Cult of Civilianality

With reports that almost 6,000 civilians were killed in Iraq in May and June, bringing the death toll of civilians for the year to 14,388, and daily news reports of civilian death tolls in Israel, Lebanon and the Gaza Strip, there is rising concern about the cost of war to those the liberal media refers to as "innocent bystanders." The Bush Administration tried to alleviate some of this concern by calling on Israel to "limit as much as possible so-called collateral damage not only to facilities but also to human lives," in the eloquent words of White House spokesman Tony Snow. To show just how much they care about protecting the innocent, the Bush Administration is rushing delivery of precision-guided smart bombs to Israel, which will make it possible for Israel to conduct more compassionate bombing raids in Lebanon. But others are questioning whether these civilians are really as innocent as they seem. Is it possible some of them may actually deserve what's coming to them?

"I am not buying into the innocent civilians meme," writes the Atlas Shrugs' Pamela, the Internet smart bomb whose delivery Israel unaccountably rejected, though it is hard to imagine after watching this video who would make a more impassioned and articulate advocate not only for Israel but for world Jewry as a whole. "If by ignorance, complicity, neglect or helplessness the Lebanese wouldn't throw Hezbollah out and establish a strong government, then they must pay the price for the sins of Hizbollah. And if people put up with dictatorships, theocracies, totalitarian regimes -- as they did in Nazi Germany -- they deserve what Hezbollah deserves."

Civilians, schmivilians, agrees Harvard Law professor and torture advocate Alan Dershowitz, who earned his reputation by selflessly rushing to the defense of clients like Claus von Bulow and OJ Simpson who suffered unfair discrimination because of their extreme wealth. He would like the media to replace the whole notion of civilians with what he catchily calls a "continuum of civilianality." Instead of lumping, say, women, children and goatherders into one vague category of innocent bystanderesqueness, he believes that each civilian death should be rated on a sliding scale of complicity not unlike the scale used by other less successful attorneys to calculate legal fees for indigent clients. Hovering around 9.0 on Dershowitz's continuum are victims of "Hezbollah missiles and Hamas rockets" that "target and hit Israeli restaurants, apartment buildings and schools." But while he believes "the line between Israeli soldiers and civilians is relatively clear," Hezbollah and Hamas militants unfortunately are nearly indistinguishable from "civilians," he says, putting the word in the print version of air quotes. "Nor can women and children always be counted as civilians," he writes, an argument that may especially come in handy the next time he is on a sinking ship with too few lifeboats.

Regrettably, not only do innocent Lebanese and Palestinian civilians and guilty militants all look alike, Dershowitz argues that those who insist on living in areas where terrorists live after receiving ample warnings from the Israeli Army to abandon their homes, are guilty by association and deserving of collective punishment. "Those who voluntarily remain behind have become complicit," he writes though he does make an exception for those who "cannot leave on their own" presumably because they are old, sick, infirm or impoverished. While these unfortunates may lack the means to flee the carnage, they can at least take some solace in the fact that when the final tallies of body counts are toted up, they "should be counted among the innocent victims," according to Dershowitz. While it's difficult for the military to make such distinctions in the heat of battle, he thinks the media should do so after it's all over instead of just broadcasting raw body count data.

For example, on the sliding scale of tragedy that we might refer to, borrowing the title of another Dershowitz essay, as the "Arithmetic of Pain," if terrorists are at 0.0 and babies are at 10.0, people from Lebanon would tend to fall below 5.0 while people from Israel would tend to fall above 5.0. So when the media says, for example, that a family of three Israelis died in a Hezbollah rocket attack in Haifa and a family of three Lebanese died in an air raid in Southern Lebanon, we are not getting the full picture. But if the media reported instead that a 9.2, a 7.3 and a 9.4 died in Haifa and a 3.7, a 4.1 and a 10.0 died in Southern Lebanon, wouldn't that give a more accurate, a more human picture of what really happened? Then all that you would have to do is average out the figures and you would see that the Haifa attack was an 8.6 in the "Arithmetic of Pain," while the deaths in Southern Lebanon rated only a 5.9.

Critics of Dershowitz claim that by fudging the lines between civilians and soldiers he is making the same argument terrorists make to justify their attacks. But this could not be further from the truth. Terrorists don't value any life at all, not even their own. To them everyone is a 0.0. Some people have also mistakenly compared Dershowitz's words to those of terrorist sympathizer Ward Churchill, who said after 9/11 that the people in the World Trade Center were not "innocent" because they "formed a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire … both willingly and knowingly." But while Churchill believes no one is innocent, Dershowitz is merely saying that innocence is quantifiable. Paraphrasing a passage from George Orwell's Animal Farm, Dershowitz concludes his brilliant essay by saying, "Every civilian death is a tragedy, but some are more tragic than others." If the media adopted Dershowitz's simple idea, then we would all have a better idea of when to cry.

Jon Swift, Alan Dershowitz, Atlas Shrugs, Continuum of Civilianality, Iraq, War on Terror, Terrorism, Bush, Tony Snow, Ward Churchill, Lebanon, Israel, Middle East, Foreign Policy, Politics, Beltway Traffic Jam