Some warbloggers are curiously quiet amid the fallout of the Israeli strike in Gaza, which is being questioned by many Israelis. That’s probably because these warbloggers are intelligent enough to see a line being crossed, and if they can’t say anything good about it, choose not to say anything at all. Cowardly, perhaps, hypocritical, perhaps, but understandable.
But you can depend on the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto to defend the indefensible:
We suppose the White House has to distance itself from Israeli military action for diplomatic reasons, but if Americans knew Osama bin Laden was hiding in a particular house in Afghanistan or Pakistan, would we let him go rather than risk killing civilians?
That’s just a perverse argument, because the “risk” of killing civilians when you hit a city block with a missile is, of course, a 100% certainty. I wonder: if Osama Bin Laden were hiding out in the apartment next to James Taranto’s, and the US decides to take him out with a missile rather than let him go, would Mr. Taranto mind?
A better question to ask would have been, if Sharon had known that Salah Shehada was hiding out in a city block full of Israelis, would he have made the same decision? In other words, is a Palestinian 3-year old’s life worth less than an Israeli 3-year old’s? To Sharon, I have no doubt it is, even if he is not fully capable of articulating this to himself.
News reports raise an even more damning possibility: That the decision was made because Palestinian terror groups were on the verge of declaring an end to suicide attacks. To Sharon and his fellow hawks, this was the last chance to hit their number one enemy, before he became legitimized in the eyes of the US and EU by a political process, just like Arafat. And, their thinking went, if taking him out causes these groups to rescind their gesture of normalization, that’s just fine; they prefer fighting their adversary over negotiating. No wonder Sharon called the strikes a “great success”. The civilians? They were an afterthought. It may yet turn out to be Sharon’s political suicide.
