I will volunteer an answer newcomer. Yes, the rule holds. I learned this particular rule before Kindergarten. If I punch a guy bigger than me I shouldn’t be amazing that he beats me up. And it follows: If I shoot at someone with a bigger gun I should be surprised if I get killed. If Cuba launched a missile at the US then the Cuban government would be unsurprised to have a bunch of missiles fired back. Right or wrong has nothing to do with this rule, whether or not the big guy would be better off ignoring you or just picking you up off the ground and holding you there for a minute or beating you up to a pulp has nothing to do with this rule either: if you pick a fight with someone who is bigger and stronger than you then it is no surprise that you get the worst of it. If you are explicitly dedicated to the obliteration of your neighbor then it is no surprise that your neighbor won’t allow trade across your shared borders.
Remember for many years the “other side” had the bigger guns - for nearly two decades Israel was the little kid on the regional playground. Sure the scrawny one learned how to defend itself and eventually bulked up enough that those other kids don’t want to fight so much any more.
DtC, the problem with this analogy is that everyone will presume that the adult and the 5-year-old are members of a society that has rules that cover this sort of thing. Different countries are not members of a society with rules. If Cuba does something to the US that is analogous to a kick in the shins, then the US sure as hell can do the equivalent of beating Cuba unconscious. Factors the US will weigh in its decision whether or not to do that will include (i) Cuba’s capacity to respond in kind, (ii) reactions of other countries, (iii) reactions of US citizens, and (iv) issues with the UN if the UN has any stake in the matter.
If you are talking about what a person or a country should do in a situation, the answer is they should do whatever they think is in their best interest, which is a policy decision made by considering all the possible reactions of everyone involved and the possible outcomes of the different possible courses of action. I don’t see why the person or country needs to determine whether a proposed action is consistent with some set of moral laws or anything.
In truth the best chance to minimize civilian deaths was by keeping to precision airstrikes. I am very concerned that the ground operation will cause more civilian deaths while accomplished very little in return.
I appreciate that you somehow now accept that Israel has a need to protect its own, but I honestly have no comprehension of what standard you are trying to establish as the “correct” response or why.
Dio if it’s a five year old wolf who is also growling and baring his teeth at me, yeah.
Oh you mean to equate the Palestinian side with a child who doesn’t know better and can’t be held accountable, and paint Israel as the mature adult who should be able to restrain his temper! Sorry. Hamas is not the child to Israel’s adult. Hamas is a big kid too and is responsible for the choices it makes.
More to the point, if a stronger party is attacked by a weaker party (and I doubt that you’d consider a kick in the shin if it was your town that had rockets falling down around it) then a response big enough to make the attack stop and not happen again should not be a surprise. (My reservations about this response’s likely efficacy notwithstanding).
Let’s make a good analogy for once in this thread.
If some midget with full mental capabilities but the body size/strength of a five year old tries to stab me with a knife–that’s a perfectly good knife, he’s just incompetent in its use–and grazes my clothing but doesn’t actually hurt me, I will use any level of force necessary up to, say, breaking his fingers or knocking him to the ground in order to remove the knife. This is for everyone’s long-term benefit, even if the dude proceeds to scream bloody murder about me hurting him and busybodies all around say he didn’t hurt me so I should not have hurt him–when there are deadly weapons involved, especially in the situation of taking deadly weapons away from people who are clearly not morally competent in their use, proportional response has to take into account both the target’s current level of skill with said weapons AND the actual frightfulness of the weapons involved (which are pretty high–we’re essentially talking about WWII-level free-flight artillery here, which is not a kick in the shins).
This addresses both problems with your analogy–one, that Hamas has a hell of a lot more judgement and culpability (or at least more culpability) than a five-year-old; and two, that there are deadly weapons involved, however incompetently used.
I gotta admit as an addendum that I’d rather see some serious intel work and then special-ops or other precision work aimed at the rockets and those who’d use them, but at some point Hamas and the Palestinians in general need to admit to themselves that Israel is going to err on the side of bombing weapons sites even if those weapons are sited in civilian areas. Hamas shares the culpability for the civilian deaths by placing weaponry in civilian areas and then using it offensively and unprovoked (unless someone wants to tell me that Israel is randomly bombing crap, as opposed to hitting rocket launch sites).
Care to explain why? Are you seriously saying that Hamas has the culpability of a five-year-old and that we should discount the intended effect of a weapon entirely compared to its actual effect?
So if someone shoots at you, and misses, it’s no big deal–they didn’t hurt you even as much as a kick in the shins?
That’s an infeasible manner for a state to conduct itself. States don’t have ethics, they don’t have an ethos. Individual leaders of states certainly may/do, but they change with the wind.
The only proper way to manage a state is to act in a manner that maximizes said states interests. At least there is some tangible way to measure and assess that.
It appears that you are still thinking about two members of a society. Societies have rules for their members. Two countries are not members of the same society and so their actions with respect to each other don’t have to conform to a set of rules.
There’s no reason that a country’s actions vis-a-vis another country should be ethically right (i.e., conform to a set of ethical rules). What do you think happens if a country’s actions are not ethically right? Do the ethics police from on high smite the country? Of course, other countries may not like the country’s actions, and they may take measures against the country, but that can happen even when the country believes its own actions are ethically right according to its code of ethics, and the first country should have taken the reactions of other countries into account in determining whether or not to take the action just as a part of the first country doing what’s in its best interests.
So, to sum up, two countries are not bound by a set of ethical rules, so when one country does something to another, it’s absolutely meaningless to ask whether the action was ethically right, it’s useless to debate about it, and a judgment that the action was not ethically right has no real world meaning whatsoever. Countries should just be expected to act in thier best interest.
I can’t say I agree with this either, although I think we’d both agree that it’s in the best interests of most states to act with a pretty high degree of ethics most of the time (lest they make a situation where the best interest of another state is kicking their butt).
