On Wednesday, the United States government apologized for the bombing of a hospital in Kunduz, Afghanistan that took the lives of 19 patients and staff members by American forces prosecuting the war against the Taliban. While the White House waited a couple of days before issuing the apology while investigations of the incident proceeded, once it was clear what had happened, President Obama ordered that an apology be issued to the Doctors Without Borders group that operated the facility. As our Max Boot noted earlier this week, a bombing must be viewed in the context of a red-hot conflict with an enemy. The fact that the tragic event got far more attention than a Saudi strike in Yemen that reportedly killed 130 people at a wedding party speaks to the hypocrisy of the international press. But, as one intrepid Associated Press reported pointed out on Monday, the hypocrisy extends to the U.S. government in its attitude toward not dissimilar actions by Israel in its attempts to defend itself against Hamas terrorists.
The AP’s Matthew Lee gave State Department deputy spokesperson Mark Toner a very hard time when he pointed out that in August of 2014, the U.S. didn’t wait for an investigation before it condemned the Israeli Defense Forces for the shelling of a United Nations-run school in Gaza. At that time, the U.S. cut Israel no slack when it said, “The suspicion that militants are operating nearby does not justify strikes that put at risk the lives of so many innocent civilians.”
The similarities of the two incidents are striking in that in both cases, the respective militaries had good reason to believe armed enemy combatants were in the immediate vicinity of a building that was being treated as off-limits for retaliatory fire. There are well-documented incidents of Hamas using UN schools to store weapons and as staging points for terrorists. The difference is that unlike the United Nations Relief Works Administration in Gaza, there is no indication that Doctors Without Medicine actively cooperates with the Taliban. But, though the U.S. was on shakier ground than the Israelis, there is no indication that anyone in the administration is prepared to use the kind of strong language used at the time by the U.S. government about the Israelis — “disgraceful” and “appalling’ — about the mistake by U.S. Special Operations Forces.
That Israel is treated in a discriminatory fashion by the international community is a given. Israeli self-defense, even against terrorists that are using Gaza to launch thousands of rockets at Israeli towns and cities or to send killers to murder and kidnap via terror tunnels, is considered illegitimate. The U.S. has conducted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in which many civilians have unfortunately died, but international forums treat any actions in which Palestinians die, no matter what the provocation by their side or the circumstances, as proof of the Jewish state’s supposedly genocidal intentions. This is a lie. As even the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Martin Dempsey pointed out, Israel’s behavior during the last Gaza war was a model of humane conduct that Americans ought to emulate.
But as much as those of us who were angered by the Obama administration’s willingness to pillory without proof are smirking now that the shoe is on the other foot, that isn’t the correct response to this week’s tragedy. It may well be that the U.S. made a mistake in Kunduz just as some Israeli shells or bullets intended for terrorists in Gaza wound up hurting a civilian. But the main conclusion to draw from these unfortunate incidents does not detract from the just nature of either war.
Asymmetrical warfare places a terrible burden on the armed forces of countries forced to fight terrorists. Both the Taliban and Hamas deliberately hide their fighters and arsenals amid civilian populations. In that sense, civilian casualties aren’t merely an accident of war, but a deliberate outcome sought by terrorist forces that hope to use the deaths of their compatriots for propaganda purposes. This is a practice that is as cynical as it is unconscionable.
To their credit, both Israelis and Americans operate under strict rules of engagement that make the normal mistakes that happen as a result of the fog of war less prevalent than they were in even moral conflicts such as World War II.
The difference between then and now is that supposedly enlightened people now treat any incident in which civilians killed by forces fighting terrorists as proof of the illegitimacy of the war effort. Just as critics consider surveillance of terrorist suspects by Western nations as worse than terrorism, so, too, are sad examples of the horrors of war like Kunduz and Gaza treated as a reason for the U.S. and Israel to stop fighting. But as bad as these incidents may be, Hamas rule and terror in Gaza is worse. So would be the consequences of a Taliban victory in Afghanistan.
Previous generations understood that whatever one may think about the air bombing of Germany (in which huge numbers of civilians died), that didn’t mean total war on the Nazis was a bad idea. Unfortunately, many on the left are willing to let Hamas, the Taliban or even ISIS off the hook simply because they are being fought by an imperfect Israel or Western nations.
Israel is a victim of hypocrisy when it comes to the way the world condemns its war of self-defense. But the main point to be gleaned from this week’s news is that even though we hope civilians are never hurt, if they are killed it is the fault of the terrorists who put them in harm’s way, not Israel or U.S. forces. What we should want to hear from the U.S. now is not so much an apology about Kunduz but a recognition that the life and death war Israelis are fighting against terrorists on their own doorstep is as just as the one Americans are fighting in Afghanistan on the over side of the globe from Washington.