There Is No Such Thing as a ‘Humane’ War

Francis P. Sempa

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Writing in Responsible Statecraft, the online journal of the Quincy Institute, David C. Hendrickson argues that Israel’s proclaimed war aim of destroying Hamas should be reconsidered because there is no way to “humanely” destroy Hamas. Hendrickson, from his comfortable perch at Colorado College, lectures Israel on the “just war” theory and condemns Israel for not fighting with “restraint,” not rejecting “indiscriminate bombing and shelling,” and not respecting “enemy civilians.” Israel, he writes, is “pursuing . . . a moral enormity” and risks committing “wickedness on a titanic scale in order to achieve total victory.” His recommendation to Israeli leaders is to “accept limited war and seek the containment of the enemy, not his obliteration.” In other words, Israel should conduct the war in a way that entails the greatest risk to the lives of its warriors and that will leave Hamas’ forces in position to terrorize, rape, and massacre Israeli citizens another day. That is somehow “just.”

Hendrickson’s position is consistent with the Biden administration’s approach to America’s longtime ally in the Middle East. Hendrickson quotes Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who stated on November 30th: “Israel has one of the most sophisticated militaries in the world. It is capable of neutralizing the threat posed by Hamas while minimizing harm to innocent civilians. And it has an obligation to do so.” This is also the position of Jo-Ann Mort and Michael Walzer in a piece in the New Republic that Hendrickson discusses. Walzer, a longtime critic of “unjust wars” (in 1977, in the wake of our defeat in Vietnam, Walzer, who condemned America’s involvement in that war, wrote Just and Unjust Wars), argues in the New Republic piece that Israel can achieve its war aim--the destruction of Hamas--in a humane war. Hendrickson doesn’t buy it. And he’s right because there is no such thing as a “humane” war.

For Hendrickson this means that Israel must reconsider its war aim. Israel should settle for containing Hamas. That, apparently, would be a proportionate response to the wanton terrorizing and killing of more than 1200 Israelis on October 7th--a number that would equal per capita the killing of more than 40,000 Americans. He calls Israel’s conduct in the Gaza War a “wildly disproportionate retribution[],” and “the most elaborate and twisted application yet of the Dahiya Doctrine” that includes bombing of non-military targets and a “radical” blockade “on all things requisite to life” (electricity, water, food). Hendrickson no doubt would have condemned Ulysses S. Grant for doing what was necessary to defeat the slave masters of the Confederacy. There were many leaders in the South who would have made peace with the Union earlier if President Lincoln would have allowed them to keep their “peculiar institution.” And Hendrickson would surely disagree with Grant’s favorite general William T. Sherman who once remarked that “War is cruelty; you cannot refine it.”

But Sherman was right. So was Gen. Curtis LeMay when he said that war was simple: “You’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting.” LeMay and his airmen were instrumental in the firebombing and atomic bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities which ultimately brought Japan to its knees in World War II. Walzer, as Hendrickson notes, thought that we should have stopped short of total victory over Japan in order to avoid the killing of so many Japanese civilians.

The notion of a clean, humane war is a fairy tale conjured up by liberal sensibilities that has no relation to reality. The only other option, according to Hendrickson, is for Israel to limit its war aims so that it can achieve the more limited aims by less cruel means. “The truth is,” Hendrickson writes, “that there is no way to destroy Hamas without destroying Gaza.” It is just this sort of moralism that is used to pressure Israel to accept something less than total victory in Gaza, just as it has been used in the past to persuade America’s leaders to accept something less than total victory in virtually every war since World War II.