Disproportionate Response

It is utterly disgraceful how Israeli's have the audacity to protect their lives and that of their children. How can anyone in the western media allow them to separate their military installations from their civillians? Surely all civilised liberal people and commentators such as those that publish the Guardian must come out and condemn the 300 000 Israeli's for evacuating their homes in Israel instead of welcoming the rockets into their homes. It is outrageous that they sound a siren that gives them up to one whole minute to take cover from rockets - why don't they stand around and try and get blown up? Surely if they did the above the current war in Lebonon would then be fair as there would be a more balanced number of casualties. If they weren't so selfish in trying to preserve innocent lives and they helped Hezbollah by disclosing details of where the errant rockets landed they could have many more casualties. Out of the 1500 plus rockets that have been fired into civillian Israel, if only a third had found some nice civillian targets of say families of 5, they could have lost 2500 civillians.

If only that were the case then of course the world liberal press would then consider the Israeli response proportionate!

Of course the idea is that if you get attacked with a hail of rockets but are prudent and lucky enough to try and minimise your casualties a great defence and deterrent would then to proportionately only attack a tiny number of your enemy because doubtless that would scare them from attacking again. Is this a strategy that would have worked when say Britain bombed Germany in WW2? Surely the American response to a Japanese attack on their military that led to hundreds of thousands of American troops attacking the Germans was disproportionate? Surely stopping the slaughter in Bosnia by NATO bombs was disproportionate - surely the media should have claimed they should not have done so?

In war the aim is not to try and match up your army to be fair. It is to defeat the aggressor by using the best weapons for the task.

Where is the condemnation from Anan and the UN when Israeli citizens are killed in Haifa? Where is Anan's observation that it "appears to be deliberate"?

There is no proportionality in war. If someone starts a war by attacking you, you have a duty to defeat them in a way to ensure they do not have the capacity or courage to try it again. Civillian casualties should be minimized wherever possible. If Israel disregarded civillian life, they would not warn civillians days in advance about forthcoming attacks. They would have wholesale bombing raids that would have killed thousands of civillians in the first few hours.