Re: Human Rights Watch in Lebanon

The medium size tragedy here is that HRW, which has only the moral credibility it earns, has squandered it credibility in the essentially relentless anti-Israel bias, notwithstanding its occasional fig leaf of neutrality. Once these moral arbiters are perceived as biased and advocate for one side, their role becomes one more noise maker.

This is what has happened in Lebanon.

Let me present my case.

HRW reports 1000 Lebanese dead, allegedly mostly civilians. I first dispute the number of dead, which is unknowable, and then the number of civilians within that number. By HRW's counting, there were no Hezbollah fighters killed. This is indeed possible, that the HB fighters were so well hidden or the Israeli bombers were so poorly targeted, that the safest place in Lebanon was inside an HB bunker. The IDF reports some 500 fighters dead, which leaves some 500 civilians killed. Of course Lebanon might not count HB dead, but HRW should. So our dead count is 500 or 1000.

On the face of it, this fails the credibility test.

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(1) The numerical argument;

W have considerable reports, that the extent of bombardment by the Israelis was about 7000 air attacks (also called sorties) and some 2500 naval artillery shells fired.

Let us do a numerical assumption, that each plane carries eight bombs, which means that there were 56,000 bombs dropped. At 1000 dead, which I halve for 500 civilians this means that for over 50,000 pieces of ordnance, we have 500 dead, or one per hundred.

This sounds like immaculate warfare to me. I doubt the history of humanity has such safe-bombing statistics. One dead per one hundred instances of 500 pound bombs, in dense civilian areas, is by no human definition 'indiscriminate.'

(2) The infrastructure argument.

Various HRW reports describe in some detail that the Israeli bombing campaign destroyed roads and other infrastructure, thus depriving civilians of their ability to live on as civilians.

Let us turn to infrastructure first. HRW, having failed to make its case of indiscriminate human carnage, now turns to its second order or weaker case, that by blowing up roads, we have engaged in crimes against humanity. If so, the NYC department of transportation engages in crimes against humanity every day of the week, and by leaving roads under construction and unrepaired on weekends, engages in crimes against humanity with particular virulence on the Jewish and Christian Sabbaths, oh the horror the horror.

It is standard western military doctrine to destroy rear area infrastructure, to prevent resupply / reinforcement to the front, or to prevent escape/ flight/ evacuation of fighters from the front to the rear. Military doctrine in some aspects requires the destruction of fighting capability of the enemy, usually by isolation and then be reduction.

The destruction of infrastructure is the essence of modern warfare. The US did this in Bosnia, to great effect, to compel Serbian withdrawal, and in the triage that is warfare, killing a small number saves a large number.

No intelligent or credible critic of warfare can ignore this, except to escape into irrelevance.

(2a) Power facilities.

Likewise, the destruction of infrastructure destroys the ability of the civilian population to support the military structure. Chairman Mao famously said that the revolutionary fish lives freely in the sea of the people. This has been military doctrine for the anti westerners for fifty years. We are fighting the war the other side had brought to us.

(3) Cluster bomb submunitions.

We hear very little of the details of the Lebanese dead, whether they were killed by bombs, artillery, naval artillery, small arms weapons fire, or cluster bomb munitions, or falling buildings, heart attacks, or cholera and diarrhea from contaminated water. So we do not know if these inhumane weapons were the cause of death, and were they to have been so, we surely would have heard in this endless litany

These are anti personnel weapons, and civilians are advised to stay away from the battlefield. When the entire country is a battlefield, civilians are advised to exercise prudence.

These are otherwise a subset of 'area denial weapons;' which means that an entire battlefield is now a 'no-go' zone. The essence of warfare is to warfare is to deny the enemy freedom of battlefield maneuver, so as to fix their positions in order to isolate them prior to destroying them in place. This is a modern version of siege warfare.

Siege warfare is an ancient and permanent part of warfare.

This is one more subset of mine-warfare. We are fighting a global war of words and ideology as to whether we may use mines in warfare.

Mines are indiscriminate and detonate regardless. Mines are very bad. War is very bad. The virtue of these submunitions is that they are not buried underground, they are on the surface, they are visible to all, and they are in that regard easily retrievable and neutralizable.

Insofar as warfare makes use of area denial weapons, as these things go, these cluster bomb munitions are as safe and humane as killing gets, in use of area denial weapons.

(4) Lebanese flight and refugees.

Well, recent reports have 90% returning after cease fire, so the road work which prevented resupply and interfered with humanitarian relief, in fact did not deter these returnees, so yawn as to its interference with access.

The interference with access was due to active bombing, also called interdiction by munitions. No one can move on a battlefield, and that is war. The roads themselves are well usable, based on rates of return.

(5) Dead vs dead.

HRW has some obligation in these matters to offer its moral calculation as to what is proportional killing, in order to decide when killing (which didn’t happen) is indiscriminate, and when it is necessary.

For my view, if we kill one trillion of persons who *might* be pour enemy, in order to save *one* of us, we have done what we need to do. Morality and humanity means killing the other side and keeping our side alive.

You and the other humanitarians are free to sacrifice yourselves in order to save the enemy or those caught up in warfare, but the rest of us care about our guys, not your guys.

(6) HRW Manual of arms, or rules of engagement.

HRW in order to have moral credibility MUST write its own rules of engagement, that is:

the scenario is a war where civilian irregulars and paramilitary irregulars militarize a civilian area, and civilian safe-house, such as hospitals, schools, and mosques, and either induce collaboration from ideology or compel collaboration from coercion, and then proceed to attack with weapons of mass indiscrimate warfare, aka blindly fired rockets into civilian areas, hones with anti personnel barbed ball bearings.

What is the attacking force permitted to do?

Further, the defending force has also created a well fortified and prepared network of defensive end largely infantry-impregnable firing positions, thus making reduction by infantry prohibitive in human casualty terms for their attackers, and has stated as its war goal, to bleed the attackers white by a war of attrition.

How does HRW fight this war? How does HRW fight a war against the militarization of civilian areas?

In fact there is NO WAY that the decision to militarize the civilian areas, by the HB, whether their own, or the Israelis can be fought, so far as HRW informs us, without large scale and wide spread physical destruction. The rules of war have evolved for hundreds of years, in civilized countries, aka western countries, to separate non combatant from combatants, and since the enemies of humanity and western civilization are fighting this war, with methods they learned 1300 years ago when they combined war and peace, military and civilian, they are about 1300 years out of synch.

So, if they care so little for their own, I deny the indictment that we are obliged to care for their own more than they care for their own. They have brought this war and HRW must tell us how to fight.

The purpose of war is to win, which means our guys live and their guys die.

(7) Civilian flight.

About 1m Lebanese civilians were temporary refugees. About 1m Israelis were temporary refugees. The Israelis defeated Lebanese movement by air interdiction. The HB defeated Israeli movement by fear of indiscriminate rocketry.

Sounds like parity to me.

The reason the dead-count is disparate is because the HB can't shoot straight. There can be no argument from any serious person that the HB chose to shoot trees and fields, so to give them credit for a low count of caused deaths is only to exonerate them for incompetence.

(8) History teaches: The V-2 campaign, Germany against London, 1944.

The Germans invented modern anti-civilian rocketry, in 1944, these were low-space high altitude high speed ballistic (unguided) missiles launched against general areas, and were essentially undefendible. In sixty years we have not solved that problem.

The elimination of these weapons required ground conquest, the Normandy invasion, and the like. Had the Germans brought these weapons online a year earlier, the war would have been different, causing an earlier invasion, when the west was unprepared and when the German sere not yet destroyed by the Red Army in the Eastern front.

Based on history, these rocketry weapons can only be reduced by destruction of ground areas. Since the HB war plan is to bleed Israel and thereby to create and unwinnable war, the Israelis now faced a military defeat. No nation can cede the battlefield to the enemy, and survive. The goal in the area is for a diplomatic settlement, not a military settlement. Think Iwo Jima, where the suicidal Japanese caused ten of thousands of American casualties in attacking prepared and well defended positions. This is world war one battle, the Somme and the Passchendale, where entire armies, tens of thousands, were massacred in single days.

SO our alternative is to kill a few civilians, one per hundred attacks, to save thousands of causalities

THIS is humane warfare, and Human Rights Watch is blind to events under its very nose.

(9) Battlefield investigation

HRW conducted its own battlefield after action reports:

"How do we know? Through the same techniques we use in war zones around the world to cut through people's incentive to lie. We probed and cross-checked multiple eyewitnesses, many of whom talked openly of Hezbollah’s presence elsewhere but were adamant that Hezbollah was not at the scene of the attack. We examined bombing sites for evidence of military activity such as trenches, destroyed rocket launchers and military equipment, or dead or wounded fighters. If we were unsure, we gave the IDF the benefit of the doubt. "

"The case of Kana shows how this works. After two Israeli missiles killed 28 civilians in a house there on July 30, the IDF initially charged that Hezbollah had been firing rockets from the vicinity of the targeted house. But Human Rights Watch investigators who visited Kana found that there had been no Hezbollah presence near the bomb site at the time of the attack. IDF sources later admitted to an Israeli military correspondent that Hezbollah wasn't shooting at all from Kana that day. "

This is not even nonsense as serious investigation, this is self-parody, Unless HRW has a time machine, HRW has no direct knowledge of what happened during the time of the attack.

The evidence of militarization that the HRW uses is: trenches, destroyed rocket launchers, or wounded fighters.

WOW.

So for HRW to accept Israeli claims of militarized areas, HB must leave its wounded fighters on the ground until the HRW investigators can come by; or leave their dead on the ground. Or did trenches, rather that fire from natural trenches; or have taken a hit from an Israeli counter battery fire.

Yet we know that HB do scoot and shoot tactics, all armies do, because counter battery fire is so effective. So HRTW now says that e cannot shoot after they enemy has stopped shooting whether or not we know if they are still there waiting for the next round to fire. This is not even nonsense. This is idiocy.

Any firing position is now a military target, until the cease fire takes effect. And any prepared position or potentially prepared position is a military target.

The idea that witnesses are credible is beyond deranged; it is collaboration and betrayal of HRW’s mandate for human rights watch.

Do we really expect that the locals, who know HB is coming back, to say, well, not only did they militarize the area, before and after the attack, they militarized it during the attack, my name is saddam hassan and i live at 23 kassam street ,. bin jabal, Lebanon, and I am not afraid that when HB comes back they will kill me and my family because I have turned State's Evidence.

Yeah, right.

(9a) But what we DO know is that HB, while staging photo ops and resupplying their weapons ASAP, leaves the surface and visible submunitions around and about to maim their own for more photo ops. War means cleaning up the battlefield afterwards.

I see that HRW is calling for Israeli financial support and mapping of cluster munitions. But heck, the Israeli can't shoot straight, the fog of battle, so let HB provide financial support and technical expertise to the Israelis for their own cleanup

(10) Kana, once again.

By my calculations, the Israelis sent 50,000 pieces of ordnance, not including artillery shells, and we have ONE count 'em ONE incident of wrongdoing, maybe.

Hell, this is better odds than driving on a highway in Lebanon in peace time.

(11) Racism at HRW

I went to HRW's website.

I was looking for HRW's report on beheadings; i was looking for HRW's report on bombing of mosques. I was looking for HRW on militarizing civilian areas. I was looking or HRW on mortar attacks into civilian areas in Iraq. I was looking for HRW on Taliban attacks on civilian relief workers in Afghanistan.

I found none of this. ]

I did find something in the Sudan or Darfur, but where the rubber meets the road, where the essence of Islam is mass murder of civilians, HRSW is silent.

Around here headlines should be, a la, "proportional," to the body count. The Israelis *might* have wrongfully killed 28 civilians in Kana. The Islamics have killed 10,000 or 25,000 civilians in Iraq.

We need 25,000 headlines from HRW to 'proportionally' condemn Human rights violations, Islamic on Islamic

But this is the highest racism to ignore Arab dead when Arabs kill them, and to fetishize n Arab dead when Jews kill them.

In America we know that the left wing racists ignore black on black crime, finding only white on black crime to be news- and outrage-worthy

and for this reason, HRW is racist and should be excluded from civil society.

Martin Heilweil

New York City