Protecting Civilians
A moral dilemna of resisting terrorists is that they do their very best to surround themselves with "innocent" civilians. That amounts to a win-win situation for the terrorists. If their attacks succeed, great for them. If our counter-attacks succeed, their fighting among civilians ensures there will be lots of dead "innocents" for their remaining supporters to show as "proof" we are no better than them, even when we make every effort to avoid injuring civilians while terrorists often prefer to attack civilians due to their being less defended than armed forces.
In this, our media are willing propagandists, happy to show dramatic photos and videos, and weirdly comfortable with the idea of expecting ethical behavior from the civilized while forgiving even the most heinous attrocities committed by terrorists who claim to be the underdog and/or non-Western.
Even so, choosing not to resist terrorists does no favors to civilians. Where terrorists gain power, civilian freedom disappears, especially for groups even civilized societies have only recently chosen to defend, such as women, ethnic and religious (or irreligious) minorities, and gays.
I've seen no credible evidence that terrorists can be permanently appeased even by surrender. Our current enemies have made it clear they cannot be appeased by anything less than complete world domination. If they win, millions, and perhaps even billions of innocents will die.
In the short run, it might be possible to save a few civilian lives by not attacking terrorists who hide among civilians. But long term, doing so only ensures terrorists surround themselves with even more civilians. For that reason, we may paradoxically save the most civilian lives on all sides by making it clear to terrorists that they will be targeted utterly without regard to civilians among whom they hide.
Similarly, in the short run, it may be possible to save a few lives by ransoming kidnap victims, but in the long run doing so only ensures more persons will be kidnapped.
I agree with Billy Graham, who long ago made it clear his family was never to pay a ransom for him if kidnapped. Like Billy, I am not worried about my fate beyond this life, and would not want to continue it at the expense of other future victims.
An excellent Wizbang article The Fate of Hostages covers similar ground today:
"The belief that seems to be at the core of Israel's decisions is this: one does not make concessions to hostage-takers. The principles that law enforcement apply do not hold when expanded beyond an individual or small group; when the hostage-takers are part of a very large organization numbering possibly in the tens of thousands, with several other groups in ideological agreement, concessions become precedents.
Every time Hezbollah threatens innocents (either actively, with rocket and missile bombardments, for example; or passively, through human shields), Israel is placed with a harsh choice. Do they spare the innocent and give in to the demands? In the short term, it's easy; in the long term, though, it endangers far more people. Once you've established the currency in which you are willing to pay, you can rest assured of a long line of people willing to sell you more.
It's a basic principle of economics: you get more of whatever you subsidize. If you start "paying" for the lives of innocents, you'll get offered more and more opportunities to buy their safety.
Once you pay the Dane-Geld, you never get rid of the Dane.
The way Israel seems to see it is that if they demonstrate that they will not be deterred by Hezbollah hiding behind the innocent, and in fact it is a losing tactic (it ties Hezbollah to a fixed position, and limits their ability to hide or flee), they will stop doing it. In the long run, they think, it will save more lives than it will cost."
Update:
Black Five writes similarly on the virtues of killing children:
"It is our love of these innocents that endangers them. If we did not care if children died, they would be in little danger."
"... If we did not care if our children died, they would not be targets. There would be no reason to target them, because we would not be moved by their deaths.
"If we did not care if their children died," I add, "there would be no reason to clutter military emplacements with their presence. If it were not that we are horrified by the deaths of children, the enemy's children would be clear of all places of battle -- because they are, except for the fact that we love them, a hindrance."
Update2: Vik Rubenfeld also points out several other ways trying to minimize civilian casualties in a war can backfire. For instance, this quote from Victor Davis Hanson:
"had the U.S. military begun immediately to shoot looters on sight - and that was what restoring order would have required - or carpet bombed the Syrian and Iranian borders to stop infiltration, the outcry would have arisen that we were too punitive and gunning down poor and hungry people even in peace. I fear that 400,000 peacekeepers, given the rules of postbellum engagement, would have been no more likely to shoot thieves than would 200,000."
If our soldiers were allowed to deal with the bad guys in Bagdad with normal military procedures, we wouldn't need to be sending more soldiers there to achieve the task. Conversely, if our soldiers are limited by rules of engagement more appropriate to a police force, even twice as many American soldiers wouldn't be enough to pacify Bagdad - any more than they could pacify Chicago.
Worse, no attempt to placate U.S. domestic opponents via restrictive rules of engagement can succeed, any more than it could when the same was tried in Viet Nam. And then. quoting Larry Elder, it gets worse:
"Our withdrawal, however, gave the Vietnamese armies under Ho Chi Minh free rein to overrun South Vietnam - raping, pillaging, plundering, impoverishing, imprisoning, torturing and slaughtering hundreds of thousands of people.
The withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam also strengthened the hand of the communist Khmer Rouge in neighboring Cambodia. Their leader, Pol Pot, embarked on a bloody ethnic-cleansing campaign. While the exact number of Cambodians slaughtered can never be fully known, most estimate those killed from a low of 1 million to a high of 3 million."
As Rubenfield puts it: "fighting a 'war lite,' that avoids civilian casualties in a way that prevents us from destroying the enemy, often merely postpones the tragedy"
See Steve Chapman's articles (Aug. 3 and July 20) in the Tribune about the limits of power. Steve is neither a Democrat nor a Liberal. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-stevechapman,1,6042355.columnist?coll=chi-news-col
I think I understand the logic: "Missionaries should eat cannibals because cannibals eat missionaries."