The left in the U.S. and Europe are having a hissy fit over civilian casualties in Gaza. To be sure, it's a tragedy that civilians are being used as human shields by Hamas, resulting in thousands of deaths. (We don't know how many civilians in Gaza have died because the only people doing the counting are Hamas.)
Nevertheless, both sides agree that there are a lot of innocent civilians being killed. There are just too many of them, according to U.S. officials. We should follow the tactics used by Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, who fought ISIS in Iraq.
“Like Hamas, ISIS was deeply embedded in urban areas. And the international coalition against ISIS worked hard to protect civilians and create humanitarian corridors, even during tough battles,” Austin told lawmakers, corporate and defense leaders, and government officials attending the Reagan National Defense Forum in California.
“So the lesson is not that you can win in urban warfare by protecting civilians. The lesson is that you can only win in urban warfare by protecting civilians,” he stressed. “If you drive [Gaza’s civilians] into the arms of the enemy, you replace a tactical victory with a strategic defeat.”
To try and compare ISIS fighting in Iraq with Hamas fighting in Gaza and then extrapolate a strategy for saving civilians is extremely dumb. Hamas is dug in 20 feet underground using a tunnel network designed by the devil himself. Hamas has also used the rubble from destroyed buildings to their advantage.
Two different enemies. Two different campaigns. Two different sets of rules. Austin may brag about how careful his troops were in safeguarding civilians in Iraq. The final tally of dead civilians caused by Austin's war against ISIS is 9,000 in the city of Mosul alone.
“It is simply irresponsible to focus criticism on inadvertent casualties caused by the coalition’s war to defeat ISIS,” spokesperson Colonel Thomas Veale told the AP. “Without the coalition’s air and ground campaign against ISIS, there would have inevitably been additional years, if not decades of suffering and needless death and mutilation in Syria and Iraq at the hands of terrorists who lack any ethical or moral standards.”
What kind of argument do you think Israel could make, General Austin?
The laws against killing civilians in combat are more than 75 years old and were created before the idea of human shields became commonplace and were made part of "asymmetrical warfare."
The Geneva Conventions prohibits at any time and in any place whatsoever “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds” and “the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples” with respect to “persons taking no active part in hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause.”
War is fought today in three dimensions. And for American politicians and bureaucrats to talk as if their own hands were clean of the blood of civilians is dishonest. Remember, "at any time and in any place whatsoever" the death of a civilian is a war crime. "The 542 drone strikes that Obama authorized killed an estimated 3,797 people, including 324 civilians," according to the Council on Foreign Relations.
“As Israel defends itself, it matters how. The United States is unequivocal: International humanitarian law must be respected,” Vice President Kamala Harris said after her meetings at COP28. “Too many innocent Palestinians have been killed. Frankly, the scale of civilian suffering and the images and videos coming from Gaza are devastating.’’
Yes, war is hell. And it's worse for civilians who, for one reason or another, are unable to get out of the way of the fighting. The stricture against killing civilians "at any time and in any place whatsoever" is an impossible rule to follow and needs to be amended to something far more realistic.
And given the record of the United States in urban warfare, people like Kamala Harris and General Austin should learn the value of being seen, not heard.
