Purity of Intention

More on the uses of political rhetoric, though as soon as I get hot under the collar about these things I wonder how I could be so naive. There was a discussion of the role of that most frightening of men, Dick Cheney, and the general idea that a State's strategic actions (eg securing the oil) would be routinely concealed under layers of moral justification that had nothing to do with the original and real motivation, justification in terms of the overcoming of tyranny, in terms of liberty and democracy, and so forth. This doesn't give Public Relations a good name as a profession. (Actually, I noticed that Cheney said on more than one occasion that there was no doubt that Saddam Hussein was amassing WMD. The wilier Tony Blair only ever said that he had no doubt that he had them).

But then the news turned to the situation in Gaza and that angry and eloquent Irishman, John Ging. The Israeli Public Relations team work with routine forms of defensive rhetoric. Thus Hamas intend to kill innocent civilians (which is wrong, certainly) whereas Israeli forces do not intend to kill civilians, they are concerned only to kill militants, and to that extent they are in a morally superior position because they are acting in legitimate self defence (with the implication that Hamas are not, and that rather than acting as a resistance to an occupation are sending off their rockets out of malice and nihilism).

But there is an interesting ambiguity in what they say. They don't intend to kill civilians, even though an awful lot of them get in the way and are killed because there are militants in their midst whom the IDF does intend to kill. The problem is ... that it is not the case that they intend to avoid killing civilians in such circumstances. It is significant that they get very angry when people say this sort of thing. To repeat what I said in an earlier post, it would certainly be wrong of Hamas to use civilians as human shields in a UN facility in the course of a military operation, if this is indeed what they have been doing. One Israeli spokesman said that their doing this constituted a war crime, with the implication that, rather than withdrawing, the IDF would rightly attack the position even in the knowledge that there would be many civilian casualties, civilians that they did not intend to kill but did not intend to avoid killing either. If they did intend to avoid killing civilians then they would have withdrawn.