Ethics in Guerrilla Warfare

David Aikman

In Israel, from which I have just returned, I saw the effects of the explosions of 30,000 ball-bearings when Hezbollah warheads carrying them crashed in among or near civilian residences. In Haifa, Israel’s third-largest city, steel guardrails on roads were peppered with holes shot clean through them, entire halves of three-story houses were demolished. Dozens of Israeli civilians were killed by these random—but deliberate—assaults.

How do you fight a war against fanatical fighters who hide themselves and their weapons amid civilians and deliberately aim those same weapons against civilians in another country?

You drop leaflets warning of aerial attack, you try to focus targets as narrowly as possible. If precision in aerial bombing is impossible to achieve, you launch ground commando raids against the fighters and run the risk of high casualties amid your own soldiers.

Either way, as the Israelis discovered in the recent war with Hezbollah, you are at a disadvantage. By the perverse ideology of death-worship embraced by Hezbollah and other radical Islamic groups, if civilians among the terrorist fighters are killed, it’s to their benefit because, if Muslim, they go to paradise and become “martyrs.” Meanwhile, the enemy who killed them while trying so hard not to is blamed for “war crimes” on the grounds of “targeting civilians,” while the fighters who put the civilians at risk in the first place get off scot-free. Many Hezbollah fighters openly and cynically admitted that this was deliberate policy in fighting Israel.

It has always been hard for beleaguered governments to deal with guerrilla adversaries, because governments, on the whole, can marshal greater military power than guerrillas can, but are vulnerable to the charge of using disproportionate force in dealing with their elusive opponents.

The very word “disproportionate” derives from the original Augustinian concept of a “just war,” that is, a war that is fought using means proportionate to the original military attack against you.

But the Augustinian rules of “just war” also specify that civilians should not be either targeted deliberately or used as human shields to defend oneself from military retaliation for the original aggression. In Lebanon, neither of these principles was respected by Hezbollah, for whom “just war” principles in the Christian tradition were mere Western or “infidel” constructs that could be—and were—totally ignored for the sake of the larger goals of Hezbollah’s jihad against Israel and the West. 

Just war principles work successfully only among nations that acknowledge the same moral laws at work, as in Europe, for example, in general before World War I. Now, however, we are all in a wider and starker conflict, in which ruthless Islamic ideologists are prepared to immolate their own children for the sake of ultimate victory. We should not be pressured by the enormity of the challenge they pose to civilized life to abandon our own rules of “just war.” But we need to think through—and make public—how to cope with guerrilla adversaries who operate according to barbaric and totalitarian rules. Civilization is at stake—not only ours, but the world’s. Do we have the moral imagination to oppose such adversaries without compromising the very integrity we fight to protect?  

Dr. Aikman is a Senior Fellow of The Trinity Forum and writer in residence at Patrick Henry College in Purcellville, Virginia. His website is www.davidaikman.com.

1 Responses (comments are closed) • Provocations, Faiths and Worldviews, Good and Evil, Fri 08 Sep 2006