There is something important to be learned from the arguments of leftists: that their standards, being inevitably indiscriminate, ensure their logic is contorted, their moralizing hypocritical, and their aims hopelessly obfuscated.

In an editorial titled War is not a solution for terrorism Howard Zinn confirms these inconvenient truths once again.

Published on Saturday, September 2, 2006 by the Boston Globe.

THERE IS SOMETHING important to be learned from the recent experience of the United States and Israel in the Middle East: that massive military attacks, inevitably indiscriminate, are not only morally reprehensible, but useless in achieving the stated aims of those who carry them out.

The United States, in three years of war, which began with shock-and-awe bombardment and goes on with day-to-day violence and chaos, has been an utter failure in its claimed objective of bringing democracy and stability to Iraq. The Israeli invasion and bombing of Lebanon has not brought security to Israel; indeed it has increased the number of its enemies, whether in Hezbollah or Hamas or among Arabs who belong to neither of those groups.

To characterize the war waged by the US in Iraq and Israel against Hizballah in Lebanon as “inevitably indiscriminate” you could be ignorant of history and how these recent wars differ substantially from precedent, or you could simply be ignoring it. Zinn served in war as a B-17 bombardier so he should understand something not only of war but of what “indiscriminate” means. Are we to believe that when he dropped bombs he tried to hit facilities used by the enemy to wage war, thus shortening the war and saving lives, or should we adopt his argument and assume he dropped his bombs indiscriminantly?

Like most Allied bombing during and since WWII the “shock-and-awe bombardment” to which Zinn refers targetted primarily military and government sites. How is this indiscriminate? The most notable difference over time has been the increasing precision achieved at great expense with the aim of reducing accidental death and destruction inflicted on the innocent. So what is Zinn’s standard? Does he apply it to all who fight, or only the US and Israel? If violence and suffering are morally reprehensible then anything that decreases them is morally good, and anything that increases them is morally bad. No?

If Zinn thinks Israeli leaflets are “indiscriminant” then what word does he use to describe the rockets Hizballah and HAMAS deliberately fire in the hope of killing random civilians? Does he not realize that the jihadis use violence as a tool, that they use civilization’s own media to propagandize and intimidate those with pacifist tendencies? Why in the world doesn’t he get righteously indignant about the jihadis?

The US Congress’ casus belli against Iraq were many, and they belie any claim that the goal in Iraq was first and foremost to spread democracy. The goal was to topple Saddam, and that mission was indeed accomplished. After that why shouldn’t the Iraqis try democracy, and why shouldn’t we help them? Does Zinn realize the Iraqi (and Afghani) people purpled their fingers even under the threat of violence and death? Will Zinn acknowledge that the threats come from the jihadis, and not from the armies of civilization? If he can describe the constitution and democratically elected government in Iraq (and Afghanistan) today as “utter failure” one can only wonder what words he would use if the US withdrew and the jihadis came to power. Would Zinn call that a “super duper failure”, or maybe “utter success”? I’d rather not find out.

Zinn seems to believe that civilized armies are responsible for all the violence, zipping around dropping bombs whereever they think there might be a terrorist. He does so by willfully ignoring the very strict constraints those armies operate under. Consult for example the US military’s rules of engagement. We expect our soldiers to be lawyers and policemen as well as warriors. It is in fact the Baathists and jihadis (with a large amount of help from Iran and Syria) who deliberately cause death and destruction in Iraq. They initiate it because they benefit from the chaos and intimidation it creates. They assassinate anyone who is too secular, detonate bombs in crowds of civilians, and saw the heads off any infidel or friend of infidels they can get their bloody hands on. And neither one of those hands is ever tied behind their backs by world opinion, the UN, or the quaint notions of the Geneva Convention.

It also seems safe to assume Zinn knows nothing of the violence and suffering under Saddam or how it compares to the casualty rate now.

The history of wars fought since the end of World War II reveals the futility of large-scale violence. The United States and the Soviet Union, despite their enormous firepower, were unable to defeat resistance movements in small, weak nations — the United States in Vietnam, the Soviet Union in Afghanistan — and were forced to withdraw.

Even the “victories” of great military powers turn out to be elusive. Presumably, after attacking and invading Afghanistan, the president was able to declare that the Taliban were defeated. But more than four years later, Afghanistan is rife with violence, and the Taliban are active in much of the country.

This appears to be an example of what leftists like to call “cherrypicking”. At the same time it modestly overlooks the role leftist undermining can play in achieving defeat.

England’s exploitation of the US was ended by large-scale violence. As was slavery. As were the totalitarian aspirations of Germany, Italy, and Japan a century later. Too bad Zinn cleverly excludes these by date. He then overlooks the fact that the Cold War was “fought” entirely under the umbrella of Mutually Assured Destruction, a strategy used by both sides. Thus we know empirically that the threat of large-scale retaliatory violence can actually deter violence. At least when both sides prefer to avoid violence.

The book Militant Tricks makes a solid case that the jihadis purposely goad the US military into using its preferred tactic of overwhelming firepower, hoping for spillover. That doesn’t mean every use of force is a ruse, or does spillover, and at any rate the book’s suggested solution is not pacifism, it is light infantry applying force more selectively.

The US soundly defeated the Taliban in Afghanistan. The problem is that the Taliban are based in Pakistan, and from there they keep Afghanistan “rife with violence”. As with Iraq Zinn again implies absurdly that this is all the fault of the US. As if the US military is murdering civilians as a matter of course, and the Taliban is trying to build roads.

The US withdrawal from Vietnam and Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan were “forced” by the their own public opinion more than any other factor. What he euphemistically calls “resistance movements” were but sock puppets for the larger actors in the Cold War. These sock puppets did not win. At any rate Zinn does not mention that in both cases pacifists got what the withdrawals they wanted. And of course he does not mention the bloodbaths that followed.

Beyond the futility of armed force, and ultimately more important, is the fact that war in our time inevitably results in the indiscriminate killing of large numbers of people. To put it more bluntly, war is terrorism. That is why a “war on terrorism” is a contradiction in terms. Wars waged by nations, whether by the United States or Israel, are a hundred times more deadly for innocent people than the attacks by terrorists, vicious as they are.

Zinn asserts war is terrorism, and that war (and thus also terrorism) inevitably results in indiscriminate killing.

First, I do not abide his conflation of war and terrorism. Words have established meanings that you cannot ignore or change just for the sake of your argument. Second, the claim that war and terrorism are indiscriminant is patently false. Warriors and terrorists both choose their targets, ie. they do discriminate.

War, at least in contemporary Western form, primarily concerns forming an officially sanctioned and uniformed force under orders to engage and destroy the forces (uniformed or not) of hostile powers, constrained by primarily Western conventions of lawful warfare. Civilians are killed in war, sometimes even deliberately, but most usually by those who resort to terrorist tactics. It is specifically not the aim of civilized militaries and is not necessarily the result. Why else does civilization waste so much energy concocting rules of war, and prosecuting those who violate them?

Terrorism, jihadi style, especially prefers attacks “deadly for innocent people”. The jihadis are generally unpredictable but patient, carefully selecting and planning their attacks. Right under the noses of the civilization’s media they use civilization’s internet to spread hate and lies with virtually no controversy or coverage. The same nations adhering to the rules of war can’t imprison or even listen to what this enemy is saying without being taken to task by the same media that is deaf dumb and blind to the premeditated depredations of the jihadis.

So the jihadis don’t have a media revealing and debating the propriety of their every move. Their armies are irregular, operating without open sovereign sponsership, uniforms, or even much supervision. And it has so far been a fruitful strategy for them. For one it allows them to fly under the radar and escape the detection of Zinn and other pacifists. But these substantial differences are exactly why it is ridiculous to insist that war and terrorism are one and the same. Terrorists ignore and flagrantly violate the laws of war. They often murder civilians, which is of course the central distinction. Terrorists do not follow the rules, do not punish murderers. When Zinn reduces deaths caused by either war or terrorism to simple “killing” he’s waving a magic wand that would just as easily abolish any difference between manslaughter and murder.

Sadly Zinn and his fellow travelers do not recognize that the primary enemy in Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, and many other places are jihadis – not a random collection of unrelated “terrorists”. His knowledge of history does not appear to include any understanding of the length or relative cost of the jihad Islam has waged for nearly 1400 years, or that long before “nations” existed Muslim armies swept out of Arabia – without the excuse of colonialism, the Crusades, Abu Graib, or Gitmo – and crushed the most advanced civilizations of the day. The jihadis eventually killed and subjugated people from Spain to India. And within the past decades they’ve reawakened and resumed the jihad. Does he count how deadly this has been for innocent people, or is blaming all this on civilization’s armies too?

The repeated excuse, given by both Pentagon spokespersons and Israeli officials, for dropping bombs where ordinary people live is that terrorists hide among civilians. Therefore the killing of innocent people (in Iraq, in Lebanon) is called accidental, whereas the deaths caused by terrorists (on 9/11, by Hezbollah rockets) are deliberate.

This is a false distinction, quickly refuted with a bit of thought. If a bomb is deliberately dropped on a house or a vehicle on the grounds that a “suspected terrorist” is inside (note the frequent use of the word suspected as evidence of the uncertainty surrounding targets), the resulting deaths of women and children may not be intentional. But neither are they accidental. The proper description is “inevitable.”

So if an action will inevitably kill innocent people, it is as immoral as a deliberate attack on civilians. And when you consider that the number of innocent people dying inevitably in “accidental” events has been far, far greater than all the deaths deliberately caused by terrorists, one must reject war as a solution for terrorism.

OK. That’s more than enough. Let’s finish with just a bit more thought than Mr. Zinn seems able to muster.

Civilization hires police to deter and deal with those who would harm innocent people. In the pursuit of this task it is “inevitable” that the police also accidentally kill innocent people. Should we not then have police? The military’s job is tougher because they work often outside civilization’s borders, fighting people who don’t play by civilization’s rules. Shall we then simply ignore those would harm innocent people but hide outside civilization’s borders?

Zinn treats words and numbers like putty. He envies the power of logic and apes its language, but fails to follow the rules from which its power derives. He does not apply his criticisms fairly, and certainly not to himself. Such mendacity is the mark of either a charlatan or a fool and has earned him undying infamy as a moonbat hero.