naraburns nihil supernum
1yr ago
(text post)
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Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
This is a refreshed megathread for any posts on the conflict between (so far, and so far as I know) Hamas and the Israeli government, as well as related geopolitics. Culture War thread rules apply.
If you want to kill civilians on a mass scale, you best be ready to face the same in response.
I don't completely disagree, but at some point this becomes "Gaza's (failed, questionably representative) government wants to kill Israeli civilians on a mass scale," and it seems to justify a "firebomb Tokyo" response. And that doesn't quite feel morally right either, does it?
I'd say that it feels about the same, myself. The rules of war are there to protect good actors, and to provide a Schelling point that enemies can agree on before hostilities. If your enemy abuses surrender and commits perfidy, then you shoot their wounded. If they hide among civilians, you bomb the civilians. And if they disassemble their farming infrastructure and use it to make rockets to shoot at you, then you bomb their farms, blockade their ports, and starve them out, until they cease hostilities and offer surrender with a commitment that you can trust.
In this specific case, I am reasonably sure that surrender would be total evacuation or death at this point. But if Japan's morale had not been broken by the atomic bombs, if they were continuing to perform Rapes of Nanking with their dwindling resources, and nestling their army inside their civilian population, then yeah, the moral action is to start with Tokyo and keep up the firebombing until the evil is defeated and the threat is gone.
Morals don't tend to have much support or actuality in interstate conflict. We can argue about what is "moral", but the only way that has any effect is if we manage to convince some more powerful nation (the US for instance) to put enough military force into the area to create the conditions we think preferable. This sort of thing doesn't tend to solve much.
I don't think firebombing Tokyo feels quite morally right, but trying to fight a war when constrained to conventional moral standards is probably never going to really feel right. Leveling Hamas-occupied areas of Gaza has more moral legitimacy in my mind than leveling Dresden did.
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Notes -
I don't completely disagree, but at some point this becomes "Gaza's (failed, questionably representative) government wants to kill Israeli civilians on a mass scale," and it seems to justify a "firebomb Tokyo" response. And that doesn't quite feel morally right either, does it?
I'd say that it feels about the same, myself. The rules of war are there to protect good actors, and to provide a Schelling point that enemies can agree on before hostilities. If your enemy abuses surrender and commits perfidy, then you shoot their wounded. If they hide among civilians, you bomb the civilians. And if they disassemble their farming infrastructure and use it to make rockets to shoot at you, then you bomb their farms, blockade their ports, and starve them out, until they cease hostilities and offer surrender with a commitment that you can trust.
In this specific case, I am reasonably sure that surrender would be total evacuation or death at this point. But if Japan's morale had not been broken by the atomic bombs, if they were continuing to perform Rapes of Nanking with their dwindling resources, and nestling their army inside their civilian population, then yeah, the moral action is to start with Tokyo and keep up the firebombing until the evil is defeated and the threat is gone.
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Morals don't tend to have much support or actuality in interstate conflict. We can argue about what is "moral", but the only way that has any effect is if we manage to convince some more powerful nation (the US for instance) to put enough military force into the area to create the conditions we think preferable. This sort of thing doesn't tend to solve much.
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I don't think firebombing Tokyo feels quite morally right, but trying to fight a war when constrained to conventional moral standards is probably never going to really feel right. Leveling Hamas-occupied areas of Gaza has more moral legitimacy in my mind than leveling Dresden did.
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