While the President accuses Israel of what would have been considered a war crime in World War II, completely and totally botching the historical reality of US policy in the process, he and others who insist Israel is killing too many civilian refuse to provide any number of acceptable casualties of their own.
Immediately after the massacre of October 7, where the equivalent of a barbarian horde stormed out of Gaza and slaughtered some 1,400 Israelis, quickly killing the lucky few while raping and mutilating the unlucky, President Biden dispatched Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Israel. While standing on the still bloody soil, he solemnly declared, “We encountered a nation knit together by grief but also a nation united in resolve. The United States shares that resolve. We stand shoulder to shoulder with the people of Israel.” Even at the time, astute observers recognized that this was highly unlikely given the obvious preference among progressives, one of the President’s key constituencies, for Palestine, if not Hamas itself, over Israel. It seemed unreasonable to believe that President Biden would have either the spine or the stomach to oppose his own party for long, and that has been precisely what has unfolded over the past two months, perhaps worse than even his detractors thought at the time. Rather than standing shoulder to shoulder or anything even close, the President almost immediately began pushing for a “humanitarian pause” far more favorable to Hamas, which was under a brutal onslaught right up until the 5-day ceasefire, than Israel, especially given that it was primarily negotiated by their allies in Qatar. Reports behind the scenes suggested that President Biden pressured Israel into an arrangement which would see more Palestinian prisoners released than Israeli or US hostages held in the Gaza Strip. Inexplicably, the President also sought no guarantees on who would be released, what their condition was, or any of the other usual details one would expect for a hostage negotiation. It was as if he were pressuring Israel to cave to Hamas’ demands, rather than backing an important ally in the region. Last week, however, the situation became far worse than even I imagined so soon, when the President accused Israel of nothing short of a modern blood libel and simultaneously provided countries that might be wavering in their support of Israel to abandon the only democracy in the Middle East in their time of utmost need. “Israel’s security can rest on the United States, but right now it has more than the United States. It has the European Union, it has Europe, it has most of the world supporting them,” President Biden said to donors at private fundraiser before delivering the ultimate backstab. “They’re starting to lose that support by indiscriminate bombing that takes place.”
Rarely, does a single statement contain so many damaging sentiments it is difficult to fully appreciate them all at a glance. First, the accusation of “indiscriminate bombing” can only be interpreted as validating the progressive impression that Israel is intentionally targeting civilians, rather than the reality that Hamas itself hides behind civilians, sets up headquarters embedded with civilians, and uses civilians as shields, making sure that Israel inflicts as much collateral damage as possible to sway world opinion – as they have succeeded in swaying the President’s. This is fundamentally different from suggesting Israel should more carefully balance destroying Hamas and simultaneously safeguarding civilians, or that different tactics could yield the same military objectives while reducing casualties, both of which are certainly reasonable points of discussion given no calibration or tactic can ever be perfect in a warzone. Instead, this is an accusation that they are showing a fundamental disregard for human life, and a reckless one at that which leads directly to the notion that Israel is committing war crimes. The phrase “collective punishment” is used to describe a military campaign that seeks to target civilians rather than the enemy, essentially taking revenge on the populace. There is no difference, logically speaking, between claiming they are conducting “indiscriminate bombing” and saying they are punishing civilians. The two are one and the same – if you are bombing indiscriminately, you are by definition punishing civilians, which has been a heinous accusation at least since World War II, if not earlier, more on that in a moment. Second, by implicitly accusing Israel of war crimes, the President is tacitly giving permission for countries to stop supporting their efforts to eradicate Hamas. The one thought leads directly to the other, as Biden himself said, “They’re starting to lose that support by indiscriminate bombing that takes place.” The phrase “stunning statement” is frequently overused, but here, we need an even more shocking adjective. Like the United States, European countries have also seen large, sometimes violent, sometimes antisemitic protests. If Israel is indeed committing war crimes as the United States President suggested, why would anyone continue to support them? In diplomatic speak, he is telling these potentially wavering countries not to support them and this is precisely what leaders who have no interest in bucking segments of their own populace over what happens a thousand or more miles away will conclude. Third, President Biden is explicitly endorsing the information provided by Hamas over Israel. The notion that they are indiscriminately bombing is based on the perception that there have been an inordinate number of civilian casualties, but the only source for this number is Hamas itself. Though the President has personally questioned the death count in the past, he embraces it to slander Israel now.
Given these statements were said in public and the President was well aware they would be widely reported, it is hard to imagine a more shocking breach of diplomatic protocol concerning any ally we are supposed to be standing shoulder to shoulder with. A stab in the back doesn’t begin to describe it. I can think of no modern analog at this early stage of a conflict. It would be as if Prime Minister Tony Blair openly accused President George W. Bush of war crimes less than three months after 9-11 based on information provided by the Taliban, if the Taliban was still holding British and American hostages. If he truly believes this, he should be calling for Israeli leadership to be brought to the Hague and charged with war crimes, not insisting that we are still their allies somehow. How could we possibly be allied with a country indiscriminately killing civilians for no reason? Perhaps even worse, the entire argument rests on a false assumption: If you are going to claim Israel is, in fact, killing too many civilians, you need to provide a number that would be acceptable in the first place. War is hell and people die. Nothing will change that, which is why we try to avoid war whenever possible and why the world was shocked by Hamas’ brutal attack. Once a war begins, however, civilian deaths are unavoidable. The question becomes how many is too many given the theater of combat and the conditions on the ground. In this case, the theater is a densely packed urban area and everyone, or at least almost everyone, agrees that Hamas itself intentionally uses civilians as shields. There is no military base or munitions factory Israel can overrun outside of a population center. The bases and makeshift factories are all placed inside civilian areas, frequently underground. There is no Hamas fleet that Israel can destroy in the middle of the ocean. There is no Hamas air force that can fight in the skies. There isn’t even an Hamas army that can be met on the field. No matter what tactics Israel pursues, people are going to be in harm’s way, sometimes their own people as we saw last week then three Israeli hostages were accidentally killed while the defense forces were clearing an area. This is undoubtedly tragic, but it remains a fact of urban warfare even when combatants take steps to preserve innocent lives. The President himself appeared to anticipate this argument at least somewhat by mentioning past battles that targeted urban populations. “It was pointed out to me — I’m being very blunt with you all — it was pointed out to me that, by Bibi, that ‘Well, you carpet-bombed Germany. You dropped the atom bomb. A lot of civilians died,’” the President said, according to a White House provided transcript. “I said, ‘Yeah, that’s why all these institutions were set up after World War Two to see to it that it didn’t happen again — it didn’t happen again. Don’t make the same mistakes we made at 9/11. There was no reason why we had to be in a war in Afghanistan at 9/11. There was no reason why we had to do some of the things we did.”
Here, the President almost catastrophically misreads history, displaying an ignorance and a lack of subtlety that is truly incredible for a commander in chief. Even during World War II, there were prohibitions in place against targeting civilians and the accusation of “indiscriminate bombing” against an American leader in Europe or the Pacific would have been considered grounds to relieve them of command, if not face a court martial. American generals and Admirals were not given free reign to kill anyone they wanted or bomb any target they wanted, not once during the entire course of the war did the leadership in Washington specifically target civilians or approve the specific targeting of civilians. At the same time, it was understood that military installations or factories in urban areas were acceptable targets even at the cost of significant collateral damage and there was far more of an acceptance for collateral damage in general in an era where tens of thousands frequently died in a single battle. Putting this another way, civilian casualties were orders of magnitude higher than what would be tolerated in the modern era, but this did not imply that indiscriminate bombing was an accepted strategy. The President is likely confused by the firebombing raids against Japan, Tokyo in particular, which killed tens if not hundreds of thousands, developed towards the very end of the war and were largely indiscriminate in their targets, but his confusion is instructive nonetheless. These raids were not authorized by US Central Command, at least at first. They were instead the brainchild of Major General Curtis LeMay, nicknamed “Iron Ass” because he “defecated nuts and bolts,” who was given command of a new fleet of B-29 bombers, the largest and most sophisticated of the war. LeMay began his career in World War II in the European theater, but in the winter of 1944 and 1945, he was restationed in the Mariana Islands to take charge of this new fleet at only 39 years of age. Initially, he attempted to adhere to the United States policy of only using aircraft for precision bombing. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself embraced this prohibition, describing indiscriminate bombing as “inhuman barbarism.” This was in contrast to our British allies at the time, who were largely behind the raids on Dresden.
Upon taking command, General Larry Norstad told LeMay, “You go ahead and get results with the B-29. If you don’t get results, you’ll be fired…If you don’t get results it will mean eventually a mass amphibious invasion of Japan, cost probably half a million more American lives.” LeMay flew some 2,037 sorties attempting to adhere to the precision bombing provision, but was not able to achieve the desired results due to the cover of darkness and the altitude at which the bombs were supposed to be dropped. He wrote to General H. H. “Hap” Arnold, “Our attempts to bomb precision targets at night have failed,” at which point he came up with a new strategy to fly the planes low and drop larger amounts of incendiary bombs. Crucially, he came up with this strategy on his own and asked permission from no one. The first raids were conducted against Tokyo and resulted in the largest death toll to date in the war, some 100,000 thousand. The White House, still with Roosevelt in charge, learned of the raid and LeMay’s violation of government policy after it had been conducted. LeMay himself was convinced he’d done the right thing to shorten the war, saying “We don’t pause to shed any tears for the uncounted hordes of Japanese who lie charred in that acrid-smelling rubble. The smell of Pearl Harbor fires is too persistent in our nostrils.” His superior, General Arnold, described it this way,, “A quick glance at the map gives the impression that something over half of Tokyo is now gone. [The] Tokyo incendiary operations have certainly been among the most effective in the entire history of bombing. Keep up the good work.” Roosevelt and Washington, DC in general remained silent, not endorsing the strategy or admonishing LeMay. By March 19, however, the raids stopped because there were no more bombs, and it was not until the fighting in the Pacific grew even more brutal over the next month that they started again. Whether one agrees with LeMay or not, the context is important. These raids only developed after the Japanese began resorting to using mass numbers of suicide bombers in the Pacific theater. The campaign for Okinawa was almost beyond modern conception. In a single raid, the Japanese unleashed over 250 suicide planes. There were suicide boats and even suicide swimmers. Soldiers hid in booby trapped tunnels fighting to the last man and some 2,700 Americans were killed in the first nine days alone. It was only in this light that LeMay was given free reign to proceed.
That President Biden is unaware or has chosen to forget all of these details is telling. First, he is essentially slamming his own country and our close to 100 year history of protecting human life, claiming we are no better than anyone else, a typical refrain from progressives in general despite our long tradition of being otherwise. Second, he is failing to acknowledge that the civilian casualties that occurred in World War II did not happen as a result of some insatiable bloodlust, a desire to indiscriminately bomb civilians for the sake of bombing civilians. Rather, both sides grew increasingly desperate, particularly in the Pacific, and the tactics employed became more aggressive with time. What was not acceptable in 1943 became acceptable in 1945. Third, he is doing so in a way intentionally designed to make Israel look bad and weaken their support, so extreme he actually mentioned the use of nuclear weapons, as if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was ready to drop an H-bomb on Gaza and wipe out the entire city. The Israel-Hamas War, by contrast, was started by an atrocity that Israel is now responding to. Israel lost half the number of civilians in a single day than the total that shocked US Command after nine days of fighting in Okinawa. They are bound by oath to their own citizens to protect them from this kind of atrocity in the future, and therefore their calculus as to what is an acceptable number of civilian casualties is likely different from ours, but that doesn’t mean there is no calculus at all. Of course, this doesn’t mean their calculus is correct, either. Given the history in the region, they might well be conducting attacks that are more aggressive than they need to be, but that is significantly different than the accusations the President is making and if one wants to have that debate, they need to provide a number of their own. Instead, Israel’s closest ally in the entire world is recycling attacks based on unfounded assumptions, attacks that will be used by Israel’s enemies and the mainstream media to undercut crucial support. Are we friend or foe in this situation?
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 