Walter Hinteler wrote:From today's The Guardian (page 19/
online version)
Quote:
....
Terrorism has always been extraordinarily difficult to define, but the American approach lacks any pretence at objectivity, thus making the term utterly meaningless. Used in this way, terrorism becomes simply "political violence of which we disapprove". The answer, of course, must not be to abandon any attempt to distinguish between right and wrong in the use of force. There need to be standards if we are to prevent the free-for-all of violence without limit. But these standards must be disinterested, legitimate and robust. As it happens, most of what we need is adequately provided for in international humanitarian law. Numerous treaties and judgments from the Geneva conventions onwards set out quite detailed rules governing the use of force, including the principles of proportionality and civilian immunity.
Under international law, there can be no doubt that many of the actions carried out by Hizbullah and Hamas constitute war crimes that must be punished. The reason it has been disregarded for the purposes of fighting terrorism is that, rather inconveniently for the governments concerned, it applies to states as well as non-state groups. Accepting it would leave them open to unwanted scrutiny and possibly even prosecution for war crimes of their own. In the case of the Israeli government, it isn't hard to see why. Israeli doctrine eschews the principle of proportionality in favour of massive retaliation, as has been amply demonstrated in Lebanon and Gaza.
Despite Israel's protestations that it is doing everything it can to avoid civilian casualties, it is clear that its military strategy is aimed at maximising the suffering of the Lebanese people as a whole. This was declared quite openly on day one of the campaign, when Israel's chief of staff, General Dan Halutz, promised to "turn back the clock in Lebanon by 20 years", and confirmed again yesterday with the horrific slaughter at Qana. The approach is identical to the one taken in similar operations in 1996 and 1993, when Yitzhak Rabin admitted: "The goal of the operation is to get the southern Lebanese population to move northward, hoping that this will tell the Lebanese government something about the refugees, who may get as far north as Beirut." Populations will move like this only if they are in fear of their lives.
The same applies to Gaza, where the pretence at discrimination is even thinner and Palestinian civilians are being subjected to a brutal siege and acts of violence that have no military justification. As in Lebanon, the intention is to force civilians to turn on the militias by inflicting as much pain and suffering as the Israeli government thinks it can get away with. What is this if it is not terrorism? It is certainly a war crime. So let's hear no more hypocritical utterances about the evils of terrorism from Bush and Blair. Not until they are able to speak with genuine moral authority by condemning all forms of illegal violence, irrespective of who commits them.
· David Clark is a former Labour government adviser
I found David Clark's appeal (above) to "moral authority" and "the established principles of international law to be vague, almost meaningless in its repeated references to unenforced (and unenforcable) principles of supposed international law, and utterly without grounding in the realities of human history and even the recent history of his own country. Exquisite hand wringing by a commentator safely on the sidelines, but without any practical utility to those directly involved or even for those who might influence events.
Clark's repeated references to his rather inflated version of international law and its applicability to Hizbullah belie the fact that there is no extant mechanism with which to enforce it on such groups. Even the mighty International Criminal Court, so favored by the Guardial and others of that ilk, has been utterly impotent in this matter. Clark sneers at the U.S. "War on Terrorism" without even acknowledging this rather obvious dilemma.
He also notes the rather obvious intent of the Israelis to motivate the Palestinian and Lebanese populations, who have either knowingly or at least passively accepted the Hizbollah and its rockets in their midst, to recognize the sosts and risks to themselves. He equates this with terrorism (an analogy I accept) and proposes political action against Blair and Bush for supporting it, but proposes nothing whatever against the Hizbollah terrorists who assembled the rockets aand launched them from villages in Gaza and Lebanon, or even the Syrian & Iranian governments that supplied them. This is selective moral blindness of the first rank. It is entirely inappropriate from one who otherwise assumes the exclusive access to the lofty heights of legal and moral principle.
This screed was merely vain, self-important posturing on the part of an observer who shows little understanding of either history or the realities beyond the facile "principles" he casts about so willingly.
Clark also narrowly defines the causus bella here as the abduction of the Israeli troops, ignoring the fact that continued escalation would surely follow such acts if they were not responded to and, of course, the subsequent rocket attacks on Israeli cities. He also notes the evil
