always favor the weaker, less morally-constrained combatant. In our current age of asymmetrical warfare against fanatical terrorists, proportionality means using the right amount of force to accomplish the objective. Too little puts mission accomplishment at risk; too much wastes expensive weapons and generates bad PR fodder for the New York Times. As Israel fights on one front of the Global War on Terrorism, we should never lose sight of why we fight and how we fight – and compare that with our enemies’ motives and methods, as well as our own history of warfare. Context is everything. Holding our side to impossible standards is counter-productive. Under-reporting the barbarism of our adversaries is foolish and dangerous. Journalists understood these truths during our last global war.
