A liberal friend of mine in the 90s complained during one of our seemingly endless conflicts that “We did the flyin’ while the bad guys did the dyin’,” combitching that we just weren’t fighting fair! For some cockamamie reason, she seemed to think that military conflicts should be fair. Could someone show me a drill sergeant who would train his soldiers that a fair fight was a good idea?

I had assumed that such a cockamamie idea about fighting fair in warfare was limited to her — that friend of mine departed for her eternal reward several years ago — but nope, we have the great military strategist Sophia A. McClennen, Professor of International Affairs and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University. She writes on the intersections between culture, politics, and society.

The end of the fair fight

There used to be at least a pretense of following rules in conflict. The conflict in Gaza proves that’s gone

By Sophia A McClennen | Saturday, January 13, 2024 | 5:30 AM EST

The history of human conflict has always included a set of rules, regulations, and ethical considerations to be followed to keep the fight fair. Whether on the playground or on the battlefield, all societies have a sense of a line that shouldn’t be crossed. Comedians are meant to punch up, not down. Schools have anti-bullying rules. Military conflict should limit civilian casualties. Many of these guidelines, like the Geneva Conventions, have been codified into international humanitarian law.

If your first thought was to immediately list the various times that those rules have been broken, then consider this: We now live in an era where we don’t even pretend to follow rules of fighting fair.  If we once gestured towards ethical guidelines for conflict, then later worried over the effects of moral relativism, today, we don’t even bother.

We could have sent a million men on landing ships to invade Honshu in August of 1945, and perhaps that would have been a fairer fight than dropping two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but President Harry Truman realized that his duty was not a fair fight, but to end the war in a way which would yield the fewest American casualties.

Let’s tell the truth here: wars are conducted by killing people. That makes it a thing to be avoided, something the United States has too frequently failed to do. But once you are in a war, sorry, but f(ornicate) fairness, you need to fight to win!

Basic guidelines for military conflict like not targeting civilians, not engaging in torture, offering detainees humane treatment, not attacking hospitals or aid workers, allowing civilians safe passage, offering access to humanitarian assistance, and avoiding unnecessary loss and suffering have been routinely ignored in recent conflicts. From Syria to Yemen to Gaza, there has been a total abdication of standard rules of engagement.

You can see where this is going, can’t you? In a paragraph that seems on the surface to condemn both sides, she asked:

Who would describe the U.S. response to Pearl Harbor as proportionate?

She mentioned China’s attacks on Tibetians and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the 2003 invasion of Iraq and, “Didn’t the United States wage a war on a sovereign country because of an attack by terrorists who lived in a few of its caves?”, as though the September 11^th attacks were no big deal.

We get to her real complaint a tad further down:

(I)n today’s conflicts it is only one side that gets carte blanche to engage in conflict without limits. While those they attack are held to standards that exist for their side alone.

That is the definition of the end of the fair fight.

What, should the Israel Defense Force forego its armor and air superiority and the weapons it has bought or manufactured over the years, and simply fight hand-to-hand, door-to-urban-door, to give the poor, benighted Palestinians a fair chance?

And it is the war in Gaza which has drawn her sympathy. While Dr McClellen does pay lip service to the fact that Hamas’ attack of October 7^th “crossed a line” and was “reprehensible,” she throws a partial excuse as well, saying “There may be debates over whether Hamas had been provoked.”

What there is clarity on, however, is that with each passing day the suffering, loss, and destruction of Gaza only multiplies. Forget the fog of war or the idea that it is difficult to assess casualties. By whichever metric you use, the scale of destruction in Gaza is outpacing anything we have seen in recent history and that includes the razing of Aleppo or Russia’s bombing of Mariupol.

Skipping a paragraph, we come to this:

At the start of the Israeli response to the October 7 Hamas attacks, it became clear that there was a loss of proportionality. “We have only started striking Hamas,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu emphasized early on. “What we will do to our enemies in the coming days will reverberate with them for generations.”

How is such a statement even remotely inside the lines of anything resembling reasonable rules of conflict?

What it is within the lines of is winning a war!

Regardless of the destruction caused by the Germans and Japanese in World War II, in the end the Allies returned the Axis’ destruction in even greater amount. We bombed Germany and Japan until wouldn’t have it anymore, killing soldiers and civilians alike, but you know what it did? It did to our enemies death and destruction that “reverberate(d) with them for generations.” Bullets and bombs and finally two atomic blasts not only destroyed those nations’ will to fight, but also impressed on the minds of the boys who would grow to fighting age in the next few years that no, there was no use at all in starting the war again. That’s how you win wars.

Sadly, that wasn’t what the Israelis did in their wars of 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973. When their enemies sued for peace, defeated but not destroyed, Israel granted that peace. You can count the years in between, and see what happened: the sons of the defeated Arab fighters grew into fighting age, and hadn’t seen the total destruction of their ‘nations,’ but a fight which had been a setback, yet one which could be resumed. Most of the Arab attacks after that were more muted, but they continued.

This time, Israel seems determined to destroy Hamas, period, which is what she should do.

Finally, we come to this gem:

But here’s the thing, the end of the fair fight isn’t just about losing a commitment to rules of conduct; it is also about losing the idea that there are two sides in a conflict.

Yes, there are “two sides in a conflict,” but that does not mean that there are two morally equal sides in a conflict. Yes, the Axis powers were a ‘side’ in World War II, but I doubt that even Dr McClennen would say that the Third Reich was somehow morally equivalent to the United States, United Kingdom, or France.

Of course, to today’s left, the Palestinians are the side of right, but to any Westerner, anyone who has grown up in Western civilization, that’s insane. What the Palestinians are doing is demonstrating to us that the Islamists are not Western civilization classical liberals. Sadly, many, many Westerners seem unable to understand or comprehend that message.

It’s called intersectionality, in which every self-designated victim group have decided that they should be strong allies with every other self-designated victim group, which leads to such nonsense as “Queers for Palestine,” even though, were those queers living under an Islamist government, they would be, to various degrees, oppressed, discriminated against, jailed, or even executed. We see feminist groups supporting the very people who would make women into second-class citizens — or subjects — again. We have seen the reports of women being forced into Islamic dress, with Iran’s morality police enforcing that, up to the point at which some women have died. We have seen how the Taliban have banned women from education beyond the primary school level. And we have seen how Da’ish have thrown homosexuals off of tall buildings, and Iran had hanged them. Every time you say to yourself, “The left can’t really be this stupid,” they wind up doing something even more stupid.+

Hamas and the other Palestinian groups have been pretty honest in one regard: they have told us what their aims are, to liberate ‘Palestine’ “from the River to the Sea.” That means the destruction of Israel, and somehow, some way, some on the left just can’t understand, or believe, what the Palestinians are telling them.