Hanging Tough

Ted Lapkin

Radio National "Perspective" - 27 June 2006

There are elements of corruption within every culture. If you picked 1,000 people off the street at random, a handful of those chosen individuals would prove to be criminals or political extremists. Thus the measure of a society is not whether it comprises aberrant members, but how it treats them.    

Suicide bombers and hostage beheaders are elevated to cult hero status by al-Qaeda groupies and Palestinian society. By contrast, those who deliberately kill innocent people are criminally prosecuted in the United States. And that goes for the American military as well.

The US Navy is currently investigating allegations that a squad of Marines slaughtered Iraqi civilians in the town of Haditha. A separate enquiry is underway to determine whether the initial reports of this atrocity were shelved through negligence or criminal collusion.

The media have revealed that some of the errant Marines are likely to be charged with murder. It is entirely appropriate that American personnel who intentionally killed defenceless Iraqi civilians should be harshly punished.

And harsh is the appropriate adjective to use when describing the attitude of the US Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) towards unjustifiable homicide. The UCMJ classifies murder as a capital offence – meaning that it can incur the ultimate penalty of death by lethal injection.

But these few Marines are no more representative of the US military than Ivan Millat is reflective of mainstream Australia. And any war crimes at Haditha do not undermine the essential justice of the campaign to overthrow Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athist tyranny.

The overwhelming majority of US troops in Iraq have fought in accordance with the laws of war. Yet despite the best efforts of Coalition forces, thousands of innocent Iraqis have accidentally been killed in the hurly burly of the battlefield.

Collateral casualties are a tragic reality of even the most well-executed military campaigns. But by setting our moral threshold so high that it precludes armed action that might inadvertently cause civilian deaths, we would consign ourselves to the vulnerable irrelevance of pacifism. And in the cruel world that we inhabit, pacifism is simply an engraved invitation for tyranny to run wild.

“War never solves anything” is a popular mantra of the peace movement. And except for the quashing of Nazism, Fascism, the Holocaust and slavery at the sharp end of a bayonet, perhaps the peace activists have a point. Perhaps the Allies should never have invaded Normandy because 20,000 French civilians died during the campaign to liberate their country from Hitlerean oppression. After all, nothing demonstrates the moral superiority of military passivity like the genocides of Rwanda and Srebrenica.  

A less utopian view of the world indicates that there are instances in which armed action is the only practical and moral response to evil. And if the legitimacy of war is conceded in some circumstances, then the  argument becomes about which ends justify which means.

Just because we can’t overthrow tyrants everywhere doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t depose despots anywhere. And by any reasonable moral yardstick, the dethroning of Saddam Hussein was more than justified by his regime’s brutality.

Meanwhile Osama bin Laden has declared that Iraq is the central front in the jihadist war to impose Wahabist Islam upon the world. And he’s right.

The anti-war movement makes the seductive claim that we would reap substantial gain by cutting the pain of our military involvement in the Middle East. But if the Coalition leaves Iraq without a credible claim to victory, the resulting perception of Western failure will constitute a strategic calamity of the first order.

The political lexicon of radical Islam does not recognise the concepts of compromise, comity  nor conciliation. The only language that is understood by the jihadist movement is the violent dialect of total victory or utter defeat. Islamic fanatics like the late abu-Musab al-Zarqawi are either at your feet, or at  your throat.

In the zero-sum world according to bin Laden, American failure is, ipso facto, seen as an al-Qaeda accomplishment. And nothing succeeds in Middle East politics like success.

A premature retreat from Iraq would be akin to emptying a bag of offal while swimming through shark-infested waters – it might initially lighten the load, but it is ultimately bound to prove very painful. Ululations of jihadist jubilation would echo from rooftops throughout the Islamic world, attracting legions of new recruits to the cause.

The conflict that has been forced upon us by jihadist Islam will yield more than its share of pain and suffering. And while Zarqawi’s death is an important achievement, we must understand there are no quick fixes to be had.  

We must overcome our tears and fears to persevere and carry on. The only other option entails humiliation and surrender, and that is an alternative too terrible to even contemplate.

Ted Lapkin is Director of Policy Analysis for the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council. His son is a US Marine.