Alterman: "War Is Hell"

Eric Alterman has written an addendum to his rather callous post from yesterday following the assassination of Salah Shehade. He offers:

I’ve received a lot of nasty hate mail because I said I didn’t have a problem with Israel’s missile attack from a moral standpoint as an act of war against a political entity that has declared war on Israel. I still don’t.

Everyone seems to forget that the history of warfare in the past century is the history of the slaughter of innocent civilians. Look at Dresden, Tokyo, the Russians in Afghanistan, the Syrians in Lebanon, Iraq vs. Iran, the Christmas bombing of North Vietnam.

If you ask for war, you are asking to have your civilians slaughtered, unless you can keep the war on the other side’s turf. Well, Hamas asked.

This is absurd. He sounds more like a rabid conservative clone - ya know, "war is hell," so quit whining - than a liberal who writes for The Nation. It's one thing to point out that "the history of warfare in the past century is the history of the slaughter of innocent civilians." It is quite a different thing to use the observation to excuse Israel's actions, which is exactly what Alterman is doing by saying that, while finding it imprudent on "pragmatic grounds," he has no "moral" problem with murdering civilians or assassinating political adversaries.

The fact that Hamas "asked for it" is completely irrelevant; the militaristic stance of a political party does not, in any way, justify a clear violation of international law. Nor does Hamas speak for those civilians killed, which is implied by Alterman to rationalize their deaths as unfortunate collateral damage.

Even more ridiculous, Alterman refers readers to an ABC News report stating that Hamas was willing to take a major step towards a cease-fire. Of course, assuming this is true, it completely undermines his contention that such bombings are necessary to defeat Hamas "militarily".

Usually, I'm pretty neutral on Alterman's work. Many of his columns, like this week's, are informative and well-written. Still, these recent comments remind me why I've become skeptical of liberals, especially since so many (including much of the staff at The Nation) buckled under the pressure following 9/11 and were swept along, to varying degrees, with the tide of militarism and blind nationalism.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was known to criticize liberalism for being "so bent on seeing all sides that it fails to become committed to any side" and "so objectively analytical that it is not subjectively committed." Alterman seems to be fitting this profile with these posts which bend over backwards to whitewash murder. Conservatives rail against liberals for "moral relativism" all the time. In the case here, I would have to agree.