Proportionality
Kofi Anan, supported by the chorus, calls Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s attack over the international border “disproportionate,” meaning, it seems, that Israel killed “too many” Lebanese in proportion to the number of Jews killed. We think he means “parity,” not “proportionality,” but consider the stupidity of either in assessing threat and response.
Kofi Anan, supported by the chorus, calls Israel’s response to Hezbollah’s attack over the international border “disproportionate,” meaning, it seems, that Israel killed “too many” Lebanese in proportion to the number of Jews killed. We think he means “parity,” not “proportionality,” but consider the stupidity of either in assessing threat and response.
Hezbollah is a proxy of Iran and Syria and operates by virtue of the failure of the Lebanese government to control its own territory. The population of Iran, Syria and Lebanon (plus the Palestinians, who are cheering for Nasrallah) is about 122,243,630. The population of Israel is 6,276,882. The ratio is roughly 19.5 to one. The number of Israeli killed thus far is 31 – proportionality requires 605.4 Arab and/or Iranian deaths. The Lebanese government says 330 people have died.
Try a different number.
The states of the Arab League plus Iran constitute 326,291,363 people, a ratio of 52:1. Remove for the moment Egypt, Jordan and Mauritania – the only members of the Arab League that have relations with Israel – and you get 252,109,172 people; a ratio of 40:1. [At one point we had removed Iraq, thinking they had enough trouble of their own, but last week Prime Minister al-Maliki denounced the Israeli attacks, so Iraq now counts.] That gives you 1,829 or 1,240 deaths required to create proportionality.
Try a different thought.
Coalition forces in Iraq uncovered approximately 400,000 bodies in mass graves no older than 1991, coincident with the crushed Shiite uprising. That works out to 33,333/year for the 12 years between 1991 and the invasion of 2003. Add to that the 5,000 “excess child deaths per month” estimated by the UN for Iraqi children during the period of sanctions, or 60,000 children annually dying beyond what would have been considered “normal” in a country such as Iraq. That is more than 93,000 annual regime-related deaths in Saddam’s Iraq in the last 12 years of his dictatorship. Whatever destruction Sunni and Shiite militias plus foreign forces supplied by Iran and Syria have brought to Iraq, there is a long way to go to reach parity with the stability of the “good old days.”
How many deaths would it take in Darfur to create proportionality with the government of Sudan? Less than the 200,000 already dead, we suspect. The war in the Balkans likewise cost more than 200,000 dead – mainly civilians – proportional to what?
Enough. Body counts are terrible way to assess the justification for military action or the success/failure thereof. Israel faces a terrorist army seeking nothing less than the destruction of Israel and the death of as many Israelis as possible, civilian or military. It is clear to objective observers that Israel is doing all it can to limit the killing of civilians – even giving up the element of surprise over Hezbollah to warn people to flee. But the obligation of the Government of Israel is to find and remove the threat, even when it is dispersed within the civilians of Lebanon in an effort by Hezbollah to create “disproportionate” Lebanese civilian casualties.