MORE RUBBLE, LESS TROUBLE. While I suppose that this article on Islamic justifications for the massacre of civilians was interesting enough, I do wish that the authors had taken a bit more time providing context. For example, Moss and Mekhennet describe in some detail the jihadist thinking that allows the killing of children (God will sort out his own, more or less), Israeli civilians (conscription means that they're all potential soldiers), and civilians of certain professions (civilian support is integral to Occupation). That's fine, good, and appalling, but there's little in the article to remind us that, sixty-five years ago, General Arthur Harris of the Royal Air Force and General Curtis Lemay of the United States Army Air Force justified the massacre of German and Japanese civilians on grounds that were pretty much the same. Civilians living in cities that contributed to German industry were legitimate targets for incineration. Civilians who might be conscripted were also legitimate targets for incineration (or, in World War I, starvation through the Royal Navy blockade). Civilians who knew other civilians were also legitimate targets for incineration; British strategy in the air war against Germany and American strategy in the air war against Japan specifically targeted enemy morale, and depended on the hope that Germans and Japanese tired of having their brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, friends, and children burned to death by incendiary munitions would rise up against their respective governments. It can fairly be argued that the "West" has abandoned, in the last fifty years or so, the most egregious of these justifications for directing attacks at enemy civilians. Nevertheless, it's misleading to write an article that suggests that traditions of attacks against civilians are somehow alien and outside the Western cultural context. Such amnesia is particular unfortunate in our contemporary political context, where such eminences as Glenn Reynolds and Ralph Peters regularly make the argument that the United States will lose the war in Iraq if we display insufficient brutality. Indeed, it's really irritating to read that "leftist radicals here in the 1960s" supported such tactics, without any exploration of the role that mass murder of civilians played in Allied strategy in "the Good War."
--Robert Farley
