On "The Immorality of the Moral High Ground"
Daniel Greenfield, in "The Immorality of the Moral High Ground" (Canada Free Press, July 15th 2010, http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/25388) has managed to say something I have been thinking for some time, and say it really well:
We can't win the War on Terror so long as we hold to liberal definitions of the Moral High Ground ...
That's the subtitle. And it's something that I mostly agree with -- to be precise, I would say that it is much harder to win under the liberal definition of morally proper conduct, because this definition bars us from using most of the effective counterinsurgent and counterterror tactics.
To take the extreme case, if we treated every enemy combatant as a criminal and staged elaborate trials for them, it would require a ridiculously huge court and prison system to fight any war; what's more, the requirement for evidence gathering would severely impede rational combat tactics. War is not the same thing as criminal law enforcement, and those who imagine that it can be simply don't know much about conditions on a battlefield.
I often wonder, seriously, if those who call for treating the War on Terror as a problem in criminal law honestly believe that this could work, or are simply trying to sabotage the war effort. I grew up reading military history, knowing veterans, etc. -- it's sometimes hard for me to grasp emotionally how innocent some people are of military affairs.
A Good Muslim is willing to kill for Islam. The Koran says so explicitly. On the other hand liberals insist that only a Bad American is willing to kill for America.
Both statements are very, very true. Any Muslim who tells you that jihad was meant to mean only "spiritual struggle" is either lying to you or to himself -- it's clear from history that jihad FREQUENTLY means actual war in the violent sense of the word.
And the modern American Left seems to have problems with the idea of Americans killing anyone (though, interestingly, are willing to fawn all over murderous foreign leaders, including those of Terrorist States). There seems to be an idea that foreigners have more right to kill than do Americans, overlaying perhaps a subtler and subconscious notion of Americans as higher souls who are dirtied by killing, while foreigners can't be expected to know any better, poor things ...
We can’t win the War on Terror so long as we hold to liberal definitions of the Moral High Ground. We can’t even begin to really fight it. What’s worse, is that not only does this warped understanding of morality result in more American deaths, it results in more deaths of both fighters and civilians on the enemy side. Because where the soldier understands that the most moral way to win a war is, quickly.
Very true. Fighting with inefficient levels of self-restraint makes the war drag out longer, and encourages recruits to join the enemy forces -- because it looks like they're winning. The combination of this with our highly-efficient miltiary technology is gruesome -- most of those enemy recruits are not going to come home again, at least not in one piece.
The bleeding heart liberal thinks that the most moral way to win a war is, never. To a liberal, if we must fight a war, we should do it with our hands tied behind our backs, and after a decade of senseless bloodshed, we’ll finally come to realize that war is a bad thing.
And, of course, the liberals fail to realize how dreadful would be the consequences of our defeat in this war. I have noticed a curious denial on their parts that there is a war, or really an enemy -- so they do not grasp that a victorious enemy would seek to impose terms upon us in order for us to be granted the privilege of a cessation of attacks upon ourselves. They think that we could simply leave the Mideast and be safe: they do not grasp the implications of the fact that the war started with attacks on us in our homeland. They might start to grasp it when the terms included censorship of our own media and oppression of our own LGBT minorities, but perhaps not -- the European Left doesn't seem to be getting it, and the appeasement is much more advanced there.
Not only will they see that the whole thing fails, they’ll make sure that it fails as painfully and horribly as possible in order to serve as a lesson to any future government that might flirt with any similar notion.
Because Only America Is Real. Obviously, if one believes that, then one anticipates the effects of success or failure purely in terms of its effects on domestic politics -- it's not as if the enemy was real, and had its own goals, some of which might involve the loss of one's own liberties if achieved.
Their goal is to break Western civilization. Break it of its exceptionalism. Break it of any notion that it has any worthwhile accomplishments to its name. Break it of any idea that it has a right to exist. That is their real Moral High Ground. National and international suicide in favor of nobler and better Third World creeds that won’t be as greedy or as industrially developed, and will build societies based on sharing and caring, and of course the obligatory head chopping. Nothing else matters.
Exactly. And, as Greenfield implies, the reality is that most non-Western cultures are far, far worse than the West even by the Leftist standards of value. The Left is wilfully blinding itself to this reality, which is why they are constantly surprised when anti-Western rebels manage to take over in this or that country, and the result is localized Hell.
Israel, which has its own hard-at-work left, has something similar called “Purity of Arms” which is Hebrew for the “Courageous Restraint” medal that General McChrystal was thinking of handing out to US soldiers in Afghanistan for not killing terrorists. Purity of Arms is one of the best strategic advantages Israel has ever handed to the terrorists because it gives the terrorists a free pass to carry out attacks behind civilians, while threatening soldiers with severe penalties if they fire without being 100 percent certain that they’re about to be murdered if they don’t.
Yep. And what's worse, it internalizes the global anti-Semitism that helps create this double standard between Israel and the Muslim states in the first place, so that the Israelis wind up feeling guilty simply for defending themselves!
How many people died in both Israel and Lebanon because IDF soldiers are trained not to shoot, rather than to shoot, thereby allowing themselves to be ambushed by terrorists and turned into hostages and the causes of a war? How many more people will die when Noam Shalit finally gets his way and thousands of terrorists with blood on their hands are traded in for Gilad Shalit’s freedom? And how many more will die when the cycle repeats itself. The numbers become more horrifying as you trace them back to their source.
Exactly. This Israeli self-restraint has the effect of dragging the war out for decades, when a lack of Israeli self-restraint would lead to the decisive defeat of the Muslim Terrorist States, and force the more moderate Muslim States to stop supporting anti-Israeli terrorism, because they wouldn't want to be NEXT.
Greenfield then points out that Arab states rarely have a major problem with Palestinian terrorism directed against them (the sole, and obvious, exception being Iraq -- which developed this problem under American administration!). And he explains why.
... in 1970 when the terrorists began hijacking planes and declared that a part of Jordan belonged to them, King Hussein sent in the army. He didn’t kill a mere 52 Palestinian Arab terrorists, as Israel did in Jenin. Or a mere 107 in Deir Yassin. Not even the 800 or so killed in fighting between Arabs in Sabra and Shatilla. No, according to Arafat, King Hussein’s troops killed an estimated 25,000 Palestinian Arabs
This wasn’t some sort of unique event by Middle Eastern standards. When the Islamists tried to stage an uprising in Hama, Syrian troops killed somewhere between 20,000 to 40,000 people. When Arafat sided with Saddam during the Gulf War, Kuwait expelled 400,000 Palestinian Arabs. Why did they do it? Because by 1990, Kuwait had some 564,000 native Arabs, and some 450,000 Palestinian Arabs. So the Kuwaitis began bombing Palestinian Arab neighborhoods, top officials boasted about “cleansing” Palestinian Arabs from Kuwait, and tanks and troops were sent into Palestinian Arab neighborhoods, setting up checkpoints, killing, imprisoning and torturing thousands. There were plenty of atrocities that got brief mentions in the media, before the Palestinian Arabs were gone from Kuwait, and everyone moved on.
And note (as Greenfield does), that the Western media failed to complain about this. To this day, almost no one in the West has heard of any of these three events -- even I didn't realize their full scale until I read this article. (For instance, I knew of the Palestinian expulsion from Kuwait, but not that it was almost half a million Palestinians, or the great brutality with which it was carried out). Today, all three of these events are non-issues (save to the Palestinians, and who really listens to them except when they are attacking Israel?).
And that just about says it all. The same Western governments which think it’s asking a lot to expect Muslims to show mercy, make those demands of Israel all the time. They make those demands of their own forces while never expecting Muslims to show mercy.
Which strikes me as suicidal -- to criticize one's own allies and military harshly, while giving others a free pass. A better means of inducing one's own demoralization could hardly be invented.
And who’s to blame? The Moral High Ground is. Terrorist groups can only win, if you let them. Their entire strategy relies on drawing you into a conflict, on the understanding that you won’t have the nerve to really crush them. If you do crush them, the conflict goes away. But if you try to be Mr. Nice Guy, the terrorists now have you hook, line and sinker. If you restrain yourself, you’ll be involved in endless little fights, dying the death of a thousand cuts, until the terrorists and their international backers successfully replace you with a Pro-Appeasement government. And if you recognize the terrorists and make concessions to them, you’ll be up to your neck in terror.
Completely and accurately summarized. The Terrorists can only win if we make the war a sport and handicap ourselves in the contest.
Let us stop playing games. Let us instead start fighting to win.
But what is the real Moral High Ground? It’s not mercy toward those who show you none. For governments it is about doing their duty by protecting their citizens. For soldiers it is about serving as the protectors of the home front. It is not about sparing enemies, either those under arms or those who aid and abet them. Because that is the surest way to prolong the conflict, and in the long run will cost more lives on both sides.
Yes. What's more, we are giving the Terrorist States time to escalate to nuclear weapons, and once that happens, the chances are that we will wind up killing large percentages of the populations of those states, including many people whom we would have spared had we fought the war in a shorter, less restrained, but more decisive fashion from the beginning.
Not only that, but this false mercy actually kills more civilians because it turns human shields into a viable tactic. A terrorist who hides behind a civilian, and doesn’t get shot, learns that hiding behind civilians is a useful strategy. Other terrorists learn from him that civilians are better than bulletproof vests because vests won’t stop automatic fire, but human shields will. A terrorist who hides behind a civilian and gets shot, is dead, and a warning to other terrorists that hiding behind civilians is not a good way to stay alive. In the long run, the “cruel” act of disregarding a hostage is a much better way to protect civilians in conflict zones.
We need to learn to disregard the false argument that the fate of a hostage is in the hands of the captor's enemies. The fate of a hostage -- and the responsibility for his good treatment as either a civilian internee or a POW under the Geneva Convention -- is in the hands of the captor -- no more and no less. If a captor chooses to murder a hostage by putting him in the firing line, it is the fault of the captor, not of the soldier who fired the bullet, as much as if it had been the captor who fired the bullet.
In the same way, stamping out the first terrorist attacks will save you from engaging in a prolonged struggle. That means doing it with decisive finality. This is a simple truth that every Middle Eastern country, but Israel understands. And a simple fact that every Muslim country understands, but the United States does not.
Very much so. When we spare terrorists due to our "self-restraint," we only look weak. Not moral.
Throw a dart at any major Muslim nation and you find repression, mass graves, and even genocide. Indonesia, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Turkey-it never ends.
Which puts the lie to the notion that killing Terrorists "outrages the Muslim street."
There’s a very simple reason for that. In Islam, force is the only real morality.
Or, to be precise, a contest of force shows which side had the "will of God" with him. The loser must have been immoral by definition, or he wouldn't have lost.
If, on the other hand, the Islamists get stomped into the dirt, their religious credibility runs at an all time low. When victory is impossible, Islam withers and goes into the long sleep of cultural hibernation to awaken in a more permissive time.
We know this, because it has happened at least once before. In the l8th through early 20th centuries.
There’s only one way to defeat terrorists. To fight them without any more restraint than they impose on themselves. Under such conditions, superior force and technology makes the victory of the civilized side inevitable, and creates an incentive for the uncivilized side to become civilized, or pay the price.
Exactly. War is the continuation of diplomacy by other means, which emphasizes that one must provide the foe incentives to surrender. The more horrible the war is for the enemy, the more he suffers from it, the more these "incentives" can consist of "We'll stop killing you" rather than "We'll sacrifice our own interests to appease you."
And the less likely it is that the war will be resumed. This is what the American Left truly fails to grasp: that what induces a warlike Power to peaceful conduct toward a peaceful Power is not a lack of provocation, but a memory that the last time they screamed and leapt, they were humiliatingly and painfully defeated.
By repeatedly offering the Terrorist States status quo ante bellum peaces, such as we have successfully pressured Israel to do, all we achieve is to make it obvious to the Terrorist States that there is no real price for failure, so they might as well try attacking again and again. (Those who point out that lots and lots of Terrorist State soldiers die in each such war are missing the point -- these deaths are not painful to the Terrorist State LEADERS, who regard them as worthless cannon fodder).
There is only one Moral High Ground that that can defeat, the moral high ground of standing up for civilization, against those who would drown it in the ichor of their own hate, the stench of their own greed, the lust of their own power and the blood of their endless murders. It is not moral to let your family be murdered, rather than harm the murderers. He who slays those who kill his loved ones, stands on the true moral high ground. The only true Moral High Ground that there is.
I don't see how I can improve on that.
Comments?
We can't win the War on Terror so long as we hold to liberal definitions of the Moral High Ground ...
That's the subtitle. And it's something that I mostly agree with -- to be precise, I would say that it is much harder to win under the liberal definition of morally proper conduct, because this definition bars us from using most of the effective counterinsurgent and counterterror tactics.
To take the extreme case, if we treated every enemy combatant as a criminal and staged elaborate trials for them, it would require a ridiculously huge court and prison system to fight any war; what's more, the requirement for evidence gathering would severely impede rational combat tactics. War is not the same thing as criminal law enforcement, and those who imagine that it can be simply don't know much about conditions on a battlefield.
I often wonder, seriously, if those who call for treating the War on Terror as a problem in criminal law honestly believe that this could work, or are simply trying to sabotage the war effort. I grew up reading military history, knowing veterans, etc. -- it's sometimes hard for me to grasp emotionally how innocent some people are of military affairs.
A Good Muslim is willing to kill for Islam. The Koran says so explicitly. On the other hand liberals insist that only a Bad American is willing to kill for America.
Both statements are very, very true. Any Muslim who tells you that jihad was meant to mean only "spiritual struggle" is either lying to you or to himself -- it's clear from history that jihad FREQUENTLY means actual war in the violent sense of the word.
And the modern American Left seems to have problems with the idea of Americans killing anyone (though, interestingly, are willing to fawn all over murderous foreign leaders, including those of Terrorist States). There seems to be an idea that foreigners have more right to kill than do Americans, overlaying perhaps a subtler and subconscious notion of Americans as higher souls who are dirtied by killing, while foreigners can't be expected to know any better, poor things ...
We can’t win the War on Terror so long as we hold to liberal definitions of the Moral High Ground. We can’t even begin to really fight it. What’s worse, is that not only does this warped understanding of morality result in more American deaths, it results in more deaths of both fighters and civilians on the enemy side. Because where the soldier understands that the most moral way to win a war is, quickly.
Very true. Fighting with inefficient levels of self-restraint makes the war drag out longer, and encourages recruits to join the enemy forces -- because it looks like they're winning. The combination of this with our highly-efficient miltiary technology is gruesome -- most of those enemy recruits are not going to come home again, at least not in one piece.
The bleeding heart liberal thinks that the most moral way to win a war is, never. To a liberal, if we must fight a war, we should do it with our hands tied behind our backs, and after a decade of senseless bloodshed, we’ll finally come to realize that war is a bad thing.
And, of course, the liberals fail to realize how dreadful would be the consequences of our defeat in this war. I have noticed a curious denial on their parts that there is a war, or really an enemy -- so they do not grasp that a victorious enemy would seek to impose terms upon us in order for us to be granted the privilege of a cessation of attacks upon ourselves. They think that we could simply leave the Mideast and be safe: they do not grasp the implications of the fact that the war started with attacks on us in our homeland. They might start to grasp it when the terms included censorship of our own media and oppression of our own LGBT minorities, but perhaps not -- the European Left doesn't seem to be getting it, and the appeasement is much more advanced there.
Not only will they see that the whole thing fails, they’ll make sure that it fails as painfully and horribly as possible in order to serve as a lesson to any future government that might flirt with any similar notion.
Because Only America Is Real. Obviously, if one believes that, then one anticipates the effects of success or failure purely in terms of its effects on domestic politics -- it's not as if the enemy was real, and had its own goals, some of which might involve the loss of one's own liberties if achieved.
Their goal is to break Western civilization. Break it of its exceptionalism. Break it of any notion that it has any worthwhile accomplishments to its name. Break it of any idea that it has a right to exist. That is their real Moral High Ground. National and international suicide in favor of nobler and better Third World creeds that won’t be as greedy or as industrially developed, and will build societies based on sharing and caring, and of course the obligatory head chopping. Nothing else matters.
Exactly. And, as Greenfield implies, the reality is that most non-Western cultures are far, far worse than the West even by the Leftist standards of value. The Left is wilfully blinding itself to this reality, which is why they are constantly surprised when anti-Western rebels manage to take over in this or that country, and the result is localized Hell.
Israel, which has its own hard-at-work left, has something similar called “Purity of Arms” which is Hebrew for the “Courageous Restraint” medal that General McChrystal was thinking of handing out to US soldiers in Afghanistan for not killing terrorists. Purity of Arms is one of the best strategic advantages Israel has ever handed to the terrorists because it gives the terrorists a free pass to carry out attacks behind civilians, while threatening soldiers with severe penalties if they fire without being 100 percent certain that they’re about to be murdered if they don’t.
Yep. And what's worse, it internalizes the global anti-Semitism that helps create this double standard between Israel and the Muslim states in the first place, so that the Israelis wind up feeling guilty simply for defending themselves!
How many people died in both Israel and Lebanon because IDF soldiers are trained not to shoot, rather than to shoot, thereby allowing themselves to be ambushed by terrorists and turned into hostages and the causes of a war? How many more people will die when Noam Shalit finally gets his way and thousands of terrorists with blood on their hands are traded in for Gilad Shalit’s freedom? And how many more will die when the cycle repeats itself. The numbers become more horrifying as you trace them back to their source.
Exactly. This Israeli self-restraint has the effect of dragging the war out for decades, when a lack of Israeli self-restraint would lead to the decisive defeat of the Muslim Terrorist States, and force the more moderate Muslim States to stop supporting anti-Israeli terrorism, because they wouldn't want to be NEXT.
Greenfield then points out that Arab states rarely have a major problem with Palestinian terrorism directed against them (the sole, and obvious, exception being Iraq -- which developed this problem under American administration!). And he explains why.
... in 1970 when the terrorists began hijacking planes and declared that a part of Jordan belonged to them, King Hussein sent in the army. He didn’t kill a mere 52 Palestinian Arab terrorists, as Israel did in Jenin. Or a mere 107 in Deir Yassin. Not even the 800 or so killed in fighting between Arabs in Sabra and Shatilla. No, according to Arafat, King Hussein’s troops killed an estimated 25,000 Palestinian Arabs
This wasn’t some sort of unique event by Middle Eastern standards. When the Islamists tried to stage an uprising in Hama, Syrian troops killed somewhere between 20,000 to 40,000 people. When Arafat sided with Saddam during the Gulf War, Kuwait expelled 400,000 Palestinian Arabs. Why did they do it? Because by 1990, Kuwait had some 564,000 native Arabs, and some 450,000 Palestinian Arabs. So the Kuwaitis began bombing Palestinian Arab neighborhoods, top officials boasted about “cleansing” Palestinian Arabs from Kuwait, and tanks and troops were sent into Palestinian Arab neighborhoods, setting up checkpoints, killing, imprisoning and torturing thousands. There were plenty of atrocities that got brief mentions in the media, before the Palestinian Arabs were gone from Kuwait, and everyone moved on.
And note (as Greenfield does), that the Western media failed to complain about this. To this day, almost no one in the West has heard of any of these three events -- even I didn't realize their full scale until I read this article. (For instance, I knew of the Palestinian expulsion from Kuwait, but not that it was almost half a million Palestinians, or the great brutality with which it was carried out). Today, all three of these events are non-issues (save to the Palestinians, and who really listens to them except when they are attacking Israel?).
And that just about says it all. The same Western governments which think it’s asking a lot to expect Muslims to show mercy, make those demands of Israel all the time. They make those demands of their own forces while never expecting Muslims to show mercy.
Which strikes me as suicidal -- to criticize one's own allies and military harshly, while giving others a free pass. A better means of inducing one's own demoralization could hardly be invented.
And who’s to blame? The Moral High Ground is. Terrorist groups can only win, if you let them. Their entire strategy relies on drawing you into a conflict, on the understanding that you won’t have the nerve to really crush them. If you do crush them, the conflict goes away. But if you try to be Mr. Nice Guy, the terrorists now have you hook, line and sinker. If you restrain yourself, you’ll be involved in endless little fights, dying the death of a thousand cuts, until the terrorists and their international backers successfully replace you with a Pro-Appeasement government. And if you recognize the terrorists and make concessions to them, you’ll be up to your neck in terror.
Completely and accurately summarized. The Terrorists can only win if we make the war a sport and handicap ourselves in the contest.
Let us stop playing games. Let us instead start fighting to win.
But what is the real Moral High Ground? It’s not mercy toward those who show you none. For governments it is about doing their duty by protecting their citizens. For soldiers it is about serving as the protectors of the home front. It is not about sparing enemies, either those under arms or those who aid and abet them. Because that is the surest way to prolong the conflict, and in the long run will cost more lives on both sides.
Yes. What's more, we are giving the Terrorist States time to escalate to nuclear weapons, and once that happens, the chances are that we will wind up killing large percentages of the populations of those states, including many people whom we would have spared had we fought the war in a shorter, less restrained, but more decisive fashion from the beginning.
Not only that, but this false mercy actually kills more civilians because it turns human shields into a viable tactic. A terrorist who hides behind a civilian, and doesn’t get shot, learns that hiding behind civilians is a useful strategy. Other terrorists learn from him that civilians are better than bulletproof vests because vests won’t stop automatic fire, but human shields will. A terrorist who hides behind a civilian and gets shot, is dead, and a warning to other terrorists that hiding behind civilians is not a good way to stay alive. In the long run, the “cruel” act of disregarding a hostage is a much better way to protect civilians in conflict zones.
We need to learn to disregard the false argument that the fate of a hostage is in the hands of the captor's enemies. The fate of a hostage -- and the responsibility for his good treatment as either a civilian internee or a POW under the Geneva Convention -- is in the hands of the captor -- no more and no less. If a captor chooses to murder a hostage by putting him in the firing line, it is the fault of the captor, not of the soldier who fired the bullet, as much as if it had been the captor who fired the bullet.
In the same way, stamping out the first terrorist attacks will save you from engaging in a prolonged struggle. That means doing it with decisive finality. This is a simple truth that every Middle Eastern country, but Israel understands. And a simple fact that every Muslim country understands, but the United States does not.
Very much so. When we spare terrorists due to our "self-restraint," we only look weak. Not moral.
Throw a dart at any major Muslim nation and you find repression, mass graves, and even genocide. Indonesia, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Turkey-it never ends.
Which puts the lie to the notion that killing Terrorists "outrages the Muslim street."
There’s a very simple reason for that. In Islam, force is the only real morality.
Or, to be precise, a contest of force shows which side had the "will of God" with him. The loser must have been immoral by definition, or he wouldn't have lost.
If, on the other hand, the Islamists get stomped into the dirt, their religious credibility runs at an all time low. When victory is impossible, Islam withers and goes into the long sleep of cultural hibernation to awaken in a more permissive time.
We know this, because it has happened at least once before. In the l8th through early 20th centuries.
There’s only one way to defeat terrorists. To fight them without any more restraint than they impose on themselves. Under such conditions, superior force and technology makes the victory of the civilized side inevitable, and creates an incentive for the uncivilized side to become civilized, or pay the price.
Exactly. War is the continuation of diplomacy by other means, which emphasizes that one must provide the foe incentives to surrender. The more horrible the war is for the enemy, the more he suffers from it, the more these "incentives" can consist of "We'll stop killing you" rather than "We'll sacrifice our own interests to appease you."
And the less likely it is that the war will be resumed. This is what the American Left truly fails to grasp: that what induces a warlike Power to peaceful conduct toward a peaceful Power is not a lack of provocation, but a memory that the last time they screamed and leapt, they were humiliatingly and painfully defeated.
By repeatedly offering the Terrorist States status quo ante bellum peaces, such as we have successfully pressured Israel to do, all we achieve is to make it obvious to the Terrorist States that there is no real price for failure, so they might as well try attacking again and again. (Those who point out that lots and lots of Terrorist State soldiers die in each such war are missing the point -- these deaths are not painful to the Terrorist State LEADERS, who regard them as worthless cannon fodder).
There is only one Moral High Ground that that can defeat, the moral high ground of standing up for civilization, against those who would drown it in the ichor of their own hate, the stench of their own greed, the lust of their own power and the blood of their endless murders. It is not moral to let your family be murdered, rather than harm the murderers. He who slays those who kill his loved ones, stands on the true moral high ground. The only true Moral High Ground that there is.
I don't see how I can improve on that.
Comments?