Dumb Bombs for Dumb People

THE CASE FOR COLLATERAL DAMAGE

The most recent exchange of hostilities between the Gazans and the Israelis points up, your Ostrich Killer thinks, a philosophical flaw in the Israeli defensive posture: to avoid killing innocent palestinians when responding to rocket fire from the Gaza Strip.

Much of that rocket fire is coming from places immediately adjacent to playgrounds, schools, mosques, markets, etc.  Why?  Lack of real estate?  No, it's so that when Israel returns fire there's a good chance the palestinians can show a wounded or dead baby, child, shopper, or damaged 'holy' place to the willing and eager CNN camera crews.

What were those people doing close to those launch sites in the first place?

How can they be thought of as 'innocent civilians' when they tolerate that tactic by their elected officials?  When the rocketeers locate rocket launchers next to their hospitals, why does the hospital staff and security not evict them?  That they don't makes them enablers, not innocents.  In the U.S., someone who enables a murder is an accomplice and can suffer the same penalty as a murderer.  Why should this sort of situation be any different?  By what sort of perverted PC logic can they be considered 'innocent?'  Why should they not share the same fate as those rocketeers?

So I suggest Israel re-think their collateral damage reduction philosophy, and instead reverse it so that there is a LOT of collateral damage.  Your ostrich killer would approve of carpet-bombing sites from B-52s flying at 50,000 feet, but Israel doesn't have those.  So a reasonable alternative might be deliveries of cluster bombs and napalm and fuel-air explosives and artillery-delivered area-denial minefields on those launch sites.  Yes, a lot of people might be killed.  But maybe, just maybe, other communities' citizens might not want the same fate for their communities, and maybe they'd drive out those rocket launching sites and thereby preserve their lives and the lives of their families.  If that sort of social ostracism catches on, there might actually be some sort of peace.

War is hell.  But it can't be waged without blood, and it can't be won without one side deciding it's had enough.  One more thought, and then you can go back to your coffee:  there is no point in prolonging the obvious.  If war is necessary, conduct it with maximum violence and destruction, so that it is over quickly.  In the long run, many lives will be saved.  The whole concept of 'proportional response' is ridiculous.