When Should Countries Resort To Violence? -- A Commentary

Flashback: A Hamas policeman shouts as a building burns following an Israeli air strike in the Gaza Strip in December 2008. (Reuters: Ibraheem Abu Mustafa)

From Real Clear World:

Israel last week submitted its response to the UN's Goldstone Report. That report investigated the conduct of Israel and Hamas during the Gaza war in January 2009, accusing both sides of war crimes. It recommended resorting to the International Criminal Court if the sides failed to investigate the charges themselves. One of Goldstone's sharpest accusations, denied by Israel, was that Israel used incendiary phosphorous artillery near civilians, against the laws of war.

The Goldstone report and Israel's response point to some of the most important questions facing Western democracies today: when can our nations legitimately resort to military action, and what is permissible in the course of military action? What are we allowed to do to defend ourselves?

Read more ....

My Comment: Implementing law and legal constraints on intelligence and military agencies to conduct war has a serious downside to it .... namely limiting our security forces from implementing actions that upon hindsight may have limited or prevented large number of casualties or wars in the future.

What comes immediately to my mind were the limits that were put on assassinating and/or capturing Bin Laden in the late 90s. CIA hit teams had Bin Laden in their sights on numerous occlusions .... but because he was with civilians and/or the decision from Washington to take him out was delayed for too long .... he was successful in avoiding all attempts to take his life.

This unsuccessful strategy helped to produce 9/11, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the deaths of 9,000 US citizens (military casualties and 9/11 numbers included), hundreds of thousands of casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, trillions in war costs and infrastructure destruction, and ongoing wars with Islamic extremists that show no signs of ending.

I can understand the argument that we should be careful on what to do if we should decide to go to war .... but we should also be careful and aware of the consequences if we should decide not to go to war.