Is the West too nice to win?

Lots of urgent complaints lately about the violence the Israelis are inflicting on Lebanon. You'd have to have a heart of stone not to pity those poor innocent souls caught up in this war. But at the same time, what choice do the Israelis have? They are fighting an enemy that is sworn to their destruction, and which is raining down rocketry with the express intention of killing innocent civilians (versus Israel's attempt to pinpoint its strikes). Israel is facing an enemy that places its military targets in civilian areas. Israel did not choose this war, but it has to fight the war that's in front of it, not the war it wishes it had.

John Podhoretz, writing today in the NYPost, wonders aloud: Are we too nice to win? Excerpt:

What if liberal democracies have now evolved to a point where they can no longer wage war effectively because they have achieved a level of humanitarian concern for others that dwarfs any really cold-eyed pursuit of their own national interests?
What if the universalist idea of liberal democracy - the idea that all people are created equal - has sunk in so deeply that we no longer assign special value to the lives and interests of our own people as opposed to those in other countries?

What if this triumph of universalism is demonstrated by the Left's insistence that American and Israeli military actions marked by an extraordinary concern for preventing civilian casualties are in fact unacceptably brutal? And is also apparent in the Right's claim that a war against a country has nothing to do with the people but only with that country's leaders?

Can any war be won when this is the nature of the discussion in the countries fighting the war? Can any war be won when one of the combatants voluntarily limits itself in this manner?

Could World War II have been won by Britain and the United States if the two countries did not have it in them to firebomb Dresden and nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Didn't the willingness of their leaders to inflict mass casualties on civilians indicate a cold-eyed singleness of purpose that helped break the will and the back of their enemies? Didn't that singleness of purpose extend down to the populations in those countries in those days, who would have and did support almost any action at any time that would lead to the deaths of Germans and Japanese?

What if the tactical mistake we made in Iraq was that we didn't kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything? Wasn't the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35 the reason there was an insurgency and the basic cause of the sectarian violence now?

If you can't imagine George W. Bush issuing such an order, is there any American leader you could imagine doing so?

And if America can't do it, can Israel? Could Israel - even hardy, strong, universally conscripted Israel - possibly stomach the bloodshed that would accompany the total destruction of Hezbollah?

John Tierney, writing in today's NYT (behind the wall, of course), considers that the West doesn't understand that in confronting Arab Muslim enemies, we are up against a culture in which shame and honor define morality. The most important thing is not to lose face, no matter what. Tierney quotes James Bowman of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, who has a new book out on honor, as saying that the Israelis have no choice but to do what they're doing, namely to try to destroy and shatter Hezbollah, given how Hezbollah would define victory. In the shame/honor mentality, no cruelty is too great to inflict on others in the name of saving face. In his extraordin ary, must-read book "The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs," David Pryce-Jones draws a lesson for the West out of the shame/honor psychology of the Arabs:

Westerners habitually and ignorantly misconcieve the responses they are likely to encounter from the Arabs, unsuitably and even laughably projecting their own political and moral attitudes where these cannot apply. ... Depending on the interests at stake, either [military] entry into the Middle East should be avoided altogether for the sake of the shame-based hostility it will trigger, or it must be undertaken with inflexible determination to use whatever degree of force is required for supreme arbitration. In 1983, a terrorist sponsored by Syria or Iran drove a truck packed with explosives into a barracks, kiling 200 American marines. To abandon Lebanon as a result was a response comprehensible as pragmatic to an electorate, but which in the Islamocentric perspective looks quite different, a shaming of the entire West and an honor to the anonymous terrorist whose bomb, however freakishly, proved to be strong enough for supreme arbitration.

As a Western democracy unable by reason of geography to extricate itself from the Arab collectivity, Israel is in a similar predicament, routinely obliged to arbitrate by force while fruitlessly pleading for democratic procedures of compromise and civility to resolve a conflict that would be redundant, indeed would never have asumed its historic form, if such procedures had been available in the first place.