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What they mean by “disproportionate response”
Writing at Lewrockwell.com, Jorge Hirsch, a professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego, attacks Israel for its military conduct in Lebanon. He begins by referring to “Israel’s hugely disproportionate response to Hezbollah’s actions.” Wanting to know what the argument was for this oft-heard charge, I clicked on the link. It is an interview with a Prof. Guido de Marco, apparently of Malta. What de Marco means by Israel’s “disproportionate response” is that it exceeds an “eye for an eye.” “An eye for an eye,” of course, is the standard for criminal justice. It doesn’t means that a person’s eye should literally be taken out if he caused the loss of another person’s eye, but rather that the punishment for a crime should be proportionate to the crime. But since when has the “an eye for an eye” standard ever been the rule for conducting war? Since when is war conducted as though it were a criminal sentencing hearing? Obviously, the ultimate VICTOR in a war that has been initiated by another party will have ended up inflicting greater damage on his enemy than he suffered himself. The “no disproportionate response” rule thus precludes victory in war. The air war against Nazi Germany would have had to stop in the middle because the Allies were destroying far more German factories than the Germans ever destroyed in England. The Allies could not have invaded Germany because Germany never invaded Britain or America. Similarly, America’s response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor would have had to consist of finding a Japanese base, bombing it, and then stopping and waiting for Japan to take the next step. The U.S. could not have taken any active steps to defeat Japan. To make proportionately the rule of war is to make leftist egalitarianism the rule of war. The economic equivalent of this idea would be that no one could earn more money than anyone else. If “eye for an eye” is the basis for the charge that Israel’s response has been morally wrong, then the complaint is exposed as sheerest nonsense. De Marco then goes on to justify Palestinian terrorism against Israel on the basis that the Israelis mistreated Arafat by confining him to Ramallah. He makes no mention of why Arafat was confined, that Arafat was waging a terror war against Israel. Lewrockwell.com, a libertarian webste, thus quotes an egalitarianism-spouting (and probably socialist) terrorism excuser to “prove” that Israel engaged in a disproportionate response against the terror organization Hezbollah. However, the main part of Hirsch’s article is a wild thesis that the U.S. government has a secret project preparing for the use of nuclear weapons against Iran.
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