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Necessary and Proportionate
The Biden administration announced that they had conducted “necessary and proportionate” airstrikes against weapons and ammunition storage areas used by Iranian-backed militias with two F-16s. They are still assessing damage. The storage areas were unoccupied at the time they were struck. If they really destroyed something, we would be seeing the videos of bombs going down ventilation shafts. Maybe we destroyed something, but maybe we just hit some sand.
Iran conducted 19 attacks against two of our bases in Syria from 17-26 October. Twenty-one of our soldiers suffered traumatic brain injuries, and one contractor died.
I want disproportionate retaliation so that Iran will never do it again. I want the Ministry of Defense in Tehran burning. It saves the most lives on both sides if the US responds forcefully to evil. Biden is encouraging evil to metastasize.
Published in Foreign Policy
When does the principle of “proportional response” apply and when does it not, according to generally accepted international standards?
Obviously, it applies to one end of the spectrum: police actions to control a civil disturbance, such a demonstration by civilians that turns violent. (Even if someone throws a rock, you are expected not to mow down the crowd with machine guns.)
If we were in a declared war, isn’t there the conventional expectation that we would reasonably aim to destroy by force of arms the will and capacity of the enemy to continue resistance to our political will, without regard to any consideration of proportional response?
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[I welcome all replies, responsive or not, and will respond to all that are responsive to either of the two question statements: clarification requests or answers compliant with the CoC.]
If they said “necessary” without specifying, “necessary to what end,” that means they don’t know what they’re trying to do.
The principle of proportionality in the law of armed conflict is often misunderstood. It says that the expected harm to non-combatants should not be disproportionate to the expected military gains from an operation. In other words, the proportionality ratio is not between harm we do to our enemies vs. harm they did to us. It’s between expected harm to civilians vs. our expected military gain.
If they kill one of our soldiers, we would be justified in wiping out an entire division of theirs. But if there is a sniper in a building occupied by a thousand civilians, we would not be justified in wiping out the entire building.
Actually, that’s not quite right. It could also mean they are dissembling about what they’re trying to do.
True, but in prosecuting an open-ended lie, you focus on blowing the cover story, not on proving the hidden truth.
Traumatic brain injuries? Where did you get that?
The NPR story yesterday reported minor injuries to US personnel, all of whom returned to duty, and one contractor who had a heart attack while seeking shelter from a possible drone attack. The “possible” part suggests that the contractor death wasn’t even connected to an actual attack.
But hey, sure, traumatic brain injuries, right next to those phantom beheaded Israeli babies, the supposed rape victims, and the ghost of Kiev.
Expect propaganda and lies, folks. It happens every time.
The news article.
From the same article “an American civilian contractor died from a cardiac arrest that occurred during one of the attacks.”
Don’t lump the ghost of Kiev (an internet meme) with the babies that actually were beheaded and the women who actually were raped. You’re getting sucked into the pro-Hamas, pro-terrorism section of the internet.
Crimenutely, Jerry, get a grip. I expect the author of the OP got the term from one or more of the many news sources on both the Left and the Right using the term to describe 19 0f the 21 injuries to US troops.
You may not be aware that diagnosis of “concussion” is one which falls at the milder end of the TBI spectrum. (For anyone tuning in from Rio Linda, this means that a “concussion” qualifies as a TBI.) Do you find it all that implausible that a number of troops sustained a concussion from the rocket and drone attacks? I don’t. I also don’t deprecate the injury, as it takes many forms and bears close watching, even if its victims are able to return to more-or-less immediate duty.
Oh, and BTW, your remark implying that there were no dead babies and no rapes on October 7 is utterly beneath contempt. I think you are the one who is living in a fantasy world. It is probably too much to expect that you are ashamed of yourself, but you should be.
From what I understand, “proportionate response” means using the appropriate amount of force as is required to meet the objective. It has nothing to do with, for example, responding to a 1,500 deaths by killing 1,500 of the enemy. It means killing a single man in an occupied civilian apartment building if possible by using a sniper to kill the man, rather than leveling the entire building. However if the entire building was riddled with hiding enemies and the only way to kill them is to level the building, then leveling the building is proportionate to the task, despite the civilian casualties.
Added: I would take Steve Fast’s comment #3 over mine.
I don’t exactly agree with his conclusions, but fwiw:
https://x.com/propandco/status/1718092723750899809?s=46&t=M1Bed99OUfhgYaXugI0qNw
A lot of this is fog of war.
Thanks. I do not understand the principal the same way you do.
I have a different understanding of the principles than you and Steven, but thanks.
The logic of “phantom beheaded babies” produces “the twin towers are still standing.” You take minor inconsistencies and decide to reject mountains of consistent reports which come complete with reasonable explanations for the inconsistencies.
It is the refusal to allow for some error in initial reports of dynamic events, interpreting every minor difference as evidence of fabrication, and concluding in the most childish and unserious way possible that therefore the dynamic events did not occur because not every report meets an academic, legalist, philosophical standard of veracity.
Jerry. The reports cluster about a mode.
Propagandists in denial mode know that they can muddy the water further not by on-scene reporting, but by midstream corruption. They insert new “modes” such as no it never happened, or yes but it was the israelis (or the us government), or the babies are all alive, or dead but not beheaded, or beheaded but not dead, or dead and beheaded but not israeli, or there were never any babies because Israelis spring fully-formed from the forehead of Zeus. “Fire never melted steel” because Rosie O’Donnell has never seen fire hotter than that under a cauldron, not because the entire U.S. rust belt (known for using fire to melt steel) cannot exist on the flat earth.
I would like to express my appreciation for whatever respect or reticence led you to refrain from commenting on the matter for some time here, and raise a glass in your direction to seeing more of it.
If you mean that your understanding of the principles is that killing more of them than they killed of us is verboten, then as long as the enemy is more willing to give up their lives – including/especially civilian lives – than we are, they automatically win and we might as well not even fight.
“To the pain” covers it sufficiently for me. Just saying’…
Here are two commodity-level discussions of proportional/proportionate response, one looking specifically at Israel’s options to quell Hamas rockets from Gaza in [checks notes] 2021, and the other to several self-defense incidents.
The principle of proportionality is not restricted to a narrow band of intensity conflict, but from the private existential up to the global existential.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/proportionality-of-response-what-it-really-means/
https://www.athlonoutdoors.com/article/proportional-response-understanding-self-defense-statutes/
These are as I say commodity-level discussions, not dispositive sources such as JAGMAN, Geneva, UN, or USCS selections. They comport with my experience in more authority-adjacent settings.
Even in an old-style conventional “total war,” using an entire wave of bombers to knock out one militarily valid warehouse is disproportionate to the goal. Beating a burglar to a crippled bloody pulp is disproportionate to the goal of defense — it may send a message, but that’s harder to sustain in court.
Personally, I differ from the proportionality holding that apparently I’m supposed to take a beating rather than use a gun to stop an attack. Bullpoop. I’ll see you in court before I allow myself to rely on the odds of prevailing over an attacker while not using my dedicated self-defense tool. I agree that this may or may not be proportinal (we don’t know the attacker’s intentions beforehand), but to me, this is where the granularity of available responses falls below my quanta of manageability. If I must surrender control in order to use the less-deadly force, then it is insufficient to the goal. To me this is right up there with saying you’re allowed to carry a full-sized spare, but can only mount a tiny wooden wagon wheel in case of flat tire.
Israel can promptly strike a location known to source missiles (Gaza mosque, or hospital, say) and blow it to bits. They can not drop the equivalent amount of explosive spread out over a year as the crowds return.
In both war and self-defense, there is some consideration given to the extent over time of the response. There’s a difference between on one hand hitting someone harder than you meant to or needed to and on the other hand prolonging a beating or bombing.
Proportionality is more closely connected to economy of force than it is to fairness. Violations of proportionality waste valuable resources.
Hmm. How might this apply to other matters, especially “non-violent” criminality? Would the Left perhaps argue that putting someone in jail for a year when they only robbed your home – or beat you up, etc – for a few minutes, violates “proportionality?”
No clue.
I probably shouldn’t give them any ideas.
See Fast’s and BDB’s remarks.
Iran is at war with America. They have engaged in acts of war against us, over and over.
The correct response is to Declare war and turn this nation into dust.
They started the war. We should end it.
This has been going on since 1979. Enough is enough. End Iran as a military threat and power that it is. That is the answer.
Despicable.
Larry Kudlow (six minutes) is in complete agreement with Steve Fast:
Kudlow: There’s no deterrence, only appeasement – YouTube
How do we determine that the Syrian terrorists who carried out attacks on two of America’s bases in Syria had involvement with Iran? Or that Iran had involvement with them?
Granted the way the American news media works is that it suggests something for a half dozen days and then those suggestions are transcribed into fact (“A lie told often enough possesses the ability to be seen as the truth.”)
Circa late 2002 into early 2003, the suggestion and then firm statements by the media that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction brought about one such transcription into “fact.”
That war cost us some 3 trillions of dollars, while the lives of 4,550 service members & 3,793 military contractors were killed. (These lives were lost between March 2003 & October 2018.) The entire nation was destabilized with various factions fighting one another, as well as some 900,000 Iraqi civilians losing their lives and up to one fourth of the nation’s population leaving their homeland and living elsewhere.
But Americans do not understand that Iran is not Iraq.
Consider: It is a much larger nation, and has a much larger population.
Here is one website that presents some important statistics about both nations:
https://www.thoughtco.com/iran-and-iraq-differences-195595
From the above link:
“Iran ranks as 18th largest country in the world at 636,000 square miles while Iraq ranks 58th at 169,000 square miles. Their populations differ as well. Iran boasts 80 million citizens to Iraq’s 31 million.
“The ancient empires that once ruled the 2 nations are also different. Iran was ruled in ancient times by the Median, Achaemenid, Seleucid, & Parthian empires while its neighbor was ruled by the Sumerian, Akkadian, Assyrian, & Babylonian empires. This resulted in an ethnic disparity between these nations. Most Iranians were Persian while Iraqis were of Arab heritage.”
Perhaps the more worrying differences between the situation of the USA vs Iraq in March 2003 and the situation were the USA to go and face off against Iran in the near future are these:
The Chinese government would involved itself in ways that would be a detriment to our attempts to take on Iran.
Here is one citation regarding the reaction:
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/policy/defense-national-security/israel-china-capitalize-hamas-us-support-iran
Oct 31, 2023
“Earlier this month, a top U.S. military leader warned that a prolonged conflict with Iran would be “catastrophic” to America’s long-term efforts at countering China.
“If only Lt. Gen. Alexus Grynkewich, commander of U.S. Air Forces Central, and his military brass colleagues knew what was coming in the region days later.
“While Beijing had sought relations with Israel, its decision to remain neutral in the current conflict demonstrated what side it had actually chosen, and it wasn’t Tel Aviv. The current chaos, which Beijing will watch carefully, is enough to make China a morbid victor of sorts as Israel looks to destroy Hamas “SNIP.
This might be of use. Proportionality in Warfare (thenewatlantis.com)
I know there has been a lot of discussion of late about two members being “banished” and the reasons therefor and I appreciate that there are good faith arguments on both sides of this question (proportionate?) although the last one was clearly egregious. However, I consider this comment of @arizonapatriot to be beyond the pale, and want the record to clearly reflect my 100% agreement with this statement of @She that the statement that there were no beheaded babies and no rapes is beneath contempt. Surely we must expect higher standards than those reflected in this kind of mindless blather, completely unmoored from all demonstrated and videotaped and documented evidence.
I will go further and say this: I am disgusted and sickened by these statements which are a libel to those 1,400 Israelis who lost their lives on October 7 and the thousands who were injured. But it is a most grievous libel against those little infants, God’s greatest gift, who were slaughtered like so many pieces of meat at an abbatoir.
Absolutely disgusting.
The New Atlantis is a quality journal.
See my #26 above for the degree to which I strongly disagree with any idea of lifting a glass to this particular commenter after such a – to use @jimmcconnell ‘s word– despicable comment. Perhaps I misunderstood your comment; if so, I would be glad to know how I did. But, as one of many who has been on the receiving end of this thoroughly acerbic commenter’s sharp edges, it seems to me high time that someone started telling him how disgusting some of his comments are. He certainly shows little or no compunction in letting those he disagrees with how “wrong” they are in his view.
What is the object of the first clause?
Two members were banished? We are SCA adjacent?