While I don't always agree with Victor Davis Hanson, he has an interesting piece in today's National Review Online. While I certainly can't speak from experience about the word games played in the 1930's to avoid facing Nazi Germany's aggression, the moral equivalence that I see in much of the media and the anti-war movement today is very troublesome.
I don't understand how these people, who seem very clear on the matter of intent when it comes to criminal prosecutions, can be completely blind to the importance of intent in wartime. It is absolutely critical, being the difference between a just action and a war crime.
Let's take a couple of examples. Last year, while I was deployed, there was a lot of media coverage of a Marine who shot an Iraqi insurgent during a raid. The insurgent in question was wounded and was later determined to be unarmed. The media coverage came from the fact that an embedded reporter caught the incident on tape, showing this Marine apparently executing the insurgent.
The subsequent investigation determined that the Marine had not acted in a criminal manner, and no charges were brought against him. Why? The investigators determined that the insurgents in the area where this unit operated often concealed weapons on their bodies (grenades among them), and would use these weapons to kill American soldiers and Marines who got close enough to them after the insurgents were wounded. The sudden motion by the wounded man caused the Marine to believe this particular insurgent might be one of those individuals, and he reacted instinctively to protect himself and his fellow Marines.
Was this young man mistaken? Yes. Was his action criminal? No. The Law of War ( and the Uniform Code of Military Justice) were both written with an understanding of the "fog of war." In the heat of battle, split second hesitations can often be fatal, and a servicemember acting on a reasonable belief that he is being threatened can take action to defend himself.
In the court of public opinion, however, the MSM and anti-war crowd did their very best to paint this Marine as a no better then the insurgents he was fighting. Now, considering that the insurgents we face in Iraq commonly target unarmed civilians, deliberately, how is that in any way equivalent to the previous example?
The same twisted philosphy is being spouted again, by the same people, in the Israel-Hezbollah conflict. Here we have one side, which does everything in its power to avoid killing civilians (to the extent of dropping warning leaflets and calling cellular phones of people in an area where they will be attacking), even at the risk of alerting their intended targets. And on the other, we have a group that wants to kill as many civilians as possible, and to cause their opponents to kill as many civilians as possible in order to use that as a public relations ploy. Again, its all a matter of intent - if you're intent is to kill an armed opponent with a minimum of injury and death to those around him, you're good. If your intent is to simply hurt as many people as possible, regardless of who they are, and hopefully kill many of them - we call that criminal.
So I ask, who as the moral high ground here?