McFreedom

Sasha Volokh asks, "at the risk of sounding morally bankrupt," what exactly is so bad about suicide bombers, anyway? His question is two-pronged:

What's the problem with suicide bombers? Is an otherwise acceptable act of war unacceptable because the guy kills himself in the process?

and

What's the problem with targeting civilians? Is the claim that you should never target civilians, or that targeting civilians is a strike against your side which you need to make up for with (a) an exceptionally worthy cause or (b) an inability to go after military targets? If we're against Palestinian terror on those grounds, do we have to be against having dropped the bomb on Hiroshima too?

I think it's pretty obviously that the instinctive anger felt at the bombing of a bus in Tel Aviv doesn't come from the fact that the perpatrator commits suicide as well as mass-murder. If we imagine a world in which the Palestenians had merely been hiding bombs in buses (instead of carrying them on) I don't think most of us would be any less angered by their actions. I think most Americans (perhaps even most Westerners) are repulsed by any political movement that would routinely ask their members to commit suicide as part of operations. But, to turn my hypothetical situation the other way, if the Palestenians were protesting their plight by blowing themselves up in empty fields, I think most people would be bewildered by it, but there would not be the outcry there is today. Much like the Buddhist monks protesting in Vietnam by setting themselves on fire, I believe that such self-sacrifice, absent any terrorist civilian casualties, would cause puzzlement and a sense of a vast gulf of civilizations - but not moral outcry about the suicide per se.

Which leaves the second question, "What's the problem with targeting civilians?" Sasha then goes on to suggest what I believe to be a false duality of answers (either it's never alright or it's something you have to jusitfy by [another false duality] either having a very just cause or not being able to strike at the military). He then wonders, "[D]o we have to be against having dropped the bomb on Hiroshima too?"

To begin with, I'd like to look at the Allied justifications for the intentional civilian casualties we infliced in World War II:

1) We were stopping their production. This justification was used in both Japan and Europe. The idea was that, with a modern war-making economy, the support of the army was industry, and the support of industry was the workers. World War I had ushered in the era of "total war," where a nation's entire economy was shifted to support the effort. In this environment, it is arguable that the baker, the steelworker and the millworker were in some sense "rear-echelon" troops who were valid military targets.

2) We were getting revenge for their having targeted our civilians. This rationale is primary one found in the European theater; the Japanese never had much chance to target US civilians (although they certainly weren't very nice to the civilians in the places they conquered). Germany, however, in some sense "started" attacks on major civilian populations in World War II with the Blitz on London. I believe that the action closest to an atrocity perpetrated by the Allies in World War II - the fire bombing of Dresden - was largely intended as revenge of some sort, and to send some sort of message to any other potential combatants that future bombing of Allied civilian populations would bring forth similar punishments.

3) It was a military necessity. This justification is primarily used for the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Interestingly, I think why these bombing happened actually has a lot to do with Japan's own use of suicide warriors - the kamikaze. In the battle of Okinawa - the operation setting the stage for the invasion of the Japanese home islands - 350 kamikaze inflicted 5,000 US casualties. To the American mind, these were the proof of a totally comitted enemy. An enemy who was not afraid to die, as long as he took some US soldiers with him. As a result, American planners became convinced that an invasion of the Japanese home islands would involve the entire population fighting to the death rather than surrendering. Faced with this, they decided to move decisively to show the Japanese that such a house-to-house fight would never be allowed to occur. Seperately - and I've never really seen this discussed, anywhere - I believe that they really had no idea what they were doing. They didn't really understand the number of people who were going to die, or how horribly they were going to die. The Trinity test looks quite impressive out there in the desert, but trying to map that onto a civilian population with no experience to back it on - is an impossible task.

After all that, I believe the second question is a bit of a straw man. At the time, I think the justification of the bombing of Hiroshima was possible. But it is certainly not something we would do today, absent hundreds of thousands of our own civilian casualties. Direct, intentional, indiscriminate targeting of civilian populations is something we have not done since the Korean War (and, honestly, I'm not all that familiar with that war - we may not have done it then, either). Yes, there have been civilian casualties by American hands since then. But, even in Vietnam, we bent over backwards - much to our own military detriment - to avoid targeting civilian populations.

So, when is it acceptable to intentionally target civilians? I think the three justifications above sum up the situations I can think of: To crush production, when a portion of production is crucial to your opponent's war effort; In revenge for (and as a deterrant to) people killing your civilians; and Because your opponent is so fanatical that all his civilians are soldliers. Obviously, the last one is a bit tricky to define in a morally objective way. In fact, all of them are, and slippery slopes abound. I personally think the atomic bombing of Nagaski was unjustified, and the firebombing of Dresden was probably unjustified (except perhaps as a deterrant). But I understand why they targeted Hiroshima, and why the Allies bombed many German cities.

How do the Palestenians stack up against my Moral Decree Handed Down From On High? Well, they blew up a University cafeteria, recently. Clearly the students there were not involved in production. It perhaps arguable that it could be in revenge for Palestenian civilians killed by Israelis - but, in that sort of tit-for-tat accounting, Palestenians have killed a lot more Israeli civilians than vice versa. And the vast majority of the Israeli civilians killed were directly targeted, while the vast majority of Palestenian civilians killed were accidentally targeted. Finally, I think it should be fairly apparent that the Palestenians do not need to fear fanatical Israeli University studients fighting to their last breath rather than surrender.