An Eye for an Eye
McGurn, William
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 18, NO. 12 / DECEMBER...
...The retreat was led by Mr...
...Neighboring Libya recently expelled all Tunisian workers, diplomatic relations were broken, and the last thing the U.S...
...Sometimes the line is hard to draw, especially with regard to political figures...
...Taking issue with Jeane Kirkpatrick's cogent analysis that "the French clearly did not intend to attack civilians and bystanders and maim, torture or kill," Cockburn apparently found too taxing the distinction between guerrillas (who may or may not be justified, according to other criteria) and terrorists...
...The 1980s are shaping up as the "Decade of the Family...
...Indeed, the violation of Tunisian sovereignty under these circumstances is the smallest problem presented by the Israeli raid...
...Obviously, it didn't, because he released the suspected mastermind of the hijacking, Mohammed Abbas...
...Until people learn to equate terrorists with criminals deserving of punishment no matter what their political stripe, liberal democracies will find themselves on the defensive...
...Both were impressive, courageous, and lonely stands...
...Judging from the precision of their bombing, and the relatively low number of innocents killed, the Israelis appear to have taken this precaution...
...The response was entirely different in character from the attack that provoked it...
...Shultz's mind was the danger to innocent American lives were the U.S...
...The classic metaphor used to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of force is that of the policeman/criminal...
...If true, then not even the dramatic capture of the four PLO pirates responsible for the seizure of the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro and the murder of U.S...
...We have no interest in a confrontation with Tunisia," he said...
...Chief among the secretary's worries was the precarious position of Tunisia, whose 82-year-old President Habib Bourguiba is among America's staunchest allies in the region...
...Unfortunately, at the first opportunity it had to put some flesh on these words the Reagan Administration acted almost Carteresque: the strong initial line, followed by Cabinet infighting and a quick retreat, culminating in a feeble attempt to please everyone and of course pleasing no one-not the Israelis, not the Tunisians, probably not Ronald Reagan himself...
...It requires the forcefulness and eloquence George Shultz demonstrated last year in his speech, not his backpedaling of this year...
...Israel's retaliation against the heart of the PLO was an admirable expression of such commitment...
...Navy F-14 Tomcats to bring down the Egyptian plane carrying the PLO members to Tunisia, President Reagan said in Chicago that however much one wants to retaliate, if innocent lives are threatened, well, then "you have to swallow your gorge and you don't do it...
...As Defense Minister Rabin took pains to emphasize, the raid was not an attack on Tunisia...
...If a government literally cannot control the inhabitants of the territory over which it supposedly presides, or police its borders, and if other countries suffer because of this incapacity, then surrogate controlling and policing are clearly permissible...
...As a gesture of good will, the Israelis might offer reparations to the families of the Tunisians killed in the raid...
...It applies here as well...
...The target was not Tunisia...
...Shultz distanced himself from his tough stand of a year ago because he thought that such a stand would carry a high price...
...planes to bring down the Egypt Air Boeing 737 carrying a group of PLO terrorists, is not without sin, having backed down on his initial strong stand...
...The French sinking of the "Rainbow Warrior" may or may not have been wrong (probably it was...
...By 1990 half of all American families may be headed by only one adult," announced Newsweek in a cover story en William 7iicker is The American Spectator's New York correspondent and author of the new book, Vigilante: The Backlash Against Crime (Stein and Day...
...citizen Leon Klinghoffer make any difference...
...Klinghoffer grimly demonstrated...
...It is immoral to wage ,a war one does not intend to win...
...Secretary of State George Shultz, responsible for the Reagan Administration's second-guessing of what it originally recognized as "a legiti mate...
...resolve to win the war against terrorism...
...Implicit is the recognition that sometimes it is necessary to violate the letter of the law to uphold its spirit...
...First, it was not an initiative but a response to the brutal murder of three Israeli citizens...
...Here the Israelis might object that granting reparations implies acceptance of Israeli guilt for an act of aggression...
...Within hours of that Administration statement, Mr...
...to be too closely identified with the Israeli retaliation...
...At its heart, terrorism is just what the word says: terror...
...This latter is the basis for distinguishing between a guerrilla and a terrorist...
...Raise women's salaries, legislate "comparable worth," eliminate "sex discrimination," and these truncated families of women and-their-children will be able to take their rightful place in society...
...William Tucker WHY WE HAVE FAMILIES In the past quarter-century we've undone what it took 3.5 million years to create...
...If these conditions sound difficult, that's because they're supposed to be...
...Ask the Klinghoffer family...
...Over 60 percent of black children are now living in single-parent homes, and 70 percent of these are officially classified as "poor...
...On the diplomatic front, the Administration in general and Secretary Shultz in particular found themselves caught between their obvious inclination to support the Israeli raid and their efforts to start peace negotiations in the Middle East...
...The question is whether the right to sovereignty overrules responsive action to terrorism...
...Action must be U.S...
...Nor is Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin, for encouraging the moral equivalence crew with his unfortunate statement in the Economist that Israel "reserves the right to fight terror with terror...
...has countless other tourists, diplomats, and expatriates around the world, all of whom are prime targets for kidnapping and murder, as the seizure of the Achille Lauro and the murder of Mr...
...Since women are the victims, then the feminist agenda must be the solution...
...All the defined targets were hit precisely...
...policy, or innocent lives will continue to be threatened...
...My own inclination was to blame U.S...
...Retaliation loomed large in that speech...
...opposes "the rising pattern of violence in the region, including the latest incident of the attack on PLO headquarters in Tunisia...
...Taking just the PLO-the paradigm of the modern terrorist organization-it is interesting to compare its targets with those of the Israelis...
...Chronology is important, too...
...For all its rhetoric about "the war against terrorism," the Reagan Administration hasn't even been able to define terrorism...
...The statistics are astounding...
...The Tunisians attributed the killing of several Tunisian Jews by a berserk policeman shortly after the air strike to anti-Semitic broadcasts beamed into Tunisia by Radio Libya...
...But it was not terror...
...Israel's justifiable use of proportionate military force on a military target was placed on the same level as the PLO's habitual attacks on innocent civilians, and a chance to lay down a clear unequivocal anti-terrorist line was lost in the process...
...They have taken their usual early lead...
...I was up at Harvard last April when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan presented his own somewhat similar analysis in a widely reported lecture series on the "Crisis in the Family...
...There's the United Nations Security Council, which voted 14-0 to condemn "vigorously the armed act of aggression" by Israel, with the U.S...
...They have a good argument...
...The hijacking of an Italian liner ought to have taught Prime Minister Bettino Craxi that good relations with terrorists like the PLO don't mean much...
...Often the best way to set one's compass in such matters is to find fatuousness and head toward its polar opposite...
...Because if the President's line about not doing so if innocent lives are at stake still stands, then little has been accomplished...
...Had this taken place in, say, 1976, most likely candidate Reagan would have denounced the idea of placing negotiation above justice...
...The raid had its sorrier aspects, in order the Tunisian dead and the violation of that nation's sovereignty...
...The Tunisian dead represent a horrible waste of human life...
...The man who last October 25 declaimed that to combat terrorism "we must be willing to use military force" this October 1 went on record as saying that there is "no military option" in the Middle East...
...But it is a particular kind of terror, fear as a constant state of mind rather than as a transitory feeling...
...support was not there at the crunch...
...Michael Walzer addressed this very difficulty in his book Just and Unjust Wars, the problem of a peacetime strike into another country not responsible for the original offense...
...There is no dealing with terrorists any other way...
...At the moment, however, that's largely an academic difficulty...
...Senator Moynihan is an odd source for such ideas...
...Moshe Levy, and the Israeli air force commander, Maj...
...Amos Lapidot, the target was the main PLO headquarters from which terrorist operations have been mounted over the past three years...
...Even Jimmy Carter approved the attempt to rescue the Iranian hostages, which surely endangered both the hostages and innocent Iranians...
...To put it another way, Israeli soldiers did not simply go down to the West Bank and line some Palestinians up against a firing squad...
...The target was PLO headquarters that are in a situation of actual extraterritorial control over the area where they are settled in Tunisia...
...Levy noted that the Israeli bombers took special care to avoid hitting a boarding school nearby, concentrating on the buildings in the center of the large compound...
...Nor did it bother him that the French, like the unlike the hijackers of TWA flight 847, were reacting to a threat and responded by choosing a precise target...
...interception of the Egyptian plane over the Mediterranean is denounced as a form of terrorism...
...Shultz pointed out that "fighting terrorism will not be a clean or pleasant contest but we have no choice but to play it...
...Now, of course, Secretary Shultz is neither soft on terrorism nor a foe of Israel's right as a nation to self-defense...
...Therefore the true failure was that of the United States, the failure of the world's leader to lead...
...He is the incarnation of the monstrous twentieth-century notion of total war, the idea that anything goes...
...Shultz deliberately muddied the waters by telling the Gulf Cooperation Council in New York that the U.S...
...Faced with - this overwhelming evidence that something remarkable is happening, the really important competition has already begun-the race to define the problem...
...Shultz...
...did not get the North Vietnamese to the negotiating table until President Nixon ordered the bombing of Hanoi...
...diplomat William Buckley, after learning of the Israeli attack...
...Would that this were so...
...More might have been expected from the European states, but London, Bonn, Rome, and Madrid rushed in to lend their voices to the chorus of condemnation, later formal ized in the European Parliament...
...We must hope that the decision to force down the Egyptian plane signals a future decisiveness as well...
...In wake of the successful October I strike by Israeli F-15 fighter-bombers on the Tunisian headquarters of the Palestine Liberation Organization, it's hard to know whom to blame most for the ensuing confusion...
...Though it cited Israel's violation of Tunisian sovereignty, the editorial concluded that the conditions for a justified reprisal were reasonably met...
...A staggering 54 percent of all single-parent families are below the poverty line, compared to 18 percent of two-parent families...
...According to the Times, international law justifies reprisals under two conditions: "One is that the victim must appear to have been unwill ing to give redress for his original offence-and must be clearly prepared to repeat it...
...His mistake was not to follow through, which has rarely been President Reagan's problem...
...12 / DECEMBER 1985...
...More important, the Israeli action was a response to an aggressive act, not itself an aggressive act...
...As the Wall Street Journal said at the time of the TWA hostage crisis, without swift and sure retaliation repetition of terrorist acts is inevitable...
...In over 90 percent of all cases, this parent is the mother...
...For if true, then the successful demonstration of American might was less a signal that the war is in earnest than a desperate (and successful) attempt to regain political face...
...The time has now come to bring these efforts together, and welcome the help of all those who will join and ignore those who will not...
...In his famous speech of October 1984, Mr...
...As usual, liberals are first out of the starting gate, riding high on a horse called "The Feminization of Poverty...
...Moammar Qaddafi...
...But outside of textbooks there are always grim aspects to any part of war, and in the end they do not outweigh the propriety of the reprisal...
...Yet the surprising thing about the Israeli retaliation against the PLO is not how dirty it was from the just-war perspective but how clean...
...This support must be generated from the top...
...The candidates are legion...
...That is the savvy he demonstrated in ordering the invasion of Grenada...
...At the time, many observers took the speech as a watershed in U.S...
...More important, Israel's armed forces appear to have discriminated in their target, confining it to the PLO headquarters from which, according to Israeli intelligence reports, the original slaying was ordered...
...That is an accepted principle of warfare, though certainly it does not release the authorities from taking as many reasonable precautions as possible not to injure noncombatants...
...if the woman is injured or killed by authorities attempting to bring the criminal to justice the blood is on the criminal's hands...
...The key to the metaphor, of course, is that one doesn't argue from the similarities (both the policeman and criminal have guns, both may break the speed limit in the chase, each may kill the other) but from the differences: how and why they do these things...
...Writing in the Wall Street Journal before the Israeli raid, Cockburn attacked the Journal's position on terrorism, concluding that the French sinking of the environmentalist ship "Rainbow Warrior" put France in the same league as Libya...
...In short, Mr...
...To expect leadership from a Europe that failed to support America in the invasion of Grenada demands an unbounded naivete...
...The philosophical failure was even worse...
...The secretary has other responsibilities he must try to balance...
...Probably he would have argued that without the latter the former is meaningless...
...Nowadays everything from the denial of food stamps to the U.S...
...Ruling out an attack on PLO forces in Jordan, Prime Minister Shimon Peres said that Jordan was different because King Hussein had proved he did not tolerate terrorism...
...Public support for U.S...
...And in fairness, these extend beyond his interest in a Middle Eastern peace initiative...
...This failure was twofold...
...So was President Reagan's decision to bring to justice the terrorists responsible for the murder of one of his citizens, despite the opposition of some friendly Arab states...
...The guerrilla limits his attacks to legitimate military (and in more restricted cases, political) targets, for example the French Resistance effort against the German occupation...
...To prevent this word from further debasement, we must get back to its core...
...President Reagan, who redeemed himself a week later by ordering U.S...
...The larger point is that if we are real ly engaged in a war against terrorism, we'd better be prepared to win it...
...The terrorist exercises no such scruples...
...That these people should have had to pay with their lives for the actions of a terrorist group fighting a war not involving their countryindeed, a war that their country is one of the few in the region to opposehighlights the tragic ripples that roll far out from the initial terrorist action...
...But given that the innocents killed were citizens of a state not hostile to Israel, that they were not the target of the attack, and that Israel did violate Tunisian sovereignty, it would be no acceptance of Israeli guilt to offer reparations to those families...
...It is a sure thing," the paper said, "because the quite rational men who plan these incidents know two things about their strategy: It works and it carries no costs...
...military actions to stop terrorists before they commit some hideous act or in retaliation for an attack on our own people is crucial if we are to deal with this challenge," said the secretary...
...Shultz's speech contained "nothing new that is not already policy...
...An editorial in the Times of London placed Israel's reprisal into similar perspective...
...needs is a destabilized Tunisia that Israelis and For all its rhetoric about "the war against terrorism," the Reagan Administration hasn't even been able to define terrorism...
...Just conduct in war is governed by the dual principles of proportionate response and discrimination in the choice of targets...
...0...
...His classic 1965 report, "The Negro Family: A Cause for National Action," which traced increasing black poverty to female-headed households, is more relevant today than it was twenty years ago...
...Similarly, the U.S...
...the presumption is against war...
...The other concern pressing on Mr...
...There are still the six American hostages in the Middle East, and the Islamic Jihad announced that it murdered one of them, U.S...
...titled "The Single Parent...
...The result was a leveling of the targeted buildings, and 73 dead: 61 Palestinians and 12 Tunisians...
...A day later, President Reagan was telling reporters in Washington that Mr...
...However noble their cause, however sincere their intentions, however deserving of redress the wrongs done to them, terrorists nullify these claims by their refusal to operate within civilized norms...
...More than 25 percent of all children are now being raised in "single-parent homes'up from 12.5 percent in 1970...
...abstaining...
...Reagan didn't really believe this, but was simply biding his time and waiting for the perfect opportunity to demonstrate what force can do...
...For President Reagan and others interested in peace in the Middle East, the conclusion to be drawn from the events of recent weeks is that peace is impossible until the PLO and its terrorist allies are defeated, not accommodated...
...But the price we are now paying for waffling each time the issue arises-encouraging retaliation, but refusing to support anyone who actually retaliates-is higher still...
...Placing a command structure within civilian populations is the terrorist equivalent of hiding behind a woman's skirts...
...No better reference point exists than the Nation's Alexander Cockburn...
...The Israelis, on the other hand, struck at the command center from which they believe these and other similar attacks were launched...
...The second is that the act of reprisal must be in proportion to the original crime...
...New Zealanders do not walk the streets, sail the seas, and fly the skies in fear of the French or the Israelis...
...In the last few weeks alone, the PLO struck against passengers enjoying a cruise in the Mediterranean, three people on a yacht off Cyprus, and a couple hiking near Jerusalem...
...Before ordering U.S...
...Single-parent homes quickly veer toward poverty...
...Innocent lives depend on the Commander in Chiefs willingness to take risks...
...Nevertheless, Tunisia's outrage at the violation of its borders was to be expected...
...It is upon such crucial distinctions that the spirit of international law is maintained...
...For the world's liberal democracies-the targets, after all, of terrorism-this demands in turn a mustering of broad public support for the strong measures such a victory requires...
...can never do anything that risks innocent lives...
...In an age saturated with an endjustifies-the-means simplicity, the PLO execution of Leon Klinghoffer, a 69-year-old man confined to a wheelchair, ought to come as no surprise...
...Ironically, much of his speech last year cited Israel as the model in combating terrorism...
...According to their interpretation, family breakups mainly victimize women...
...Targets are all the same to him, with a school bus as open to attack as an enemy tank...
...13 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 would give an opening to Col...
...Although both principles-just cause and just conduct-carry equal weight, today the idea that there is an ethical way of fighting tends to be either forgotten or dismissed as hopelessly anachronistic...
...After all, even the tenuous peace that exists now between Israel and Egypt owes itself to the latter's defeat in the 1973 Yom Kippur War and President Anwar al-Sadat's realization that the defeat was final...
...Combatants-terrorists as well as soldiers-who shield themselves with civilians bear the responsibility for any loss of civilian life that occurs as a consequence of any of their actions...
...But the way this force is used must also be just...
...The terror of terrorism lies in its indeterminateness, the feeling of the innocent that they are in a state of siege as in, say, Belfast or Beirut, where the grocer is as much a target (in practice, more of a target) as the general...
...William McGurn AN EYE FOR AN EYE The Shultz doctrine of retaliation in theory and in practice...
...Unfortunately, Moynihan received so much criticism for being a "racist" that he 14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985...
...The reaction to Israel's blow to the world's most active terrorist group was another in a long line of failures by the West to define terrorism in such a way that would make the legitimate responses against it by governments intelligible and obvious to those governments' citizens...
...Similarly, back in June during the TWA hijacking he said he could take no action that jeopardized the hostages, the implication being that the U.S...
...violence...
...This is the same man who less than a year earlier made headlines when he called for swift and sure action against terrorists, insisting that "the worst thing we could do is change our principled policies under the threat of William McGurn is editorial features editor of the Wall Street Journal/Europe and a European editor of The American Spectator...
...Doubtless he was right...
...Such an action by a Western premier shows how far from victory we really are in the war against terrorism...
...It is finally beginning to dawn on Americans that many of the things that have gone wrong with this country stem from the disintegration of the nuclear family...
...In just-war terms, the terrorist is simply he who violates the 12 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR DECEMBER 1985 distinction between combatants and noncombatants...
...According to the Israeli chief of staff, Lt...
...The question is whether President Reagan, given his statements, would even give the goahead for such a rescue attempt...
...First, the cause must justify the resort to arms, which is always a last resort...
...expression of self-defense...
...To defeat them, moreover, the West must have enough faith in its system of values and enough confidence in its forces to meet the challenge...
...The description of the event given by Israel's ministry of defense confirms this interpretation...
...Under traditional Western ethics, codified in the Geneva Convention, taught in military manuals, and resting at the foundation of international law, the proper use of force must meet two criteria...
...The hope is that Mr...
...The U.S...
Vol. 18 • December 1985 • No. 12
