The West's Civilian Fetish

Jim Geraghty wonders whether we aren't becoming desensitized to civilian casualties. Speaking for myself, I know I've become somewhat desensitized to them, and I imagine quite a few others have as well. What's more, I don't think this is an entirely negative development. Certainly since Vietnam, and arguably since the end of World War II, the number of civilian casualties has been the almost exclusive moral barometer by which the actions of Western militaries are judged. This combined with the West's unwillingness to take casualties of any sort has put civilians in grave danger. Unprincipled foes place legitimate military targets behind civilian shields to either protect them from attack or try to gain the moral high ground (many times with the complicity of Western media) if they are attacked. Furthermore, terrorist organizations attempt to force political or military concessions from the West by deliberately attacking civilian targets, and they have been successful far too many times, most recently on 3/11 when the train stations in Madrid were bombed.

Both of these tactics are used because they seem to work, and as long as the West continues to emphasize civilian causalties above all else, they will continue to be employed to great effect by terrorists in Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, and beyond. Only when these tactics are shown to be ineffective will they cease to be used, and while we should always deplore and punish the deliberate killing of civilians (as opposed to killing civilians unavoidably in strikes on legitimate military targets) by those on our side, our becoming demonstrably desensitized to civilian casualties essentially renders these tactics ineffective because their effectiveness rests not on actually taking and holding territory, but on the reactions of populations to their tactics. If the populations of countries view the deaths of civilians in wartime with the shrug of a shoulder, terrorist tactics are thus rendered ineffective, and they will be forced to do things like actually take and hold territory. This plays into the hands of traditional militaries like those of the United States and Israel and, just as importantly, makes civilians low-value targets once again.