The new rules of war

On a cable news show the other night, Pat Buchanan was in the midst of one
of his typical tirades against Israel when he added this new arrow to his
quiver – Israel squandered world sympathy and support when it invaded
Lebanon. And that somehow delegitimized her entire mission.

It's one of the rules of war – the new rules of war, that is.

Rule #1 – The war must be popular with the world.

To hear Buchanan tell it, the so-called "international community" was
solidly in Israel's corner as long as the Jewish state was tolerating
constant missile attacks on her civilian population, violations of her
increasingly-narrowing borders, and the killing and kidnapping of her
soldiers.

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But as soon as Israel arose to defend herself against Hezbollah, the tide of
world opinion turned against her. From that point forward, all we heard
about was the Qana "massacre" (anyone remember Jenin?) and debates about
what was a proportionate response to military aggression.

Never mind the fact that Israel willingly withdrew from Lebanon and Gaza in
hopes of advancing peace with her implacable enemies, only to see these
territories turned into terror strongholds. Indeed, no sooner did Israel
pull out of Gaza than the terrorists turned it into a lauching pad for
rockets targeting Israel's civilian population. Talk about no good deed
going unpunished!

Not so surprisingly, this was the same thing they said about America in the
immediate wake of September 11. When the Twin Towers lay in ruins, Americans were
dead and dying in our streets, and we looked like a bowed and bloodied
empire, the world loved us. But the moment we went after the monsters
responsible for these heinous attacks, we somehow lost the moral high ground
in their eyes.

Perhaps that's because the United Nations, the body that represents the
international community and thus fashions world opinion, is comprised
largely of blood-soaked tyrants, terror-sponsoring thugs, virulent
anti-Semites and America-hating goons.

In the Middle East, for example, Israel has endured a host of unprovoked
wars, intifadas and terrorist attacks since being established as a nation
again in 1948, and through it all the U.N.'s "community-minded" kooks have
issued continual resolutions denouncing the Jewish state. Yet for some
reason they have nary a negative word to say about the Arab regimes and
terror groups who have launched or sponsored these persistent assaults.

These are the morally-bankrupt voices of the international community. And
that's why we shouldn't be surprised that passing the "world opinion"
threshold tops the list of their new rules of war, or by any of the other
new rules of war they've established.

Rule #2 – The killing of civilians cannot be tolerated.

This one would certainly be a shocker to Jimmy Doolittle and the heroes who
dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which led to Japan's
surrender in World War II and saved hundreds of thousands of American lives
– and potentially millions of Japanese lives as well.

After all, had those atomic bombs not been developed, America would have
been forced to carry out a full-scale invasion of Japan that would have made
D-Day seem like, well, a day at the beach. The Japanese were preparing for
a fanatical, all-out defense of their homeland in which even children were
instructed on how to kill enemy soldiers using crude weapons. As on
Okinawa, the entire Japanese fighting force was ordered to fight to the
death, and the civilian population had been brainwashed by the death cult of
Shintoism that viewed surrender as unacceptable.

Such actions as dropping the atomic bombs on Japan, and the allies'
firebombing of Dresden, were properly understood back then – when we had a
sane military policy – as absolutely essential to ending the war and, in so
doing, actually reducing casualties on both sides over the long haul.

But these days the internationalists and the peaceniks use civilian
casualties – an inescapable consequence of any war – to undermine
efforts across the globe to repel the forces of Islamo-fascism, whether it's
in Iraq or with the Qana incident in Lebanon.

The bottom line is this, though. Any country or fighting force that is not
willing to inflict civilian casualties on its enemies is a country or
fighting force that has ensured its ultimate defeat and demise at the hands
of those who are devoted to its destruction.

Rule #3 – Responses to military aggression must be within reason.

We're seeing this in Lebanon, too, as all the defenders of Islamo-fascism
can do is talk about how "disproportionate" the Israeli response has been.
Disproportionate to what? Certainly not the six years of military
attacks, arming to the teeth and devious tunnel-digging that the Hezbollah
terrorists and their sponsors in Iran and Syria have been engaging in since
Israel withdrew from Lebanon in 2000.

And who are the U.N. delegates, or anyone else, to say what is the
"proportionate" response of a sovereign nation in defending herself against
the attacks of those whose charters still call for her obliteration?
That's a question I've never heard answered by any of the pontificators of
propriety at the U.N. It would be like people claiming FDR's call for a
declaration of war in December of 1941 was disproportionate to a single
bombing mission carried out by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor.

Rule #4 – Any single wartime atrocity discredits all wartime objectives.

Well, it doesn't really have to be an atrocity. Look at the dozens of
front-page stories the New York Times ran on Abu Ghraib, and how the rest of
the mainstream media followed suit for months on end.

Did they find evidence that all those prisoners were being brutally
tortured? Were they being systematically killed? No, this was mostly about
some rather silly, perhaps obscene, photographs that were taken. But for
that so-called "atrocity," carried out by a handful of soldiers, America and
our mission in the war on terror (a war for our very survival) was denounced
as immoral and branded as bigoted and cruel. The same goes for the
treatment of the hard-core terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, where we're now
learning that it's the poor soldiers assigned to guard these savages at
Gitmo who are the ones truly being abused. It's just too bad we can't get
the ACLU and the rest of the terrorist-loving left to understand that.

Rule #5 – There can be no claims of moral superiority made.

We saw this when a top U.N. official recently dismissed the idea that
Hezbollah is a terrorist organization, and we're seeing it in the Bush
administration's willingness to treat terrorist sponsors like Syria and
rogue nation states like North Korea like respectable and reliable entities
notwithstanding their unwillingness to ever abide by any of the treaties
they make or promises they put forward.

Rule #6 – These new rules apply only to Israel and America.

This is true even though it is Israel, America and our allies who treat
prisoners of war humanely, while ours are tortured to death, and who take
all precautions possible to avoid harming civilians. Conversely, the
Islamo-fascists we're fighting in the ongoing war on terror specifically
target civilians and use their own civilians as shields to protect
them from military retaliation or as pawns if they're killed when
retaliation is exacted.

These are the new rules of war mandated by the U.N. and others who would
love to see America fall, and Israel fall with us. And, incredibly, we seem all
too willing to go along with them.

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Tom Flannery writes a weekly political column called "The Good Fight" and a continuing religious column called "Why Believe the Bible?" for a hometown newspaper in Pennsylvania. His opinion pieces have appeared in publications such as Newsday, the Los Angeles Times, and Christian Networks Journal. He is a past recipient of the Eric Breindel Award for Outstanding Opinion Journalism from News Corp/The New York Post, in addition to winning six Amy Awards from the Amy Foundation.